Blaz Kos

self-discipline

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  • The proactive way to taking breaks throughout the day

    Your approach to life must always be proactive. You always have to be one step ahead of life and even of yourself – or, to be more exact, your instinctive behavior. You should never do things only because you are used to doing them or other people are doing them, but always ask yourself why you are doing certain things and where does that lead you.

    Proactive living also includes planning how many breaks you take during the day and what kind of activities you do when you have the time off.

    You aren’t only more productive during working hours if you plan your brakes in a smart way. Even more importantly, if you learn how to proactively take breaks throughout a day, it makes the off-time and your life in general so much more enjoyable and fun. It may sound easy to proactively plan breaks, but in reality it’s not. That’s why most people aren’t doing it. We have to even put together a few core concepts to understand what proactive breaks really are.

    In this article, you will learn everything necessary to really max out every single break you take. As you’ve probably figured out, taking a proactive break doesn’t mean checking social networks, but doing completely different things.

    It may not be easy to switch to proactive breaks, but it’s definitely worth it. If you follow the advice in this article, the final result won’t only be in your much higher productivity, but also in a big increase in your happiness levels.

    Refresh recharge

    The reactive way to taking your breaks

    If we want to understand what it means to proactively take a break, we must first look at the opposite – reactive breaks. Taking a break reactively means that you don’t really take a break, but switch to an activity of the least physical or mental effort that you think is relaxing you, but most often is putting additional emotional stress on you.

    When the break time comes, you only react to your environment and start doing something that feels the easiest and most convenient thing to do. Much like reactive reading means that you only read stuff that lands in your social networks’ newsfeed and never really consciously decide what book to read. You only instinctively react to outside stimuli; you aren’t really in charge.

    Examples of reactive breaks are all the things that more than 80 % of people do when they take a break:

    • Checking social networks
    • Going to the company’s kitchen and gossiping a little bit
    • Eating an unhealthy snack and reading a trashy magazine or webpage
    • Reading newspapers and similar

    It may seem that those kinds of things relax you, but in reality they do not. Much like it may feel that you sleep better if you drink a little bit of alcohol before sleep, but in reality you aren’t, proven by science.

    In the same way, checking social networks only puts additional social stress on you (how others are maybe enjoying life more than you), gossiping is destroying your key relationships, checking way too negative newspapers feeds your mind with nothing but crap.

    The solution to better breaks is simple. You must plan your daily breaks smarter. What you want to achieve by planning proactive breaks is to do the activities that really relax you, make you happier and recharge your batteries.

    You want to deeply and honestly look forward to your breaks. You want to be in charge of your breaks, not your instincts.

    The puzzles of proactively taking a break

    Now we know that checking social network feeds or gossiping aren’t very smart ways of taking a break. But what else could you do?

    Well, let’s put together a few puzzle pieces to build an adequate solution. When we put together the puzzle pieces, you will get many good ideas on how to proactively take a break.

    Sharpening the saw and putting down the saw

    There are two ways of how you can take a break – an active one and a passive one. A passive smart break equals to putting down the saw. In other words, doing nothing that takes any effort. You hibernate in a way and recharge your batteries.

    Examples of passive breaks are taking a nap, sitting in a chair and enjoying rays of sunlight on your face, talking a really easy walk, and so on.Sharpen the saw

    The second way to take a break is a more active one. An active smart break equals sharpening your saw in one way or another. You exploit breaks to be more productive during your work time.

    Examples of active breaks are reading a book, going for a more intense walk, watching an online course, brainstorming ideas, stretching, cooking yourself a healthy meal, and so on.

    When you are proactively planning your breaks, you decide how many active and how many passive breaks you will have. You can decide that based on how mentally or physically demanding your daily tasks are, based on the current goals you have in your life and other key factors.

    Systematically planning the number of breaks

    Even more important is that you do take regular breaks and that you systematically plan them. You can set alarms for breaks if necessary. Because the worst thing you can do is to take no breaks at all. If you don’t take breaks, your saw sooner or later gets used up and your work is not as productive anymore as it could be.

    That’s also where the term comes from. To cut a long story short, two foresters are cutting down trees and the one who takes the time to sharpen his saw regularly does it much faster, even if sharpening the saw takes away some working time.

    Taking breaks throughout the day

    So lesson number one: take regular breaks – passive and active ones. There are many systems for how frequently you can plan breaks. Test and see what works best for you.

    The list of things you enjoy in life

    I haven’t heard a single person say that they really enjoy checking social network feeds during their breaks; that checking their social network feeds is their dream life. Or gossiping or reading news or doing any other kind of mental masturbation.

    It doesn’t make sense to take a well-deserved break and then do activities with which you are basically wasting your life away.

    That is why you need to make a list of all the things you enjoy in life. From the big things that may take days and are more expensive (like travelling) to all the small things that are free and only take minutes (like hugging someone). When you become consciously aware of all the things you really enjoy in life, well yes, you can systematically plan to do them in your break time. It makes complete sense, so I’m not sure why more people aren’t doing it.

    In addition, planning to do things you enjoy in the break time can also be a form of rewarding yourself for successfully completing a certain task during the work time. That will additionally motivate you to do good work, which is a total win-win.

    The list of things you look forward to

    The third important concept is that you always have to look forward to something in life. Again, that can be big or small things. When you look forward to things in life, your hope is much stronger, you are dramatically happier and life becomes so precious. People who are successful and happy in life always have things to look forward to.

    Planning something to look forward to during the break is thus the winning combination. Your day gets much closer to your ideal day, you do more of the things you enjoy and you are constantly under mild positive expectation of what comes next, which makes you be more present in the moment and life as a whole becomes that more beautiful.

    It absolutely makes sense that you also find a work you enjoy doing and then your life is nothing but going from one activity you enjoy to the other. You work on a project that’s important and dear to you with people you like, but deep down you are also already looking forward to the break time where you will do something else you enjoy. And when you are at your break time, you’re already excited to go back to your work. That’s the best way that leads to a high quality of life.

    Your break list

    Let’s now put all the puzzle pieces together. Your breaks must be activities during which you either sharpen the saw or put down the saw. But no matter which type of an activity it is, your breaks must always be something you look forward to and during which you perform things you really enjoy.

    So to proactively plan your daily breaks, I suggest you make a short list of what activities you will enjoy during breaks on certain days. Like you have a to-do list, not-to-do list and many other lists. It shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes to write that down and if you don’t want to have another to-do list, you can simply do it in your head.

    Consciously decide on the number of breaks you will take on a certain day and proactively plan which enjoyable things you’ll do during the time off – make sure you look forward to your break time from early morning.

    Practical examples

    Let’s look at a practical example.

    Here is the summary of my working plan today:

    • 3 x 2 hour flows – Completing two articles and my diploma thesis
    • 1 hour of exercise
    • 1 hour of reading a book
    • 1 hour of doing smaller tasks (email, promoting articles, doing blog updates etc.)

    During the day and while performing all these tasks, I will take 6 breaks that last from 5 minutes to 45 minutes. During these breaks, I will do several things I really enjoy:

    • Stretching and doing a few core exercises (active)
    • Reading 3 – 5 quality articles (active)
    • Preparing a healthy lunch and watching a Lynda course (main break, active)
    • Hugging and talking to my girlfriend when she comes home from work (active)
    • Eating a healthy fit cheesecake and a few blueberries, and doing nothing (passive)
    • Taking a short walk (active)

    I make sure I always proactively plan my breaks and do things I really enjoy during my time off. In the morning, I take a moment and think of all the things I’m looking forward to – during the breaks and during work. There are so many possibilities for what you can plan during breaks, life never gets boring and every day becomes a special gift to you.

    Life experiment ideas

    Smart things you can do during your breaks

    Here are all the ideas what to do during breaks instead of mental masturbation and other reactive things that the majority of people are doing:

    1. Stretch or do a few yoga poses
    2. Go for a walk or do a few exercises
    3. Walk up and down the stairs in your office a few times
    4. Take 10 deep breaths and practice breathing properly
    5. Take a quick power nap
    6. Learn something from somebody
    7. Read, read, read
    8. Do brain exercises
    9. Watch a documentary
    10. Prepare yourself a healthy meal
    11. Eat a very healthy snack, like almonds and blueberries
    12. Make a new entry in your journal
    13. Draw something or do some other type of art
    14. Learn a few new words in another language
    15. Organize or clean something
    16. Have a deep and interesting conversation with someone
    17. Meet somebody new
    18. Call somebody you haven’t talked to in ages
    19. Write down the things you are grateful for that day
    20. Plan your next trip
    21. Update your vision list
    22. Watch an inspiring video on YouTube
    23. Do an online open course
    24. Organize your computer files and folders
    25. Declutter your mail inbox
    26. Build your vision board on Pinterest
    27. Visualize your goals
    28. Meditate for 15 minutes
    29. Read inspirational quotes
    30. Listen to music
    31. Do a few eye exercises, especially if you work with a computer a lot
    Homework

    Your plan to taking breaks throughout the day in the smart way

    Never ever open a social network again during your breaks, start gossiping or read news. Rather plan your breaks proactively. Now list down all the smart ways you can take breaks.

  • When you need to reprogram yourself and fix brain bugs

    Besides developing my blog, I’m also teaching myself how to code. Learning how to code is not easy and it takes a lot of time and hard work, but I think it’s worth it. I’m not doing it to be a programmer someday, but more as an intellectual challenge and to better understand what’s happening with my blog behind the scenes (technology aspect) and, most importantly, I think programming will be the best way to talk to our “servants” in the future – robots.

    Writing a piece of code that does exactly what you wanted it to do is an awesome feeling. While entering a few lines of code in the code editor a few days ago, an interesting thought came to me. I’ve actually been programming for decades, just not machines to do all different useful kinds of stuff. I’ve been programming or, to be more exact, reprogramming myself: to be more productive, more efficient, wiser, happier and to ultimately make smarter decisions.

    When your code is buggy

    Your body is the hardware and your brain is the piece of hardware that runs the code (software). You’ve inherited and acquired your code with genes, primary and secondary socialization, through main authoritative relationships in your youth, different early life experiences, trends in your environment, culture, friends, and so on.

    Most of the code (your character) that defines how you operate in your adult life was written in the first 7 years of your life.

    In a healthy environment, with many healthy relationships and positive behavioral patterns, you take over lines of biological code that are positive, productive, assertive. Well, the code you inherit always has some errors, there is no perfect environment. And it’s supposed to be like that. Because errors in the code bring the desire and motivation for progress and growth. Friction drives you.

    Nevertheless, there is a limit when too many errors in the environment lead to a very buggy code. If you are raised in a very toxic environment, your code can be seriously malfunctioning and damaged. That kind of a malfunctioning code leads to developing personality traits that are harmful to you and even others. It leads to things like severe negative thinking, shaping a poor life strategy, making bad life decisions, unhappiness, self-sabotage, poor relationships, and so on.

    That’s what we call a negative spiral, the double knockdown of life. First you are put in a toxic environment, where you suffer for sure, and then you suffer even more in your adult life because you make bad decisions that are a result of having been raised in a toxic environment. That’s the bad news in the whole story.

    But there is also some good news, of course. The good news is that you have the power to reprogram yourself, to fix the buggy code and thus change the course of your life to a more positive one.

    Searching for bugs

    It doesn’t take a lot of analytical effort to figure out the quality of the code that runs in your brain. Here are a few methods that can help you with such a task:

    • The parents test
    • Pinpointing toxic behavior
    • Short-term future predictions
    • The happiness index
    • The life satisfaction test
    • Gap to ideal self

    The parents test

    Like father like sonIf you aren’t doing anything about your personal growth and personal development, you are slowly turning into your parents, especially when it comes to the things you hate about them the most; they only appear in a slightly different way. One of your parents may be financially greedy and you are intellectual greedy, for example.

    The older you are, the more you realize that you’re turning into your old folks. If you don’t do anything about it.

    The test is very simple. Look at your parents, where they are, what they’ve achieved in their life, the quality of their code, and ask yourself if that’s what you want. You inherited many lines of code from your parents, so it’s logical that your destiny doesn’t lie far away from theirs. The more different destiny you want, the more work you’ll have to put into reprogramming yourself.

    Pinpointing toxic behavior

    A very good exercise for getting to know yourself better is to perform a personal SWOT analysis. You list all your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. One big segment of your weaknesses are the so-called toxic behavioral patterns. These are the behaviors that lead you to cause harm to yourself, other people and the environment in general.

    Many times, we see ourselves in a much better light than we actually are, so while doing such an exercise It may help to ask other people for an honest opinion or to perform a few personality tests. Or give yourself a goal to find at least 10 toxic behavioral patterns and then rank them. If you’re out of ideas, you can help yourself with things like:

    When you pinpoint a toxic behavioral pattern, your job is to of course rewrite it with a healthier one.

    Short-term future predictions

    Short-term past is a great predictor of short-term future. Take different life metrics like body fat percentage, net worth, the number of books you read etc. and analyze them for the past 3 – 9 months. Analyze the trends and where you’re headed. Are your metrics improving or not, are you advancing, declining or standing still?

    If your metrics are slowly getting worse, it means that you’re running a buggy code. You’re making bad decisions and executing bad habits. The rational conclusion is that in the future, your life situation will only get worse and that it’s time that you start working on a better code. Otherwise things will only get much harder for you. Instead make sure your life metrics are improving every month, just a little bit.

    The happiness index

    You’re here on this planet to grow, create, enjoy life and connect with other people. If you do all four, you open the potential to real happiness.

    Constantly improving yourself gives you faith in your abilities and competences, creating value gives you a sense of being valuable to the society and having an important life mission on this planet, and enjoying life is the cherry on top that makes life really worth living . And of course you can’t be happy and successful alone, you need to connect with other people, you need quality relationships in your life to really flourish.

    The happier you are in general, the better core code you are running.

    All that leads to real happiness in life. Under one big condition. If you were programmed to be happy. If you were not programmed to be happy, there is no relationship, achievement or material possession that could bring happiness into your life. Even if you follow the “grow, create, enjoy, connect” formula, you can be very unhappy if you’re hindered by too many cognitive distortions, high emotional lability, suboptimal thinking or any other type of weak thinking.

    So if you want to be truly happy, you must first deal with your core code (kernel) and then build the right kind of actions and behavior on top of that. That leads to a simple conclusion. The happier you are in general, the better core code you are running.

    Happiness Index
    Happiness Index, Source: Agile trail

    There is a simple exercise that will show how good your kernel code is. All you need to do then is to figure out how happy you really are on your average day, and you will know the quality of your code. The best way to do that is to introduce the happiness index into your life.

    Every day, you mark how happy you are on a scale from 1 to 10 on a chart. After doing that for a few weeks, you can quickly see your general level of happiness and the quality of the code you’re running in your brains. Everything from 8 – 10 means your kernel is running the right code, everything below 4 means that it’s supper buggy, turning you into a zombie. Even if you’re somewhere between 5 and 7, that’s not good enough for a quality and happy life.

    The life satisfaction test

    The happiness index shows how happy and satisfied you are with your life in general. You can do a very similar exercise, only that you dive a little bit deeper and estimate how good your code is for specific life areas. You expand the table with a few new columns and build your life-satisfaction chart.

    First you draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally, like with the happiness index, while vertically you list the key areas of life or the areas you’ve chosen to assess. You assess every area or category of life from 1 to 10. Below, you can find an example of that kind of a life-assessment chart.

    1 2 3 8 9 10
    Health X
    Relationships X
    Money X
    Career X
    Emotions X
    Competences X
    Fun X
    Spirituality X
    Technology skills X

    Made-up case as an example

    Then there is the second step. In the second step, you take another look at all the life areas you assessed with marks 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are all the life areas where you’re averagely satisfied. But average satisfaction doesn’t tell us if you’re running good code in your brains or not. The truth is that life areas either work or they don’t, you’re either satisfied or you aren’t, there is no middle ground. You’re either super healthy or not, you either have enough of money or you lack it.

    That is also known as the possibility to have only two different kinds of problems in life. You either rock or you suck in different areas of life. Therefore, in the second step you assess life areas again, but now only by using the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 8, 9, 10. You must take more time to really think about the areas you’re satisfied with and the ones you aren’t.

    Then you can make a simplified conclusion to further analyze your life and its quality. For the life areas rated from 1 – 3, you’re probably running very buggy software. And for the life areas rated 8 – 10, your software is working fine or even super great.

    That kind of an analysis can help you a lot with determining which parts of your brain code you have to work on the most. You often see that we only have parts and pieces of code that are broken and need an update. For example, you are doing well financially, but aren’t taking care of your health. It’s obvious where you need an update.

    Gap to ideal self

    The last test I call the ideal self gap. You have your actual self, who you are at this moment, and you have an ideal self, representing who you would like to become. Not many people are aware that they have an ideal self, so the best way to become aware of it in a very detailed way is to make a persona of your ideal self. Once you make that, you can easily compare your actual self to your ideal self.

    In the next step, you can analyze how far your ideal self is from your actual self. How fast are you approaching your ideal self? In the past year, how many personality characteristic, behavioral patterns and competences have you changed or improved to come closer to your ideal self? The greater the gap, the more recoding you need to do. The faster you want to approach your ideal self, the faster you have to write new lines of code.

    Reprogram yourself

    Reprogram yourself

    A few simple tests can very quickly tell you how much reprogramming you have to do and the quality of the code you’re running in your brain. The good news is that you can reprogram almost everything about yourself. I mean really everything. It’s impressive how you’re nothing more than a lot of lines of biological code you can rewrite. It’s often not very easy to do that, but it can be done.

    Practical examples

    I used to hate exercise, now I simply love it. There is no perfect day without doing something for my body. I am currently reprogramming myself for a better posture. It’s hard work, but I can already see the new code giving me better results.

    My favorite dish used to be the Wiener Schnitzel (fried veal) with French fries. Back then I was extremely fat. Now my favorite food is broccoli. I used to hate olives and flicked them off a pizza. Now I love olives. I just forced myself a little bit to eat them for a few weeks, and then they became tasty. I now eat pizza maybe twice a year. Yes, you can even reprogram your taste.

    I used to have huge problems with my temper. I reprogrammed myself to be calmer and wiser. I used to hate reading and books, even though I was an extraordinary pupil in primary school. Now I love reading, I never go to sleep without reading at least one page in a book.

    In primary school, my favorite subject was math. Then I unfortunately reprogrammed myself somewhere on the way to hate math (I suppressed some negative painful experiences). Now I want to reprogram myself back to loving math again.

    You can basically reprogram yourself for anything. From how your body operates to what foods you like, the habits you follow, how you think and behave, what are your emotional reactions, how happy you are in life, what kind of relationships you forge and how healthy you are, how good you are at acquiring and managing money, and everything else you can think off.

    There are some limits, of course, you can’t reprogram yourself to be taller, but there are so many things you can do. All you need is a little bit of courage, motivation and awareness that you only live once, so you want to make the most out of it.

    How to reprogram yourself?

    The last question is, of course, how to reprogram yourself. There are many ways to reprogram yourself and new ways are constantly being invented.

    From cognitive conditioning to behavioral conditioning, changing your environment and building relationships with people who have the personality traits you want, getting a mentor, strategically developing healthier habits, modeling, going to therapy, meditation, reading, cognitive reframing, refocusing your mind on gratefulness and positives, visualization, the search mode, and so on.

    Much like there is no one best programming language and one best code environment, there is also no one ultimate technique for reprograming yourself. You must test, experiment and find the ones that work best for you.

    So the first way you must reprogram yourself is to keep an open mind, always try new things to see if they work well for you, and to always stay curios together with nurturing the will to constantly improve yourself.

    You already are a programmer

    You don’t have to learn how to code to be a programmer. And you don’t have to learn Photoshop to be a designer and user experience expert. You see, you are already a designer of your own life.

    You are already running code in your brain that shapes your life strategy and consequently your destiny. Your life code and your life design dictate whether your life will be a daring adventure or nothing.

    BTW, code is what runs behind a program, and the user experience and design are how you see and use the program. The same way as your brain runs the code with which you make decisions and that gives you a certain life experience and design (style, functionality etc.).

    Homework

    bug featureNever ever take the code in your brains as it is, especially if it’s not leading you in a positive direction. Instead become a programmer of your life and reprogram yourself to a better version.

    Reprogram yourself to become the best version of yourself. Start by updating your brain code now and write the lines that will lead you to the best life possible, the good life.

    Don’t get too frustrated in the beginning. Beginnings are the hardest. And don’t get demotivated if you fail from time to time. The new code can’t always work as you hoped it will. You usually have to rewrite your code several times (the search mode) to find the one that works best for you (your fit). For example, you may have to try several different diets to find the one that works best for you.

    It’s hard, beginnings are the hardest, but it’s definitely worth it. And it can be a lot of fun. Okay, now I have to go back to improving my knowledge on coding. You know, to efficiently communicate with robots soon. Good luck with reprogramming yourself.

  • God mode and the perfect human state

    The god mode is a type of cheat in video games that makes your character invulnerable and invincible. The idea is not used only in games – even in Windows, you can create a god mode icon to access the system’s different control panels in the same place to customize and maximize the performance of your computer. You can find a similar concept on Mac as well as different apps and services like Netflix.

    The god mode is quite popular in the computer world. But what about real life, what would be the god mode in real life? Well, it’s pretty much the same idea.

    God mode in real life is the feeling that you can achieve everything, going straight forward to your goals without a single millisecond of a doubt.

    From time to time, I’m able to achieve that kind of a state. It’s not something unique that works only for me, because I know a few other people who do it as well. Unfortunately, it takes iron discipline and many other conditions need to be fulfilled for you to get yourself into god mode. Thus it’s usually a temporary state.

    To be honest, it makes sense that you can’t feel like you’re in god mode all the time. That would make you kind of divine or maybe your life would even be boring. Like in games, if you play in god mode all the time, the game soon becomes no fun at all. Nevertheless, most people never experience that kind of a state and even if they do, they are able to play life in such a mode for an extremely short period of time. Too short.

    For example, I put a lot of effort into designing my life to spend as much time as possible in god mode. I currently manage to spend 4 – 5 weeks per year in such a mode, which accounts to around 10%. And I put a lot of effort into achieving that. In the future, I want to increase that percentage to at least 30%.

    In this blog post, I will share what I’ve learned so far about how to achieve god mode. But before I do that, let me describe how it feels to be in such a superior mode; so you can analyze whether you’ve experienced anything similar before.

    How does it really feel to be in god mode

    Being in god mode, hmm? You know, it gives you kind of god-like feelings, being able to seize life to the full, achieve everything you ever wanted and believe deep down without a doubt that life has prepared many exciting adventures for you to undertake.

    You see yourself as an übermensch. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, socially and morally strong. You feel powerful, assertive, you feel extremely good in your own skin, you know exactly what you want, you have a strong sense of self and autonomy, and you go straight after your goals and needs in a respectful manner.

    You have your inner smile reflected on your face, shining eyes full of passion and you cherish the day given to you with a strong will to create, enjoy life and grow. In god mode, you feel super confident, sharp, decisive, but also deeply connected to other people. You know that you are just the right distance away from your comfort zone – you’re in the learning zone, where you can learn, innovate and create value.

    Being in god mode means that you are growth-oriented, you see all the abundance the world has to offer to you, you are positive, happy, problem-solving oriented, proactive, and conquer one goal after the other. You are disciplined, consistent, but also curious and playful.

    The god mode is the perfect human state, something everyone should strive to achieve in life as many times as possible for as long as possible. There is one more important detail. You can only enter the god mode if you know that you achieved that kind of a state with your own hard work (no drugs can help).

    The god mode

    How to get yourself into the God mode

    First of all, it’s important for you to know that the god mode state for humans exists in real life. Now, the second question is how to achieve such a state. To be honest, the way to achieve god mode greatly depends on every individual, from your genes to where you live and many other conditions. So you must search – experiment and test how to get yourself into the god mode.

    It took me a decade of hard work and personal development to achieve that kind of a state for the first time. And as I mentioned, I can achieve it for a short period of time with a lot of effort. But it’s definitely worth it. It’s one of the best feelings ever.

    Below are the conditions I know I have to meet to enter the god mode. There are probably more I haven’t discovered yet, since the state is so hard to achieve, so if I identify any new condition I will, of course, add it to the list. Even though achieving the god mode depends on every individual, I think many of the conditions below are universal.

    Here they are (I know the list isn’t short):

    • Having full control over life
    • Following True North
    • Being healthy assertive
    • Getting enough sleep
    • The power of the sun
    • Spending time in nature
    • Regular exercise
    • Following a strict diet
    • Taking food supplements
    • Having enough material resources
    • Doing meaningful and creative work
    • Enjoying deep relationships
    • Sex can definitely help
    • Having strong faith

    Full control over life

    I think that the underlying condition for achieving god mode is to have full control over your life. That means having the right optimal mindset by focusing on the positive, managing your time as it suits you best, being aware of the power you always have in the present moment, and so on.

    It definitely helps if you are your own boss, but it’s probably not mandatory, as long as you have a job you love and enough personal and creative freedom. But like in Windows god mode, you must be in a position to tweak your lifestyle and design your life as it really suits you best.

    And you must experiment a lot to know what the real fits for you are in different life areas. You must know that there’s a difference between what you think will bring value to your life (assumptions) and what really does. Only with real life experience can you know how to design your life perfectly.

    An important part of control is keeping all the flexibility about where you will go next. Your needs, goals and optimal life settings change all the time (also together with your environment), and you must keep the control to find the optimal setup for your life in every specific moment (in the lean and agile way).

    For example, the perfect setup for you at some point may be to work from home, at another to get work done in a co-working office and then a period may come when having an office full of people you work with is the perfect environment for you. You can’t be in god mode without the perfect setup.

    Following your True North

    There are only two options in life, either you follow your True North or you don’t. You can’t be approximately on the right path. The answer can only be yes or no. Deep down, you always know very well if you are on the right path or not.

    It’s impossible to enter god mode if you aren’t doing the things you were born to do. Every god in Greek or Roman mythology was born for certain responsibilities (for example, Poseidon to master the waters). In the same way, you were born to master a certain kind of work, practice a certain kind of sport, eat a certain kind of diet, and so on.

    In life, I often followed my True North, I followed my heart and my calling and the things I was born to do, but I also often got scared and chose the safer or more conservative path that wasn’t meant for me. Whenever I wasn’t following my True North, no matter the money I earned and the cool people I worked with, I felt a little bit dead and very sad inside. I knew there was some place else where I should be. It’s a feeling far removed from the god mode.

    There are zero chances for me or you to enter god mode if you are doing a job you hate or perform work you aren’t good at, if you spend time with wrong people who don’t support you, and if you aren’t following your life vision and mission.

    Your True North, vision and mission aren’t written in stone, you must create them by yourself to a certain extent by searching and innovating; but deep down, you always know if you’re creating the right life masterpiece or not. You can’t fake it until you make it.

    Being assertive

    Right next to having full control over your life and following your True North, I would add being healthy assertive. You can’t be in god mode if your heart is filled with fear, if you’re scared to go after your goals and if you’re afraid of everyone and everything you meet on your journey. Gods aren’t hiding behind closed doors being afraid of everything.

    In god mode, you are confident, you know you deserve to take up space under the sun and you walk boldly towards your goals, with straight posture and every step of yours is self-assured. You have no problem talking to people, forging new relationships, expressing your thoughts and feelings, and you see yourself as a highly valuable individual.

    Nevertheless, you have to be assertive in a healthy way, not a greedy one. If you constantly get into quarrels or fights, if you see everyone as your competitor and you want to trample them down or control them, you aren’t in god mode, but more like an emotionally damaged and scared animal that wants to overpower everyone to not feel threatened.

    When you are in god mode, you are high on testosterone (strength), but low on cortisol (stress). That means you go after your goals (testosterone), but in a calm, wise and integrative manner (low cortisol). Powerful and calm.

    Enough sleep

    It’s impossible to be in god mode if you aren’t well-rested and if you don’t get enough sleep. For me, that’s eight hours. Not eight and a half, not seven and a half, but exactly eight hours. I experimented a lot with different amounts of sleep and to enter god mode, I need eight hours of sleep many days in a row, so I’m really well-rested.

    Whether I have the goal to get myself into god mode or not, I always make sure to get enough sleep. I’m much more productive throughout a day, I can think much more clearly, and it’s the only way for me to be really creative, calm and make good decisions. A lack of sleep always leads to being confused, operating on low energy levels and having a hard time expressing yourself.

    Sun

    One big condition for achieving god mode that’s unfortunately out of my control unless I change my location, is sunny weather. It seems like the sun can give special positive shades to the colors of life.

    Sun is the one giving Superman power, and I guess it’s no different with me if I want to enter god mode.

    That means achieving god mode during the summer is much easier than in winter. There are probably exceptions outside of summer time, but rare ones. I don’t ski, but I assume that skiing on a sunny day in the mountains can get you close to the god mode. But I was never able to achieve god mode when it was cloudy or raining for longer periods of time.

    It would be awesome to surpass this limitation somehow.

    Nature

    Like I need sun to be in god mode, in the same way I must feel connected to nature. Spending time in nature is like a trigger for entering god mode. A walk in the woods, a swim in the sea, a morning climb to a hill or even doing a few body-weight exercises on a meadow is my trigger of god mode for me.

    And it must be done daily. As soon as I lose connection with nature, I lose the god mode state. I can work for hours and hours afterwards using technology or doing any other work, but I need that initial trigger that gets me into the god mode. That’s done only by nature.

    Well, even if you aren’t searching for your own way to god mode, spending time in nature is always very beneficial for you, so do it anyway.

    Exercise

    Exercising and spending time in nature go hand-in-hand for me. To enter the god mode, you have to feel physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually strong. If one of these is absent, you can forget about the god mode. And everything starts with you feeling physically strong. A healthy spirit can only reside in a healthy body.

    I never ever entered full god mode when I was extremely overweight. If you are overweight, I guess you can achieve a partial god mode, but it’s far from the full god mode. You don’t have to be already ultra-fit to achieve the god mode, but I think you definitely have to exercise regularly, and feel your physical power is increasing. On the other hand, you also have to be very careful not to overtrain.

    Pushing yourself too far or injuring yourself is definitely a way to get yourself straight out of god mode. Any extreme for a longer period of time is toxic, and any toxicity or extreme for a longer period of time is the enemy of wellbeing.

    The idea of god mode is to be in the perfect state of wellbeing.

    Diet

    Some of the things that kick me straight out of god mode are sugars, unhealthy fats, alcohol and overeating. That is probably 100% valid for everyone. Too much unhealthy food destroys the God mode.

    I’m on a carb-cycling high protein diet, which suits me best for entering god mode, but every time I cross the limits with sugar intake (non-complex carbs), I come straight out of god mode right after the initial sugar spike. After the spike, I feel like I was hit by a train and not in any superior kind of state.

    In the same way, I very quickly get kicked out of god mode if I eat fried food, unhealthy snacks or anything else that messes with my insulin levels or clogs up my body. Overeating, as one of my biggest weaknesses, is no different. It’s impossible to feel like you’re in a god-like state, if you have a completely full stomach and the only thing on your mind is to lie down and rest.

    Alcohol (or any kind of drugs) is a tricky thing with god mode. It may give you a fake feeling of being in the god mode for a very short period of time. I guess that’s why people love alcohol and drugs so much. But despite this, the drug state a very different kind of state from the real god mode. As I mentioned, you can’t fake it until you make it.

    The drug state compared with god mode doesn’t feel natural, it’s usually connected with partying, not following your True North, you know you’re doing damage to your body and you have to pay a big price after the high goes away, from hangover to addiction.

    Food supplements

    As an honest fact, it’s really hard for me to enter god mode if I’m not taking basic food supplements. In general, I follow an extremely healthy diet, eating more or less organic products, but I guess today’s food is just too impoverished to meet all the nutritional needs.

    Here are the food supplements I take daily to enter god mode more easily:

    • Green smoothie (avocado, spinach, asparagus, etc.) with Ashwagandha and Curcumin
    • Green drink (blended green grasses)
    • Green tea
    • Omega-3 fatty acids with vitamin D
    • B-complex
    • Magnesium
    • Whey protein (after exercise)

    I also take a few other supplements, but the ones listed above are mandatory for me to achieve the perfect state of wellbeing.

    Enough material resources

    In games where you’re playing in god mode, you usually also get access to unlimited resources – money, tools, technology etc. In real life, you don’t need unlimited resources, but I never achieved god mode, when I was drowning in debt or living from month to month.

    The best financial advice, right next to spending less than you earn, is to have an emergency savings account for 6 – 12 of your monthly costs; it’s for emergency cases if any unexpected misfortune occurs that especially kicks you below the belt financially (like job loss).

    Financial safety net relieves a lot of pressure, at least for me, and I assume it’s no different for many other people. And if you want to be in god mode, you mustn’t have any really severe and unhealthy pressure.

    Meaningful and creative work

    Work and creating are a big part of my personal identity, so there is no god mode for me without working on something meaningful, creating something awesome and being proud of my work. And again, I think that this isn’t valid only for me, but for all human beings.

    We are here to grow, create and enjoy life, and I achieved god mode only when I was doing all three things as part of my ideal day. I was never in god mode while on a beach, playing volleyball and drinking beer.

    But you can achieve that in many different forms. I was never in god mode wasting time on a beach, but I was in god mode while traveling far away from home, discovering interesting places with the person I love and mentally outlining the next article to be written. Love and work, work and love, that is all there is, as Freud said, and thus work is simply an important part of being in god mode.

    A mandatory condition for entering god mode is definitely to do a job you’re good at, proud of and that you enjoy. You can’t be in god mode if you’re doing a job you hate or work you despise. You have to see and feel how you’re creating value for other people and are respected for it.

    Deep relationships

    Good relationships lead to heaven on Earth. Toxic relationships mean hell on Earth. If you want to be in god mode, you have to live heaven on Earth, of course. That means many healthy, supportive and encouraging relationships.

    You need to have the best possible relationships with your primary family, with your spouse and your friends on the personal side of life. And you need encouraging and stable relationships with your boss, coworkers and mentors on the professional side.

    Even a single toxic relationship can put you straight out of god mode.

    It’s not about relationships being perfect (because relationships are never perfect) or not having any problems in relationships; it’s about relationships not being toxic, abusive and one-sided. There is a big difference between working with someone on constructively solving relationship problems with the goal of deepening a relationship, and suffering and torturing yourself in a toxic relationship.

    Sex

    You probably know the actual summary of Greek mythology and how the god of gods behaved. It goes something along the lines of: Zeus: I’m going to put my penis in it. Everyone: Don’t do it. Zeus: Too late.

    Well, I’m just kidding a little bit, but passionate sex and intimacy can definitely help you enter god mode in a similar way like nature does.

    Faith

    The last condition for entering god mode for me is having extraordinary faith in myself and life. The god mode is not about a complete absence of problems and challenges and everything miraculously solving itself. I never entered god mode when there was no real challenge waiting for me, a challenge that was slightly more demanding than my abilities.

    That’s the big difference between the god mode in games and the god mode in real life. To be in god mode in real life, you need a challenge – a challenge just big enough to enable you to grow personally. And you definitely need it too. Nevertheless, facing challenges and personal growth must be driven by strong faith.

    It’s about believing that you’re able to conquer all the challenges, creatively solve all the problems thrown at you, and that all things will turn out okay for you.

    Without extraordinary faith there is no god, and there is no god mode for you, whether you are religious or not (btw, having extraordinary faith in yourself doesn’t conflict with believing in god). Faith gives you the power to face all the challenges of life, no matter how difficult they are.

    If you want to do extraordinary things in life, you have to extraordinarily believe in yourself.

    Get yourself in the god mode

    As you can see, I do have a rough idea of how to get myself into the god mode. My current challenge is to increase the amount of time I spend in the god mode from 10% to 15% and then all the way up to around 30% or even more. Being in god mode is really one of the best feelings ever. You want to really live life, not only exist. You want your life to be a daring adventure, you don’t want to only work to pay your bills and then die. You don’t want to be a zombie.

    Homework

    Thus I encourage you to sit down and brainstorm all the conditions you assume you have to meet to enter god mode. Then start experimenting, adding and taking things off your list, until you finally achieve god mode, even if only for a short period of time. Then try to replicate it over and over again, and experiment even further until you really understand what rockets you straight into this superior feeling of living.

    Enter your combination for the god mode and start really living your life!

  • The hard road becomes easy with time

    I talk so much about the easy and hard roads in my blog posts (the exact quote: the easy road becomes hard with time and the hard road becomes easy) that it’s time for me to clarify what exactly I mean with it. It’s one of the most important lessons of life, illustrating why it’s so important to always make smart decisions, big or small.

    In this article you will learn:

    – Why you are programmed to constantly make the worst decisions possible
    – What is the number one thing you have to do to start making better decisions in life
    – That beginnings are the hardest. Once you develop a new habit, hard becomes easy
    – Smart decisions accumulate and they lead to a high quality of life
    – It’s so hard to save 100$, and so easy to spend it. But it’s so good to have full bank account. :)

    Every day, you take hundreds of small decisions, like what to eat, what to do with your money, how long to sleep, which tasks to do and how well to perform them, and so on. All these small decisions slowly accumulate into different outputs over time – positive or negative ones.

    On the other hand, from time to time you have to make big life decisions, like what to do with larger sums of money you inherit, who to marry or start a family with, whether you should start your own business or change a job, should you drive home drunk or call a cab, and so on. These big decisions immediately have a big impact on your life – a positive or a negative one.

    No matter if we talk about big or small decisions, there are different levels of how wise/smart the decisions are. You can make a somehow okay, good, better or the best possible decision. On the other hand, you can make a not-so-good, bad, worse or even the worst possible decision. The better the decisions you are making on this scale and as often as possible, the better the quality of life that awaits you in the future.

    Failing at doing

    You aren’t programmed to make good decisions

    But here’s the big catch. Unfortunately, you aren’t programmed to make good decisions. Your biology isn’t wired in a way to come even close to good decisions. Ever since the jungle times, you have been programmed to make the worst decisions ever.

    You are programmed to rest a lot (to be lazy, in other words) and to save as much energy as possible – physical, mental and emotional one. You are programmed to eat everything that tastes sweet, stock fat instead of muscles, because muscles are big energy consumers and own as much clutter as possible in your home for eventual hard times in the future.

    You are wired to buy status symbols to rank better on social hierarchy and you are programmed to be attracted to other people, even if you are in a relationship (at least after infatuation fades away).

    You have been programmed for instant gratification since the jungle times, because back then it was hard to find something sweet, if you didn’t immediately eat all the food that you caught a tiger ate it (and you along with it) and you had to be lightweight to be able to climb trees. In addition to that, you were programmed to be afraid of the unknown and changes, because everything new was a matter of life and death back then.

    The list of instincts from jungle times that drive you to make stupid decisions is endless.

    Thus your natural tendency is to make stupid decisions. To watch TV at least five hours per day, eat high sugar food, stare at other booties (or even slap one from time to time) despite being in a serious relationship, buy as many things as possible for the tough times and for a higher social status (you know, to attract a potential mate), and to be afraid of everyone who is different than you.

    But as we will see, the road of instant gratification is the easy road. Unfortunately, it is programmed in your DNA to choose the easy road, over and over again. But you don’t live in a jungle anymore, where life expectancy was 30 years at the most and every single thing that moved tried to kill you. You live in much nicer times now, in times where you need a significantly different life strategy.

    To undertake the hard road, you need the long-term view

    Besides all the instincts that are driving you towards instant gratification, there is another bunch of things given to you. Important things that can help you shape the life strategy you need for today’s time – curiosity, the will to create and discover new things and an ability to plan your future.

    I can also add organizational skills with which you can highly structure and organize your life, the opportunity to grow and improve, and not to mention the most capable computer ever called the brain and the most remarkable device ever called the body.

    All these capabilities given to you are the opposite of primal instincts leading you to make better, healthier decisions in life. But in order to put these capabilities to work, you need to have a long-term perspective. You must see how curbing instant gratification leads to more enjoyment in the future. And that means taking the hard road.

    But how can you develop the capability to possess the long-term view? It’s simple. Even though the future starts sometime later (in the future, obviously), the way to use capabilities that lead to making better life decisions is to make the future feel connected to the present. If you see the future as part of your current self, you can clearly see the requirement for immediate and persistent action in the present moment that leads to the future you want.

    What you need to make better decisions in the present and to keep going in the face of tough life situations and adversity is to make your future self feel like it is in the here-and-now, connected rather than irrelevant to the present self. It may sound slightly confusing, so let me explain with simple examples.

    Psychology and problems

    How do biology and psychology mess with you

    As we now know, making the future self part of your current self is the key. That’s because our natural tendency is to only care about what’s happening here and now, and not where we will be in 3 to 5 or even 10 years. That’s just too far away. The now is much more important than the future, and consequently the pressure of instant gratification is so much higher.

    If you eat a cookie, your enjoyment comes immediately, but the fat comes only after months of eating one cookie too much a day. If you smoke a cigarette, the relaxation benefit is immediate, and it’s probably going to take decades before you develop cancer. Who cares about what will happen in decades, right?

    Not so fast. Bad decisions accumulate into bad outcomes and sooner or later, you have to pay the price. On the other hand, good decisions lead to more enjoyment in the future and a small sacrifice in the present. When you make the future self a part of your now, you can see how enjoyment in the future is much greater than a small sacrifice in the present. And that’s the key to having a long-term view.

    Of course, you have to find the right balance between investing into your future and instant gratification, you aren’t a robot, and you have to constantly fulfill your needs to be a psychologically healthy and assertive person. However, the vast majority of your decisions should be towards your better tomorrow.

    Fortunately, there is a simple life truth that shows where you’re going in life with your current decisions. Short-term history is the best predictor of short-term future. So take your body fat percentage, net worth or any other kind of success metrics and analyze what’s been happening with those metrics in the past few months – is the trend negative or positive? It’s very easy to get a good sense of where you’re going.

    With every next decision you make, ask yourself where that decision is going to lead you – tomorrow, and in 6 months, and in 3 years and even in 10 years.

    Make sure you count your future self into the decisions you are making today. That’s how you always keep the long term-view.

    If you aren’t completely convinced yet, let’s look at different life areas and see where does the road of instant gratification, the easy road, lead and where does the hard road, the road of keeping the long-term view, usually take you.

    Practical examples

    Competences and knowledge

    The easy road is to stop reading this article because it’s too long. The easy road is turning on the TV and watching a stupid reality show, laughing at other people how they could be such fools; but are you that different from them, wasting your precious life in front of the TV? The easy road is watching or listening to depressing and negative radio and TV news every day. Because your mind likes it, and it likes it a lot.

    The easy road is spending hours on social networks and stalking other people to know what they are doing. Not far from that is posting rare highlights of your life on social networks, hoping that many people will like your new status. You are getting nowhere in life; you’re only wasting precious seconds, hoping to get a little bit of attention from folks who barely know you.

    The hard road is reading a book instead of watching TV. The hard road is reading one book per week, and only books with high valuable knowledge. The hard road is reading for one hour every single day no matter what, or even reading at least one page of a book every day despite being tired like hell.

    The hard road is taking a massive online open course and actually finishing it. Not only subscribing to it because it’s free. The hard road is finding people you can learn from, convincing someone highly successful to mentor you, and constantly improving yourself.

    The hard road is always acquiring new competences, being curious and constantly trying new things. The hard road is committing yourself to lifelong learning. The easy road is to stop educating yourself and reading right after you finish high school or college. The easy road is forgetting about your brain and skills right after you end with formal education.

    The hardest road possible is not only developing reading discipline, but also applying all the newly acquired knowledge. The hardest road is to change your behavioral patterns, meaning that you stop doing some things and start doing new things. That’s a really hard road. It’s equally hard and tough to think, analyze and strategically develop a competence that is in rare supply on the markets and in great demand (to make lots of money). That’s hard.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Being able to provide all sorts of value to the markets and people.
    • Where does the easy road lead? Having zero job opportunities in life and becoming a boring person.

    Hard Road vs. Easy Road - Money

    Wealth

    It’s so hard to save 100$. And it’s so easy to spend 100$. Saving 100$ is the hard road. Spending 100$ is the easy road. Saving 10% of your paycheck every time the day for your salary payout comes is the hard road. And keeping the discipline that you never ever spend the saved money is as well. Signing mortgage on a house you can’t afford or indebting yourself to buy a new fancy car is the easy road.

    Actually, today saving 10% of your income and investing it in a mutual fund is the easy road. The salesman who has to convince you to sign the investment agreement was on the hard road. You were on the naïve easy road, thinking that people who sell financial products really care about your money. They care about their fees.

    Spending less than you earn is definitely the hard road, but I must also add getting yourself financially educated, knowing different types of investments, making good investment decisions, optimizing your taxes, legally protecting yourself and paying daily or weekly very close attention to what’s happening to your assets and net worth. That’s the hard road.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Having a full bank account, not drowning in debt, having zero financial worries and being able to do so much good with your money.
    • Where does the easy road lead? Drowning in debt and living from paycheck to paycheck.

    Health

    The easy road is sitting on your couch in front of the TV and watching reality shows while eating a bag of potato chips. The easy road is putting a frozen dinner in a microwave instead of cooking a healthy meal. The easy road is eating too much chocolate and blaming your genes for being fat.

    Just bought a magic weight-loss pills? Or a sauna belt to melt your fat while watching TV? You’re on the easiest road possible. It’s not going to work.

    The hard road is calculating the macronutrients you need, planning and preparing your meals in advance, being in a caloric deficit day after day when you are cutting fat, eating no junk food at all, eating not so tasty (compared to chips) green veggies every day, and not overeating even when you’re emotionally stressed.

    The hard road is doing something for your health every day. And it’s not only about your diet, but also about regularly exercising or doing other beneficial things for your body, be it going to the gym, doing a sport you like, stretching, getting a massage, meditating, doing yoga, and so on. Every single day, no matter what.

    The hard road means having a mentality that nothing will come between you and your goals. Nothing!

    The hard road is going to sleep early and making sure you get enough rest. The hard road is continuing on your healthy lifestyle journey even when you feel like shit, even when you injure yourself or hit a plateau. The hard road is finding new exercises that enable you additional fitness progress, constantly improving your diet and listening to your body about when to stop in order to not overtrain.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Feeling good in your own skin, having a six-pack and high levels of energy to enjoy life, living a longer life and suffering from fewer diseases.
    • Where does the easy road lead? A fat body, a hospital bad and low levels of energy.

    Hard Road vs. Easy Road Relationships

    Relationships

    It’s so hard to build up quality relationships and so easy to start abusing them. It’s so easy to emotionally break your kid over and over again. It’s so easy to come home after a hard working day and start nagging to your partner. It’s so easy to go out to a club and cheat. It’s so easy to flirt with others or gossip about them.

    It’s so easy to get into a relationship and stay with the person even if you are miserable, just because you’re scared of being alone. It’s so easy to blame love for bringing wrong people into your life, and it’s so easy to bitch to others about how they should change instead of accepting them as they are and changing yourself.

    It’s so easy to be intolerant towards others, their beliefs and values. It’s easy to judge and despise others. It’s easy to make yourself feel better and superior and it’s so easy to be narrow-minded. Yes, it’s very easy to feel superior because of your color, religion or membership in a social group. It’s so easy to be an asshole boss and so hard to be an exceptional leader.

    It’s the hard road to never stop investing into a relationship dear to you, even after decades. It’s hard to remember all the anniversaries, be attentive and romantic and nurture sexual attraction. It’s very hard become the best version of yourself in order to maximize the value you can offer in relationships. And it’s hard to develop extraordinary communication skills and regularly put them to use.

    It’s the hard road to clean toxic relationships in your life, to make peace with your past and your parents. It’s the hard road to spend time with the people who push you and are better than you and, on the other hand, also mentoring others and sharing your knowledge. That’s really hard, it’s much easier to sit on a beach and watch the waves.

    It’s hard to constantly forge new relationships, search for new people who can enrich your life or build additional dimensions with the people you love in your life. It’s hard to end a relationship when the time for that comes and it’s hard to move on when life wants you to.

    It’s so easy to let relationships just happen, and so hard to be superproactive in relationships, forging the ones that you really need in life. It’s hard to respect different kinds of people and their values.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Deep and healthy relationships, the best thing that can happen to you on this beautiful planet.
    • Where does the easy road lead? To many relationSHITS.

    Career and achievements

    It’s easy to just send out 30 CVs and hoping that someone will reply. It’s so easy to be quiet at a business meeting. It’s so easy to see an employer as someone who abuses you and out of whom you must get the maximum paycheck for the smallest possible investment. It’s so easy to hope that there won’t be much to do in a working day, so you can browse social networks and play games instead.

    It’s so easy to blame your boss for the miserable career. It’s so easy to gossip about other coworkers and being jealous, trying to block their promotion. It’s so easy to do a job you hate, only bitching, whining, complaining and doing nothing. It’s so easy to hope that better career opportunities will fall from the sky right on your head.

    It’s hard to write down 50 ideas every day and share them with your boss or founders, ideas about how the company you work for can improve. It’s hard to bring additional sales into the house. It’s hard to promote your company wherever you go. It’s hard to accelerate your learning when you are new at the company and it’s hard to learn everything about products, industry and key people.

    It’s extremely hard to proactively do an analysis of the companies with which you would fit in best (make a list), and then develop the competences they need and look for, prepare outstanding personal presentation materials (much more than just a standardized CV), start networking with the key employees at different business events and, in the last step, proactively convince them that they simply have to hire you, because you will do anything to help the company grow.

    It’s easy to find a job and it’s easy to write down something as your life mission. The hard road is staying true to your mission and staying motivated at your job even in the hard times.

    It’s hard to find a good cause to fight for and stay true to it. It’s the hard road to motivate your coworkers when they are acting dull, bring solutions to the table and not only point out problems, and show real commitment to help the company grow while also you’re also personally growing.

    • Where does the hard road lead? Self-actualization and respect from professional social circles.
    • Where does the easy road lead? Wasting 1/3 of your life.

    Emotions

    It’s so easy to lose your temper. It’s so easy to feel angry or drown in depression. It’s so easy to not show your emotions or even suppress them. It’s so easy to keep bad body posture and frown all the time. It’s so easy to give in to your fears, not saying hi to a stranger you like or climbing a mountain because you are afraid of heights.

    It’s so easy to lock yourself into a mental and emotional cage, play safe and be scared of everything. It’s so easy to not really live a life, but only exist, making sure you feel as numb as possible, just to avoid any kind of challenge. It’s the easy road, the road on which you just wait for life to pass by. It’s easy to be a zombie.

    Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. – W. Rogers

    It’s hard to mark your emotional levels on a happiness index every day and analyze them. It’s extremely hard to start disciplining your mind to manage your emotions better. It’s hard to sit down, take a piece of paper and do emotional accounting or cognitive reframing. It’s extremely hard to become better at managing your emotions.

    It’s very hard to express feelings sometimes, but you do it anyway in a respectful manner. That’s the hard road. It’s hard to take the risks of being rejected or failing. It’s hard to be honest with yourself about what you want from life and assert yourself in a healthy way. Going to a therapy if you have issues with depression or any other severe negative feeling is not an easy road. Who likes to admit they need therapy?

    • Where does the hard road lead? Happiness and living life to the full.
    • Where does the easy road lead? Being a zombie, not really living but only existing.

    Kaizen Rules

    The hard road becomes easy with time and the easy road becomes hard

    I saved the best for last. Because only people who read the whole article deserve to know this life secret. Just kidding, but anyway. Even though you have to stand strong against your primal nature and instincts if you want to undertake the hard road in order to live a better life in the future, really hard are only the beginnings.

    It’s true that nature programmed you for life in a jungle, but fortunately you can reprogram yourself to live a happy and successful life in contemporary times – times very different from the jungle era. What am I talking about?

    After forcing yourself to make good choices for only a short period of time, they slowly become routines and routines slowly turn into habits.

    It’s how the hard road is slowly turning into the easy one. We know this concept as developing a new habit. Developing a new (healthier) habit simply means that after performing repetitions for a certain period of time (usually for 30 days), you slowly begin to perform new desired behavior subconsciously, without any effort. That is when a hard road becomes the easy one.

    It may be hard to exercise the first few times, but then you get addicted to it. It may be hard to start reading books instead of watching TV, but I guarantee you that after the first few months you would never go back to it.

    It may be hard to save money, because there’s never enough of it, but when you start and you see that you can survive on 90% income and how good it feels to have money in the bank account, you will definitely love to stick to your new habit.

    That’s why I love to repeat over and over again that the hard road becomes easy with time, and the easy road becomes hard. In the beginning, you have to put in the effort, the hard work, you need self-discipline and win battles against yourself over and over again.

    But with time, making good, healthy decisions becomes much easier. They become part of who you are and how you live your life. You reprogram yourself to live a completely new lifestyle. And then the good life, the successful life, is right at your hands.

    Choose the hard road, you’ll never regret it.

  • Life without a mobile phone

    I have to be completely honest. I still own a mobile phone. I just don’t use it in the traditional way anymore. I turned my mobile phone into a superior portable educational device. It’s my omni-university that enables me to learn wherever I go; and to create whenever I want. But what’s really important is this…

    I deleted all distraction apps from my mobile phone. I deleted the email app, all social networking apps, instant messaging services and basically all other things that are nothing but constant distractions (you can probably see the pattern that they’re all communication apps). I even changed my phone number and only a few people have it (my mom and my girlfriend).

    I did it as an experiment. I’m a big fan of technology, but also an equally big fan of technology detox and regularly taking time away from screens. Too much of anything becomes toxic, and today you can find screens shining some kind of a distraction at you on every single step you take.

    I was very careful with mobile distractions before. I made sure not to use too many IM apps, to have all notifications turned off, I scheduled daily do not disturb hours, especially when working in the flow, I tried to turn my social networks into an interesting news flow and I made sure I had educational apps on the first screen.

    Every month or so, I also did a revision of which apps I was using and which ones I wasn’t, reorganized my screen, cleared the digital clutter, and always tried to make sure that I use the mobile phone to my advantage, not as a burden preventing me from thinking and creating in peace. After every such reorganization, there were fewer and fewer apps that presented distractions.

    But now I decided to take everything a step further. As an experiment. Like Louis C.K. did.

    What happens when you live without a mobile phone?

    The first few days after I deleted all communication apps, I was very confused. I felt kind of lost. I unlocked my phone, but there were no notifications, no communication apps to open, nothing to kill 2 minutes on just to see what’s happening, no one to connect to.

    The urge to reinstall the apps was huge. For the first few days, I hated the experience. I felt like an addict without his shot. Even though it wasn’t easy, I decided to persist with my decision, as crazy as it sounds.

    And after the first few days, on the fourth day, to be more exact, something magical happened. I got more relaxed. Some of the tension was driven away. A very subjective assessment would be that I got 20 % more relaxed, which is a lot.

    After a few days without my phone, I suddenly started to feel much more relaxed.

    There was no need anymore for me to look at the phone every 3 minutes and check if there is anything new. Unlock the phone, open apps one by one – mail, Facebook, LinkedIn etc., spend a few minutes on every app, lock the phone. A few minutes passed, repeat the loop, unlock the phone, open the first app, and so on. Like a robot.

    Suddenly I didn’t care about the notifications anymore. Suddenly there was no need to start the unproductive activity loop around 300 times per day. Yes, 300 times per day is the number of times that the average smartphone owner looks at the screen.

    By ditching the phone, a big part of the brain fog also went away. I could feel more connected to myself. I gained the ability to think better and more clearly. Creating in the flow, knowing that nothing could really disturb me, and that there was no need to check for new notifications led me to a whole new level of focus and creativity.

    It’s magic, I tell you. It’s the real life. It’s the good life. You probably heard the expression that no one on their deathbed ever said “I wish I’d spent more time at the office”. I think this has become completely outdated. Now the saying should be:

    No one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time checking notifications on my mobile phone”.

    Feeling connected to other people

    The primal human need is to feel connected to others. Ironically, the most distracting apps are communication apps. You have a need to feel connected to people, but on the other hand, apps that enable you to be connected with people from all over the world are the biggest distraction.

    Well, to be honest, many times these apps are also real work. Email can be real work. Slack can be real work. To get anything done, you have to communicate with other people, from teammates to all the stakeholders. No one can succeed alone on this planet and most things you’re trying to achieve in life include dealing with people. No piece of art can thrive without a proper network.

    You must be in touch with other people to be happy. And you must be in touch with other people to get work done. And technology is a great tool helping you with that. That’s a fact. But the problem is that only with self-discipline, it’s hard to set limits for when and how to use technology.

    Imagine yourself sitting in an office, working on something important. You know you do the most productive work without any distractions. You may even tolerate a distraction or two doing a few hours of work, either someone calling you or stopping by in your office.

    Now imagine someone stopping by in your office every 5 minutes. You’d go nuts. But that’s what technology does in your life. As a leverage and accelerator, it multiplies the number of distractions. There are no real-life limits in the technology world. And because you have to feel connected to other people, it’s addictive as hell, and there is no way you can manage all this only with self-discipline.

    Without a mobile phone

    Being one step ahead of technology

    You definitely want to use technology to your advantage. And you definitely want to live real life, not a fake digital life full of distractions. You surely want to be connected with people, professionally and personally, but you also want the time to think, reflect and create. You want to be and feel alive.

    As mentioned, it’s almost impossible to achieve that with self-discipline. The drug is just too addictive. Thus the only sound solution is to have a set strategy and system that enable you to enjoy the best from both worlds – real life and digital life.

    I need email to get work done. I need the IM app to chat with people from all over the world. I need social networks to distribute my content and feel the pulse of the world. But I don’t need to check my email every 5 minutes. I don’t need 10 different mobile apps blinking notifications all the time.

    To set a proper system and have the best from both worlds, you have to know yourself well, especially when you can stay disciplined and what are your weak spots. You can’t just be reactive and hope for the best.

    You have to be proactive, you have to be one step ahead of technology. You have to constantly improve the system, and experiment with new ideas, setups and ways to organize yourself. Kaizen (philosophy of constant improvements) is endless. There is always a way you can improve your productivity, happiness and how you use technology.

    Here is how I am one step ahead of technology

    My current system is that I check email and social networks only twice a day (on my desktop computer). Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I reply to every email with the shortest response possible. I also follow all other top email productivity tips. That’s just enough so I don’t lose the world’s pulse, can use all the benefits of technology, and don’t get distracted too many times.

    I turned my smartphone into an educational device. I read books on it, blog posts, listen to audio books and podcasts, use Lynda and different MOOC apps like Udemy. I also have a few apps for creating and writing and managing my blog. It’s my real productivity and educational device.

    I know that I have the advantage of being in monk mode, so I can experiment a lot and I don’t need that much communication with people. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t improve the way you use technology and set a superior management system and some strict limits to also live the real life, not just the digital one.

    That’s what’s best in life at the end of the day. Listening to yourself, your thoughts and your needs. Creating in the flow. Meeting with someone you want to deepen the relationship with and actually talk without looking at your mobile phone a dozen times. All these things make you alive, and stop you from being a zombie.

    And technology is only a tool, leverage to help you with that. It’s up to you if you’re the master of technology or technology is mastering you. When on your deathbed, you definitely won’t regret not hitting one more like. But you might regret not putting down your phone and living the real life.

    Life experiment ideas

    Here is some simple homework I suggest you do. Spend one weekend completely without a mobile phone or any other screen. And if you’re quite a nervous and anxious person, consider if you could live without a smartphone. What do you say to being 20%+ more calm every day?

  • There are only two types of problems

    There are only two types of problems you can have in life – the real ones and the sweet ones. Well, I’m exaggerating to make a point, but it’s not far from the truth. These are the two extremes that you can find yourself in, and each brings a completely different set of problems.

    Here are examples of the real problems and the sweet problems:

    Having no money or having too much money. Getting no attention from the opposite gender or getting too much attention. Not training at all or simply training too much, because you’re addicted to it. You’re either too happy and can’t get drunk enough on life or you’re sad every day.

    Balance is what everyone should absolutely strive for, but that isn’t how the world works. Everything accumulates and everything concentrates in life.

    Wealth accumulates. Fame concentrates. Happiness consolidates. Success brings success. The minority of people at the top get most of the sexual, media or any other kind of attention. And vice-versa applies. Health problems multiply. Financial problems can easily enlarge. A collapse in one area of life usually also collapses other areas.

    Two problems in life

    Let’s go into the details of different life areas to find additional arguments for the “two types of problems” statement.

    Health

    Year after year, you see the same people in the gym. In January, a few new people join, but February stabilizes again with the newcomers dropping out.

    Rarely does a new nutcase come who is persistent enough after January or any other first month of training. And even then it’s usually someone who changed their gym or someone, rarely, very rarely, who really decided to do something for their fitness life.

    The hard, real problem is faced by people who don’t do any sports at all. They have poor aerobic and anaerobic performance, maybe they’re even getting fat and their posture weakens, and soon that brings a much lower quality of life with many health problems.In the gym

    The problem of the other group, the group with the sweet problems, is spending too much time in the gym. Their problem is that they get addicted to training. They just can’t stop.

    But with the sweet problems also come many benefits – better health, better looks, usually a more thriving social life with the gym buddies, and so on. As long as you make sure you don’t get injured or burn out.

    It’s no different with the diet. You have people who pay way too much attention to what they eat, when they eat, how much they eat etc., and people who don’t bother at all with their diet; and they aren’t necessarily fat. They just eat the standard diet.

    The problem of the latter is not paying any attention to the diet, and the problem of the former is feeling guilty and beating themselves up if they eat a small piece of chocolate.

    But if you’re in the group that pays attention to their diet, you probably enjoy way better health (if you are not really over obsessed). The benefits of paying close attention to your diet are huge, from much higher levels of energy and a better‑looking body to avoiding common diseases like diabetes, caused by excessive sugar consumption.

    When you have to face sweet life problems, you’re enjoying many benefits at the same time.

    Wealth

    Wealth is the most obvious one. The majority of people don’t have enough money. They’re drowning in debt and live from month to month. And that’s around 80 % population or even more.

    Wealth concentrates

    Than you have the richest few percent. One really rich individual, I don’t remember who, said that you’re really rich when it’s impossible to count all the money and assets that you have. The problem of rich people is too much money.

    They have no idea where to invest, because good investments are rare. They have to face “sweet” problems of where to put their money so they don’t make huge losses. It may be a sweet problem, but it’s still a problem. But when you’re dealing with that kind of problems, you can also enjoy life with the money you have or do a lot of good with it.

    To me, that was quite an awesome realization. You can have a problem of having too much money. Is that even possible? Well, yes it is.

    Attention

    I think you probably vividly remember the times in primary or high school when 90 % of the guys/girls were in love with that one person of the opposite gender. That definitely isn’t fair distribution. One person takes the majority and the rest get almost nothing.

    90% of the girls in my class were in love with one single guy. Unfortunately that wasn’t me.

    The same thing happens with attention as it does with health and money. In the same way, you can have two problems in life – no attention or too much attention. Fame concentrates, because beauty is a rare thing given only to a few. It’s just how it is.

    Get yourself on the right side

    Well, one thing is for sure – you don’t want to have the real problems in life, you want the sweet ones. You want to put yourself on the right side of the equation, where success starts to accumulate and brings even more success into your life.

    You want your health to flourish, you want your money to make more money, and you want to take good care of yourself so your charisma can be seen from a thousand miles.

    It’s not about greed. You have to be healthy in order to provide value and create. Health is your greatest asset. If you’re ill, others have to take care of you. In the same way, you don’t want to be drowning in debt and deal with the anxiety that comes with it.

    You want to have enough resources, so you can enjoy life and, even more importantly, invest in your ideas and other ideas that are making the world a better place. And you want enough attention so you can more easily connect and create with other people.

    The right question is not why things are as they are, but what you can do about it.

    When you start taking good care of these life areas, you can soon find yourself in a much better position than you hoped, because of the accumulation and concentration rule. But you don’t have to be greedy and keep it all for yourself. You can be satisfied with good enough goals and you can share your surpluses with others. You can do so much good when you have a lot and you’re in the position of power.

    The hard road becomes easy with time and the easy road becomes hard. The hard road is the one that leads to sweet problems in life. The easy road is the one that leads to real problems in life.

    Real problems that lead to you being poor, ill or forgotten, where you are nothing but a zombie. Real problems only grow bigger if you don’t pay any attention to them, and sweet problems start appearing when you make positive changes in life.

    BTW, want to know how you get yourself on the right side of the equation? Well, follow the formula of massive success.

    Regret Minimization Framework

    It’s not easy, but it’s not that hard either

    The purpose of this article is to show you the other reality and open your mind to the abundance mindset.

    People have problems with having too much money, not knowing where to invest it. Imagine, having too much money. People really have problems with getting too much attention, when everybody wants to be their friend or lover. And they aren’t only supermodels.

    With the right life strategy, hard work and smart work, you can also have all that. Even more, your duty is to get yourself into the abundance state and then do good with the resources you have, be it health, wealth, relationships or anything else. You are here to create, experience and enjoy life. You need resources for that.

    And it’s not rocket science. Exercise. Pay attention to your diet. Develop your personal style and charisma. Provide value to the markets, something that is in great demand and short supply. Be more of a producer than a consumer and don’t buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like with money you don’t have (debt). Build deep and honest relationships. Become the best version of yourself and share your surpluses to leave a better world behind.

    Trust the process and you will get yourself on the right side of the equation.

    There’s a small step that can take you back to the wrong side

    The last thing worth mentioning is that sweet problems can turn into real, hard ones really fast. One bad investment too many and you can find yourself on the wrong side. One push too hard in the gym and you may be down with an injury or a burnout.

    You have to be smart when you’re at the bottom, when you’re climbing to the top and when you’re at the top. Things never get easier; you always have to get better. And you have to know how to manage your massive success and not go crazy (according to the success formula).

    Always remember that we know the comfort zone, the learning zone and the panic zone. And we know good decisions and bad decisions. No matter how successful you are, these three zones always exist and the probability of making bad decisions in the panic zone skyrockets. Even if you’re super rich, super healthy or super famous, many of the panic zones still exist.

    You most often enter the panic zone by being clueless, taking too much on yourself, becoming cocky and not following or stop following a carefully orchestrated process – the process of taking calculated risks, setting a superior strategy, working as smart as possible and, last but not least, investing daily hard work to be on the right side of the equation.

    Which one of the two types of problems you want to deal with?

    I am sure the answer is with the sweet ones.

    Work hard so your real-life hard problems will become the sweet ones – like having too much money or getting too much attention or whatever you want.

    My current sweet problem is that I have too many things in my reading queue and too many ideas for what to write and share with you. It’s a sweet problem and I like it.