self-discipline

Process versus event
There are two ways to get the things you want in life. One way, the very easy one, is that someone gives it to you. You inherit it, you win the lottery, you get lucky, your family or someone else simply gives it to you. You may have gotten good genes, you may have been born in a rich family, you may fall in love with the right person right away, you may have been born with good looks or intelligence. There’s nothing wrong with that, but almost nobody on Earth is born with all their big desires fulfilled; and if there were no other way of getting the things you want, the world would really be very unfair.

That’s why we know the second way of getting the things we want in life. It’s called following a carefully orchestrated process. We can give different names to the thing you want, we can call it your endgame, your desired outcome, the final event or simply event. But to come to the event you want, process comes into play first. If you don’t respect and follow the process, it’s most likely that there won’t be a final event for you.

The sad truth is that most people want the big events in their life without investing into the process. Most people look at the few people who were born lucky and feel sorry for themselves, wondering why they aren’t that lucky in life; even more: they see people who put all their effort into the long process as lucky. They see success, but they refuse to see years and years of hard work and the vigorous process that successful people have followed.

As a consequence, people get mad at life as if life owes them something. But life owes you nothing, it was here first. Disregarding the process and giving away your personal power means giving away your potential to live a full and quality life. It means giving up your desires and dreams.

You should remember two things. The first is that you’re never given a wish or a desire without also being given the power to make it come true. And the second thing is that life rewards those who master its rules and respect the process.You have to work hard for what you wish for.

But it’s also true that following and respecting the process isn’t easy. You need a long-term view. First, you need to put in the effort and you only reap the rewards after a long time of investing. Following the process takes discipline, stamina, persistence, resilience, fast learning, competitive mind-set, smart work, hard work and much more. It’s only after years of hard work that the rewards and the events you wanted follow.

The events you want in your life

Having desires and needs is in the human nature. It’s in your nature to want things in life, especially avoiding pain and striving towards pleasure. It’s in our bones to progress, evolve, achieve and experience life as much as possible and be happy. It’s true that happiness has more to do with our inner state than outer rewards, but we still need achievements and good events to happen to us. You need to respect your own desires and needs.

Here are the events most people (90 %) want in life:
- Health: To have a ripped body and be fit
- Relationships: To fall in love, have the spouse of your dreams and many honest friends
- Money: To get rich or be financially well off
- Career: To be respected and promoted, to have a good job/business
- Competences: To be really good at something and contribute to the world
- Emotions: To be happy and strong
And here are the most important facts of life:
- Having a ripped body is the final event, but to get fit, you must first follow the process
- Falling in love with the right person is an event, but to get to that, you must first follow the process
- Getting rich is the final outcome, but to get wealthy, you must first follow the process
- Getting promoted is your endgame, but first you have to follow the process that will lead you to the promotion you want
- Being good at something is the final event, but before that, you have to invest into the process
- Being a happier person is an event, you can’t just decide to be happier, you must first follow a specific process to get there.
All these are final events you probably want in life, at least some of the outcomes you might desire. Being aware and knowing what you want in life as clearly as possible is very important and the first step towards a better life. But after you know the events you want, it’s time to follow a carefully orchestrated process. As I already mentioned, the process is usually the thing that creates the events and final outcomes that most people see as luck.

An interesting fact to mention here is that the same philosophy is the foundation of the lean start-up methodology. To quote Eric Reis, father of the lean start-up movement: “Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Start-up success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.” The same rule applies to all other areas of your life.

The process

Let’s say that again, so you’ll really become aware of it. The process is the overnight success that comes after years of hard work. It’s the effort you put in that leads to the results you want. The process requires discipline, sacrifice, commitment and delayed gratification. The process is your sweat and tears, it’s the life’s test of whether you really want something badly enough. Because if you really want something badly enough, you’ll always find a way, if not, you’ll always find an excuse.

In most cases, the process consists of:
- “Bottom lines” or core of the matter
- Educating yourself and levelling up your skills
- Searching and experimenting to find the right thing for you, your fit
- Identity shift and changing your inner world
- Building a superior strategy with all your creativity and strategic thinking
- Regular adjustments, staying flexible and constantly innovating
- Choosing the right environemnt
- Putting in smart and hard work for years (usually three to ten years)
- Constant improvements and adjustments
We can divide the process elements into five phases that are called empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue and scaling. More about the phases in some later post. But now, let’s look at the process elements in a little bit more detail.

First are the bottom lines. The bottom lines are simple, in most cases eternal, truths about life. They are the core guidelines for what to do, you only have to find your own way for doing it. Here are the bottom lines for the most desired things in life:
- Health: You have to exercise (aerobic, anaerobic) regularly and mind what and how much you eat
- Relationships: Mutual value added that has to be in balance, you have to meet enough people
- Money: You have to spend less than you earn and invest the difference or build your own business
- Career: The more ambitious career you want, the more people you have to impact (preferably in a positive way), fighting for a cause or providing and delivering the value people want
- Competences: To be an outlier in life, you have to invest 10,000 hours into something
- Emotions: To be happy, you have to increase your capacity for love and your feeling of self-worth
The bottom lines are very simple in theory. There’s no need to complicate them more than that. The problem is that there are unlimited ways of discovering these bottom lines; and everybody has to find their own way.

Although there are many ways to achieve bottom line results and that can be quite confusing, there are also some other general rules about how to follow the process and what to do.

First of all, you have to educate yourself and level up your skills. No matter what you want to do or achieve in life, acquiring and applying knowledge is power. Go straight to the best resources and study them carefully. In the information age, we have an inflation of information, and most of it is shit. A copy of a copy of a copy.

Don’t just consume information, go for the best knowledge and apply it to your life. Read constantly, keep talking to people who are smarter than you, and never stop educating yourself. And applying knowledge in your daily life.

Nevertheless, no matter how much knowledge you acquire, no matter how many role models you study, you must find your own way to success. We are all different. Something else works for me than it does for you. Thus you must search and experiment in life to find the winning combination for you only. Life is like a puzzle, you have to build your masterpiece for yourself. You have to be you, since everybody else is already taken.

After you find your fit, hard and smart work follows. Making an identity shift and changing your inner world. Using all your creativity and strategic thinking to build a superior strategy, which should then be your own personal system that leads you to better odds for success. Making regular adjustments and staying flexible. Putting in smart and hard work for years. Constant improvements and adjustments. You have to focus yourself, you have to push yourself, and you must never give up.

Sooner or later, the process will lead you to your final outcome. The beginnings are usually the hardest. You first have to set strong foundations, but you’re also doing something new, something you’re not really good at. In the beginning, you may even be surprised about how much innovation and effort it takes to achieve an outcome you desire. But remember, every master was once a disaster.

When you see your first early wins after starting to follow your process, you’ll get more motivated. Your effort will accumulate, your skills will level up and you will see your progress clearly. Remember that with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road usually becomes hard.

It usually takes from three to ten years of following the process each day to really achieve the final outcome. During the process, there are always setbacks, disappointments and obstacles. They are like little tests to see whether you still really want something badly enough. Sometimes you have to take one step back to take two steps forward. Sometimes your progress slows down. But you don’t have to be afraid of slow progress, what you have to be afraid of is giving up.

Never give up, always trust and follow the process. Without the process, there is no final event.

There’s another important thing. If you skip the process, you won’t really enjoy the event as much as you could. If something is given to you, you don’t respect it as much; and even more: you don’t evolve, your skills don’t level up, you don’t improve and become a better person. Following the process has many other benefits besides achieving the desired final event.

Things that influence the process the most

There are, of course, many things that influence how fast you can go through the process and how much time it will take you to get to your final event. Here are the six most important things that influence the process and that you have to take into consideration when building your life strategy.
- Your starting point – The worse your staring position is, the longer the process will probably take.
- The resources available to you – The more resources you have available, be it inner (intelligence, skills, stamina, knowledge…) or outer assets (money, connections, brand, technology…), the faster you can go through the process. That’s why focusing and acquiring resources is so important in life, and why in the long run, success brings success.
- Market trends (financial, job…) – Market trends can accelerate or slow down or even stop your progress during the process. Never forget that markets always win, take them into consideration very carefully. Changes create new winners.
- Your environment – From your country, company and spouse to your friends and colleagues. You’re also the product of your environment. Make sure that your environment supports your process and that it’s possible to achieve your desired outcome in the environment you operate in.
- Creativity and innovation –. On your individual path to success, you always have to invent and create new things. There’s no successful process without good and creative ideas. If you find yourself stuck, you have to innovate your way out.
- Rituals and habits – To follow a specific new process, you need a new reward and value system in your life, with new rituals and habits. The more flexible you are and the faster you can upgrade your thinking and introduce new rituals and habits into your life, the faster you’ll start following the new process.
Different speeds in life

A very useful concept in life to understand is that you don’t have to do everything with the same speed. Sometimes going fast means being the least productive at all. Knowing how to slow down enables you to enjoy life more, build a better life strategy and, in the long run, allows you to be even more productive. The concept of using different speeds in life is important in personal as well as business life.

Different speeds in your personal life

There are things in life that you should do extremely slowly and there are things you should do extremely fast. The measurement for that is pretty simple. The more enjoyable an activity or a person is, the more your senses are engaged, the slower your pace should be. In situations like that, we’re unproductive if we rush, because we’re simply missing life. Stopping in the moment, engaging all the senses and enjoying life to the full is the most productive thing we can do sometimes.

You can throw a tasty meal into yourself, just to make sure you’ve eaten something, or you can slow down, be grateful for the food, taste every bite and enjoy your meal to the full. You can just spend some time with your kid/spouse because it’s expected of you, or you can slow down and really pay full attention to a person with your body, mind, emotions and soul. You can just climb the mountain to conquer it or you can stop at the top and really enjoy the view.

There are also things in life that you should do extremely fast. There are things in life you should automate. There are things in life you shouldn’t give any attention to at all. You should still do everything professionally and as it should be done, but you should make sure that it takes a minimal amount of your time, money and effort. Things like cleaning, bureaucracy, worrying, procrastinating etc.

We also shouldn’t forget about things that you should sometimes do fast and sometimes slowly, depending on the situation. For example, having sex or doing sports. Doing it at different paces brings a whole different life experience. Maybe you should introduce a day into your life when you perform things that you usually do fast slowly and vice versa, just to be creative and to experience life in a new way.

It’s not easy to slow down, especially if you were just doing something with maximum speed. Usually, you have to first consciously decide that you’ll slow down. It helps if you have, for example, a thing that you do as a signal to your body and mind to slow down, like taking five deep breaths. The second thing you usually have to do is unplug yourself from all communication devices and distractions. And thirdly, you have to trust yourself that everything will be okay, even if you slow down. You are not missing anything if you slow down when necessary – you start missing things if you don’t.

Different speeds in your professional life

Using different speeds is also very important in the business world. First of all, the concept of time management doesn’t only deal with managing your time, but also your energy. Thus it’s very important to adjust your speed to the energy level you have on a specific day.

Sometimes you have a day when you’re extremely productive, other days it simply doesn’t work. Forcing yourself to work at your maximum speed when your energy levels are low only means hurting and doing damage to yourself. In the long run, your productivity decreases if you push yourself too hard. You have to sharpen the saw from time to time.

It’s definitely true that it’s almost impossible to be successful and respected if you aren’t hard-working, fast, productive and you don’t deliver results. Execution skills, efficiency and speed are an important part of success in today’s fast moving and constantly changing world. But it’s also true that it’s not the hardest-working people who are at the top. A lot of research has shown that success doesn’t come only from being competent and hard-working.

You also need to work smart. If you want superior results in life, you need a superior strategy. But to build a superior strategy, you need to slow down, you need to take time, you need to think, you need to self-reflect on your actions. In situations like this, slowing down means going the fastest possible. What good is it if you are rushing in the wrong direction?

An important part of a superior strategy and success are also innovation and creativity. If you want to be successful, you have to be different and better. Creativity rarely happens when you’re rushing or you’re tense and in an anxious state. Creativity happens when you’re in the flow. Again, slowing down when you need to be creative may be the best move that brings you to the optimal speed.

Going slow in the search mode

When you’re in the search mode, you should definitely slow down. The search mode is about trying new things and reflecting on whether something works for you or not. To reflect well on something, you need to be in touch with yourself, you need to listen to your inner voice and to your emotions. You have to understand what a true part of you is and what inherited or social bullshit is. To do that, you have to go as slowly as possible. In the search mode, you play and you usually play relaxed and slow.

But when you find your fit and start executing, you must accelerate. Speed is very important for winning, if you use it at the right time. Nevertheless, when it’s time to go fast, you should also constantly have a feedback mechanism that tells you if you’re going into the right direction. When the feedback tells you that you aren’t going in the right direction, you need to slow down and go back to the search mode to do reflection, build a new strategy and adapt. You should be prepared to speed up and slow down as many times as necessary in life.

Driving through a day with different speeds

The most important part of everything we’ve talked about is becoming aware that going through a day is like driving, in professional as well as private life. There are moments when you have to drive fast because you are on a highway, there are moments when you have to wait in a traffic jam, there are moments when you have to refill the gas tank and there are moments when you have to stop, just to take in the amazing view or have a chat with an awesome person.

Don’t do everything in life fast or slowly. Don’t do everything in life with the same speed. Accelerate when necessary, or slow down. It will enable you to be much more productive, happy and successful. Different situations, different activities, different speed. Life is not a marathon or a sprint. Life is a combination of all kinds of running as well as taking a rest. For every activity you do, ask yourself: what is the optimal speed I should be going with?
Setting strong foundations
The higher the skyscraper you want to build, the stronger foundations you need. Without strong foundations, the skyscraper will collapse sooner or later. It’s the same with achieving your goals in life. The more ambitious goals you have, no matter in which area of life, the stronger foundations you’ll have to build.

The secret to setting strong foundations lies in Bruce Lee’s quote:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times.”

Building strong foundations is a process. It takes patience and time, and you must do all the boring work over and over again. The skyscraper that everyone admires is the final result. Without the process, there is no final result.

We all want the final result without the process. We all want our skyscraper without putting the effort into building it floor by floor and even more than that: we want it without setting strong foundations. Because it’s hard to set strong foundations. Extremely hard. But without strong foundations, without putting in the effort to build firmly floor by floor, there is no skyscraper to admire. At least not in the long-term.

The stories in the media may fool you. There are exceptions in the world. Hollywood actors, teenagers selling their start-up for millions, winners of talent shows etc. But Hollywood is also a city of broken dreams. Silicon Valley is also a place of broken business dreams.

There are thousands of failed start-ups for every one that had been sold, you can see millions of talented people on every talent discovery show but there are only a few who become famous. People love to read and watch overnight stories, because they give hope that it can be done without hard work. But hope is not a strategy, setting strong foundations is. It’s a strategy that brings overnight success, but only after years of hard work.

Setting strong foundations in different areas of life

It’s time to look at some practical examples.

If you want to have a fit and healthy body, you must build strong foundations first. No pain, no gain could be the worst advice ever, if you don’t have strong foundations. You can seriously hurt yourself. Believe me, I’ve experienced it.

Practical examples

Health

Going to the gym and pushing yourself to the maximum, doing hyper-intensive training, cross-fit or any other extreme form of exercise will break your body sooner or later, if you lack strong foundations. Your skyscraper will collapse and you’ll go many steps backwards.

Strong foundations regarding your body are strong core, flexibility, good condition, warming up and cooling down, doing enough stretching, preparing your body for effort, increasing the amount of weight you lift bit by bit, good posture etc.

Yoga and Pilates and planking and swimming and doing some sports in nature, like hiking, can help you build strong foundations. If you’ve been doing sports from a young age, maybe your strong foundations are already there; if not, you’ll have to start with the basics.

Wealth

The same goes for money. It doesn’t matter how much you earn, the thing that matters most is how much you save. If you can’t save money when you earn a little, you’ll never save money when you earn a lot. There’s a saying that if you can’t save money, the seeds of becoming wealthy are simply not in you.

That may be true, but it’s also true that you can always improve, grow and change your behaviour. So if you don’t have it yet, you can seed the seeds in greatness in you with self-improvement.

Look at the statistics for lottery winners. Most of them go back to being broke in a few years. Because they don’t have strong foundations. They start spending like crazy and have no money management skills. The large amount of money brings them happiness only for a short period of time. After they go broke, they’re usually less happy than before winning the lottery. Strong foundations are the ones that work in the long term.

To lay down strong foundations regarding money, you have to start small. Pay yourself first. When you get your paycheck, put a small percentage of it to your savings account. Sell stuff you don’t need, start curbing you impulse buying decisions etc. Read about different types of investments.

Become financially educated. Challenge your beliefs and money blueprint. There are many things you can and should do. Step-by-step, feeling proud of yourself for having a strategy and sticking to it.

Career

Let’s continue. If you want to have a promising career, you need to build strong foundation. Strong foundations are hashtag (#) shaped skills. You need to develop soft skills, like good communication skills, team work, networking skills and all other soft skills that are very important today.

You also need general knowledge about a specific industry you’ve chosen to create in and add value to. These are your strong foundations. Based on that, you need to become an expert and develop a specific skill for which there is a great demand on the market and a short supply of. If you have two different kinds of expert skills that you can combine, your career potential is probably even better.

Realtionships

In order to have good key relationships in your life, you need strong foundations. That means having good communication skills, a great capacity for love, empathy and so on. If you want to receive, you have to know how to give.

If you want to be empowered by other people, you must empower other people. If you want to be loved, you need to love yourself first.

Why setting strong foundations is hard

Setting strong foundations also means tackling all the problems that prevent you from building your beautiful skyscraper that everyone will admire. If you want to lay down strong foundations, you have to dig first. You have to dig deep and while doing it, clean all the shit out (but don’t confuse this metaphor with the saying that you have to stop digging if you are in troubles).

I’m talking about all cognitive distortions, fears, mental bugs and other inherited and imparted psychological crap we all have to face. Much as you have to build a strong foundation on the physical level to be healthy, so you have to build strong foundations on your mental, emotional and spiritual level to be successful in all other areas of life.
Set strong physical foundations (health)

Set strong mental foundations (creativity, analytical skills, knowledge)

Set strong emotional foundations

Set strong spiritual foundations (sense of mission, faith in life etc.)

Set strong relationship foundations
Setting strong foundations can also be fun, not only boring and straining. For example, you can improve your intellectual capacity by learning how to play an instrument, trying to draw, playing Scrabble, reading books, solving Sudoku or crossword puzzles, maybe you can learn how to program and so on. There are many ways for how you can train to lay down strong foundations; and you may enjoy some of these ways.

For finding exercises that you enjoy in life and that will help you to lay down strong foundations, you can use the search mode concept. You can try, you can experiment, you can reflect and listen to yourself, to see what suits you best.

Your skyscraper is never really finished

It doesn’t matter if you’re setting strong foundations, building your skyscraper floor by floor or fine polishing on the roof, you should know when you are in the search mode and when you are in the execution mode.

Even after setting the strong foundation, there are always new challenges in life, new setbacks, new obstacles, new ways of doing things etc., that require of you to go back into the search mode and learn. You have to continuously improve yourself. Your work is never really finished until your last breath.

Homework

Everything starts with a strong foundation. Use the search mode concept to help you identify all the activities that will help you lay down strong foundations. Execute it and build them to be as strong as possible. Strong like concrete.

Go back to the search mode and experiment and learn about what would be the best way for you to build the skyscraper as high as possible. Execute it, with agile sprints and by being in the flow. When you face a setback, go back into the search mode and by experimenting, discover new ways of building your skyscraper even higher. That is a superior strategy in life.

And remember, if you start to feel like your skyscraper is shaking, climb down, look at your foundations and strengthen them if necessary. Don’t let your life collapse because you’re greedy or want too much too soon. Don’t be afraid to progress slowly, be afraid to stop.

Now start digging and building concrete strong foundations in the area of life you’ve disregarded the most.
Push yourself
Your body is wired to save as much energy as possible. You’re wired to be afraid of the unknown and resist changes at all cost. You, just as everyone else, like safety and easiness. To survive. But you’re also a curious being. It’s in your nature to strive for progress and personal development. To thrive. Much like staying in your comfort zone is programmed in your genes, so is your desire to achieve your peak performance and experience new things.

Thus you have to keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. You always have to push yourself through your doubts and insecurities. You have to constantly push yourself to focus more and remove waste from your life. The moment you stop pushing yourself is the moment you stop growing. You should constantly improve yourself. You should always challenge yourself. You should always push yourself to become the best version of yourself.

To push yourself is one of the secrets of success

You have to choose between the easier and the harder way many times in life. In this context, Nike still has the best slogan: just do it, choose the hardest way, because with time, the hard way usually becomes easy and the easy way usually becomes hard. There is a simple reason why that is so; because by pushing yourself and constantly growing, you are becoming a better master of life.

Life rewards those who master its rules and know how to play the game.

The challenge

When it comes to pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, the biggest challenge is that with every push, you usually experience immediate (personal growth) pain and your desired results only come in the long term.

That is mentally very hard, especially compared to not pushing yourself. Not pushing yourself provides immediate pleasure and the punishment only comes in the long term. And we all somehow care much more about now than about what will happen in the long term.

Practical examples

Let’s look at some practical examples:
- Eating a doughnut gives you immediate pleasure. Extra weight comes sometime in the future, if you eat too much doughnuts on a day to day basis.
- Going to the gym requires discipline and a lack of comfort now at this very moment. But results only come later. There’s the immediate result of feeling better after a workout, but real fitness progress and a better body image come in months.
- Spending money on a gadget you want gives you immediate pleasure. Peeling off the plastic film of a new gadget. Mmm. You can deal with debt sometime in the future.
- Saving money means immediate renouncement for you. But pleasure from having savings and receiving yields only comes sometime in the future.
- Giving your kid a computer tablet instead of playing with them gives you more free time immediately. Your kid ignoring you only comes years later.
- Spending time and talking to your kid demands an immediate energy investment. A good relationship and bond only come later, over the years.
- Smoking a cigarette gives immediate pleasure. It takes years for cancer to come.
If you want to really push yourself, you need to have a long-term perspective. You have to see all the rewards you will enjoy later in life if you sacrifice a little bit today. All the little sacrifices you make today, and aren’t really that hard, add up in the long term and bring a great difference.

Little everyday sacrifices (which aren’t even sacrifices anymore after a while, but become habits) are the ones that bring about the difference between average and successful at the end.

Pushing yourself

Never forget that self-doubt and insecurities kill more dreams than failure ever will. You need to constantly push yourself through self-doubt and insecurities. You have to push yourself through shyness and laziness and fear. You have to push yourself when you feel like giving up.

Pushing yourself is not easy at all. Being out of your comfort zone is hard. As Richard St. John defines it, you have to face C.R.A.P. You have to face:
- Criticism
- Rejections
- Assholes
- Pressure
You have to be proactive out of your comfort zone, you have to take responsibilities, you need to have the courage to constantly manage fear – fear of failure, fear of success, fear of public humiliation; there are so many fears you have to manage.

But dear reader, life starts at the end of your comfort zone. Out of the comfort zone is the place where magic happens. Playing it safe is similar to locking yourself in a safe. And that’s not what you want.

Your deep desire to experience life to the full should be much greater than any obstacle preventing you from going out of your comfort zone. You should see the world as an endless playground full of possibilities, where you can experience and enjoy things. Most of them out of your comfort zone.

Here are some general rules to help you push yourself out of your comfort zone slightly more easily:
- In life, fears show you what you have to face, where you have to challenge yourself and where you can really grow.
- Surround yourself with the right people, from friends to business partners. Don’t surround yourself with people who go easy on you, but with people who are honest with you and push you to achieve your greater potential. Surround yourself with people who are a role model to you. Your key relationships are the ones that should push you the most to be successful.
- Be a problem solver not a victim. Think proactively not reactively.
- Ask yourself: “What would [x] do?”, where x can be Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Elon Musk or anyone you admire.
- Ask yourself: Am I thinking optimally in this situation? Am I doing the optimal thing and making the optimal decision regarding a specific situation? What is the optimal thinking and the optimal action in this situation? Thinking like that will open up a new possibility you should probably follow.
- Be aware that many fears and obstacles are just in your head. Most of them are just illusions stopping you due to bad past experience. It’s like having a bug in your brain’s “software”. Fix it.
Your life vision and mission must be greater than any problems you face. You’re born to do great things in life. Period.

Surround yourself with people who push you

Pushing yourself is hard sometimes. That’s why you need other people. That’s why you need the right surroundings and an environment that supports your potential, not letting you waste your life.

Remember, if you’re the smartest and the most capable person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Surrounding yourself with the right people is the best way to grow.

The general rule concerning people you should surround yourself with is:
- 33 % of people who are less capable than you, and push them and coach them
- 33 % of people who are on the same level as you, and push each other
- 33 % of people who are more capable than you, and make sure that they push you hard. You can call them your mastermind group.
People who should love you, support you and push you most in life

Don’t push too hard

We know three zones. The first one is your comfort zone. The second one is the learning zone. And the third one is the panic zone. By stepping out of your comfort zone into the learning zone, you learn, you grow, you evolve. By spending time in your learning zone, your comfort zone expands. That is how you become more competent and capable. You master life more.

Stepping too far out of your comfort zone and biting off more than you can chew is sometimes even more dangerous than being in the comfort zone. Being way out of your learning zone brings anxiety, stress and negative feelings. You enter the panic zone and the panic zone isn’t anything good.

In the panic zone, you wire your brains with a new stopping mechanism that sees everything out of your comfort zone as a big danger; it wants to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. If you go too far and suffer, next time you won’t go out of your comfort zone at all. Neither to the panic zone, nor to the learning zone. Your brain will make sure of that. You basically block yourself with new fears.

It kind of makes sense. If you take the wrong thing too far, you can even hurt yourself (physically, mentally) and find yourself experiencing a great setback. Speed kills, and it can kill your potential as well. So be smart. And that rule doesn’t apply only to extreme situations that put your life in danger, but to all different kinds of situations.

Taking on too much debt or too big business risks, investing in things you don’t understand, pushing yourself too hard in the gym when you are risking injury, travelling to an unsafe country without having enough travelling experience etc. There are numerous options that could put you in the panic zone if you don’t play it smart. Even being too busy at something can be a form of laziness.

Thus you have to be smart about going out of your comfort zone. You have to take it step by step. You have to be gentle with yourself and proud of every small progress. If you improve yourself for 1 % every day, that’s a lot. In a decade, that’s an enormous progress. That’s the long term view.

Therefore don’t be afraid of progressing slowly, only be afraid of completely stopping. If you aren’t growing, you are declining and that is such a waste. That shouldn’t be an option for you. But also don’t go to the other extreme. Think about the middle path. It’s a path between the comfort zone and the panic zone.

Find just the right amount of challenge to enter the flow state.

Being in your learning zone also enables you to be in the flow. If the challenge you face is too big relative to your skills, you experience only anxiety and thus no flow at all. And if the challenge is too small relative to your skills, you get bored. You can’t be in the flow if you’re bored.

In the comfort zone, you can only be lazy and bored. Again, there’s a sweet spot somewhere in the middle, where the challenge is just big enough that it enables you to grow and still doesn’t scare you. Then you are in the flow, then you are in the right learning zone.

It’s better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. One way of conquering yourself is by pushing yourself. Push harder, but not too hard. Make sure that you’re in the flow and in the learning zone. Now start pushing!
Focus
In today’s complex world, there are two very important concepts that bring real progress in life. The first one is called focus and the second one is called pushing yourself through doubt, insecurities and other C.R.A.P. – criticism, rejections, assholes, pressure; but only if you do it at the right time in the right kind of way.

You can find many misconceptions and different views in books and blog posts, arguing over whether focus and pushing yourself are important in life. Thus let’s look at a few different life situations and analyze them to clarify what makes sense and what doesn’t when it comes to pushing and focusing yourself.

In this blog post we will answer the question if you should focus yourself in life or not, or to be more precise when to do it?

Focusing on focus

Let’s start with focus is and what focus isn’t. Focus definitely doesn’t mean stifling your curiosity and experiencing different things in life. It’s also definitely wrong to focus on wrong things in life; it will only make you miserable. It’s also doesn’t make sense to focus at the wrong stage or time in life.

That is why the AgileLeanLine philosophy knows the search mode and the execution mode. In the search mode, focusing is a big mistake. In the execution mode, not focusing is an even bigger mistake. Knowing that, we can say that it depends on each specific situation whether you should focus or not.

In the search mode, focusing is a big mistake. In the execution mode, not focusing is an even bigger mistake.

When you are in the search mode, you’re looking for new ideas, you’re looking for yet unknown connections (that means creativity), and you are looking for things that fit your desired personal lifestyle. To do that, you shouldn’t be focused.

You should be curious to the full. You have to see the world as a playground where you can experience an unlimited amount of things. You should see the world as a blank canvas where you can create new things, experiment and have fun.

If you want to be creative, look for new connections, try different things, see the forest and all opportunities in life, you can’t be focused. You have to be open-minded, you have to see all the things that could be possible but are not yet done.

In the search mode, you are like a child playing, creating, trying, experimenting, learning and finding the right thing. Without any other focus except the goal of finding your fit.

You should only focus when you find your true fit

The situation completely changes when you find your personal fit, when you find the right thing. At that moment, you should focus hard.

Think about an artist who gets a new idea and becomes obsessed with it. Think about an engineer who closes himself into a room, orders pizza for several days and just works on his new masterpiece. Think how all your energy concentrates into building a relationship when you find the right person who is your perfect fit.

The power of focus is enormous. The reasons why are simple. The first one is that you have a limited amount of energy. Let’s say you have 100 units of energy.

If you focus your attention on one thing, you can put 100 units into it. If you are doing two things at once, it’s not 50/50, because you use let’s say 20 units for mental shifting, switching tasks, educating yourself, updating context, managing connections with people etc. and consequently you become less productive. You invest only 40 units into one thing. If you are doing three things at a time you invest maybe 20 units into one thing.

20 compared to 100 is nothing. 20 is achieving something in 2 months, 100 in 10 months.

The second thing is that when you focus, the spiral effect happens. Your focus gets you to first small successes much sooner. It motivates you more. Consequently you want to focus even more. That leads to even more success.

The knowledge you acquire in the area you’ve focused on accumulates and thus you see many new creative options and so on. With focus, you enter a positive spiral that accelerates your success. 100 units of your energy slowly start to multiply until your progress is really fast.

The secret to success in today’s world is speed at which you figure out what works and what doesn’t – for you.

Focus cuts through complexity

It’s pretty obvious that all industries and all different areas we know in life are becoming more and more complex. You need to be better and better to really master and succeed at something. By focusing, investing more energy into one thing and reaching the spiral effect, you can achieve more and manage complexity better. It’s as simple as that.

Lessons about focus you can take from the startup world
- Compare training one time per week to five times per week
- Compare learning how to program for 10 hours to 50 hours per week
- Compare reading 5 books per year to 25 books per year
- Compare saving 10 % to 50 % of your salary over the next 10 years with the belonging yields
- Compare taking your kid to something they like one or five times per month
The good news is that when you find the right thing, there is no question whether you should concentrate on it or not. You become obsessed with it, you want to master it, and you want to be better and better at it. Focus should come as naturally as possible.

When you find your fit, focus comes naturally.

It should, but it doesn’t always. Beginnings are always hard. It’s not that easy to find something so good that you want to focus on it. Thus the first step is usually the hardest.

Switching from searching to executing is not an easy task. You need to get yourself into a completely different state of mind. And working hard on something, facing all the obstacles, definitely brings to mind the thought that there must be more interesting and easier things to do.

The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence. But just because it looks greener, it doesn’t mean that it actually is. In reality the grass is the greenest where you fertilize it the most.

In life you have to focus and push yourself through C.R.A.P. – Criticism, Rejections, Assholes, Pressure. And learning curves.

Regular reflections can help you decide when to focus

As mentioned it’s hard to switch from the search mode to the execution mode and vice-versa. That’s why you need regular reflections. That is why you need flows and sprints and self-discipline.

With regular reflections, you can reset your focus. You can consciously decide when to focus and when not. And when you decide to focus, with sprints and flows, you can carry out and deliver results you’ve decided to focus on.

Practical examples

When talking about the search and execution mode, we have to know that the concept is the same in nature. Let’s look at an example. Human nature knows the animal instinct that drives you to find the right mate. It’s a force that pushes you to meet new people, talk with them, flirt etc. I don’t mean to sound too primitive, since it’s not only about brutal animal force – it’s also your curiosity for meeting new people and experiencing new things. But in this phase of your love life, you are in the search mode.

However when you find the right person, love comes into play. Your instinct, thoughts, energy, everything focuses on one person you’ve started to love. That one person becomes your whole world. You get into the execution mode, you want to deliver your best to this one person you love.

Finding the right person does bring focus, but it’s not only sunshine and roses. With every relationship crisis, focus is usually challenged and in those hard situations, you have to decide to either go back into the search mode and find a new person, or to try harder in a relationship and refocus yourself. If you decide to try harder, then discipline, reflection, better communication etc. must come into play. No relationship is perfect, but if there is will, you will also find a way to fix it. If there’s no strong will and passion, it’s probably better to go back to the search mode.

Your skills should be shaped in much the same way. You should be curios, explore different industries and develop different skills where you know you can add value and be good. After finding the right thing, you should focus you attention on it. When deep-diving and becoming better and better at a certain thing, you have to go back and work on broadening your horizons, to not only look at the trees but also the forest. When you think it’s time to totally change your career, you should follow the same process.

Entering the search mode first until you find your fit, then focusing yourself by executing and when you achieve a certain level of depth, finding a balance between curiosity and focus is the key to success.

The local maximum

In mathematics we know the concept of local and global maximum. It’s an important concept also for when to focus and when not. The biggest problem with focus is achieving the local maximum when there is a greater maximum somewhere else.

It’s about climbing the wrong hill. You can focus on climbing a hill that seems optimal at a certain time. But what if there’s another hill that’s much higher, meaning what if you could achieve much more if you were to focus your attention on something else.

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

One of the purposes of the search mode is getting to know the terrain better and drawing yourself a territory before you start climbing the hill. You should be in the search mode the first time you try to do something in life and again when you start to approach the local maximum.

Just before the local maximum, you have to go back into the search mode to find a higher hill to climb.

That’s not always easy, because sometimes you have to climb down before going up again. But this is how we grow, this is how we evolve. You have to always push yourself to new and new mountains in life. Not in a greedy but a balanced kind of way.

Homework

To sum up how focus optimally works:
- When you are searching for your personal fit, you shouldn’t focus, but instead be driven by curiosity and creativity. Your goal should be to find the right thing to be passionate about.
- When you find your personal fit, you should definitely brutally focus. Without focus, you don’t have the sharpness needed to really achieve the mastery level.
- When achieving a certain level of mastery, you should take a step back and look at the forest again. Maybe it’s time to broaden your horizons and focus on a new thing. Regular reflections will help you determine whether it’s time to focus even more or loosen the execution mode. That is how you become aware of your local maximum and higher hills to climb.
And…
- After leaving one local maximum behind and focusing yourself on a new thing in life, you should creatively look for new and yet unknown connections between both fields you master (for example, if you are a personal trainer first and computer programmer second, maybe a health app is your new maximum).
- Last but not least is a general recommendation that if you want to focus better in every situation in life, the first step you should take is remove distractions from your life.
With the search mode, you outline your terrain. With focus, you start executing and climbing the chosen hill. The next step is pushing yourself up the hill and when you’re at the top, pushing yourself down and finding a new and even bigger challenge to conquer.

Know when to focus yourself and know when to push yourself.
Interested is not committed
There is a big difference between being interested and being committed. As the motivational author Kenneth Blanchard said: when you are interested in doing something, you do it only when it’s convenient; but when you are committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.

If you want to achieve your true goals in life and be successful, interested is not even close to being enough. You have to commit and discipline yourself to make progress on a daily basis. Yes, on a daily basis, not weekly or monthly; otherwise you’re are probably just wasting your time and not getting anywhere, if we’re being honest.

If you want to improve your health, you must put effort in this on a daily basis. Working out a few times per week, stretching, meditating, and eating healthy food. There is always something you can do to benefit your health day by day, even if you get ill or something.

Same goes for your closest relationships. It’s the same concept as watering plants. You can water a plant every day for months but when you stop, only a few days have to pass by before the plant starts to wither. You cannot be merely interested in having a relationship with someone, you have to be seriously committed.

Of course you can always find hundreds of reasons and excuses why you didn’t have time for something. And I trust you that the excuse was important. But the reality is that if you really want something, you will find a way, if you don’t, you will find an excuse. Don’t make compromises. Throw yourself in the water, start swimming and continue with the motion every day.

The key lies in quality not in quantity. Select only a few things you want to be really good at in life. A few relationships. A few really big goals. Make room in your life by suitably managing time. And then commit.

Interesting is the biggest enemy of lean life

In the lean start-up principles, when you are developing a new product and present your minimum viable product to a potential customer, interesting is your biggest enemy. You are looking for either extreme enthusiasm over your product or a quick no, even hate if you want. Getting feedback that someone is interested is misleading. It’s the worst type of feedback.

“Interesting” is the most misleading and the worst type of feedback.

People have a hard time saying no or not being interested. We feel that someone will be offended if we turn them down. How empathic we can be sometimes. That’s why it’s much easier to say that something is interesting, but deep down knowing that it’s not for you.

Everyone will say that you have an interesting product if you “torture” them long enough. But when they have to open their wallet, their empathy quickly goes away and we face hard reality. Actions speak much louder than words.

It’s the same in other areas in life. If you take your girlfriend to dinner and her reply is that food is interesting, it means it sucks. If you get a reply “I don’t like it”, you know where you stand. If you get a reply that it’s fuc*ing awesome, I love it, mmm… you know you have hit the target. “It’s interesting” will make you feel better, but actually you should know that you have to choose a better restaurant next time.

Ironically, you can do the same to yourself. You many times do things that are only interesting to you, instead of finding and doing things that are pure love and enjoyment and then really commit to them.

If you try a new sport and it feels interesting, it’s not really interesting. What you are looking for is a feeling of something like, “how cool is that”, “I want to do this every day”, “why haven’t I tried this before” and so on.

Don’t look for relationships, activities or people you are interested in. Look for pure love and enjoyment. When you find it, when you find your perfect fit in the search mode, it will be no problem for you to commit.

The mental shift from being interested to being committed

The key question is how to switch your attitude from being interested to being passionately committed. Here are some ideas how.

Make room for the important things in your life

The first (and obvious) thing you need to do is “make more time” in your life. If you want to do that, you have to let go of some other things you’re currently spending your energy on – people, activities and stuff. That requires saying no to people, saying no to things you are only interested in in your life, maybe throwing away some stuff that consumes too much of your time, and ignoring all distractions.

Less is many times more. You can be really committed in life only to a few things.

When you make some free time in your life, you have to make sure that you are emotionally and mentally focused in the dedicated time period. You have to be in the moment in order to be committed. You need a couple of hours where you are undistracted and focused only on that one thing that you are committed to.
- You are not committed if you text with others while being with your girlfriend/boyfriend
- You are not committed if you hang out on social networks while working on a project
- You are not committed if you gossip too much when going to fitness
- You are not committed to learning if you go to the fridge every five minutes
- Interested is not committed
Follow your True North

There is a simple, but very difficult trick in connection with being focused and present in the moment. As Buddha figured it out thousands of years ago, our mind is closely connected to our body and emotions. What we think is what we become. The best thing for a focused and peaceful mind are positive emotions.

You feel positive emotions if you are committed to the right things for you as an individual. We say that you are following your “True North” when you are committed to the right things. Then you can progress much faster, because you are much more calm, optimistic and productive.

Make zero compromises when it comes to following your True North.

Knowing all that, it is essential for you to choose the right fits in your life, and even more to avoid all unnecessary stress, conflicts, negative emotions, distractions and anything else that will drain your energy and has nothing to do with your True North. Energy is the scarcest essence you need for your personal and professional progress and commitments.

Just to emphasize how big of a destruction negative emotions can cause, remember that a few minutes of anger require the same amount of energy as a normal calm eight-hour long working day. So make sure you manage your time and emotions very wisely. It’s the only way you will have enough energy and mental focus to commit to things that you truly want in life.

You only get a limited number of fucks to give over your lifetime, so you must spend them with care. Mark Manson

Enjoy the things you do

It helps a lot if you see your commitments as fun, hobby and relaxation. As we said: you have to make a dead-serious goal and commitment, but it should not feel as an obligation or a chore, but more as the most fun part of your day.

You are definitely on the right path when you wake up every day and can’t wait to start doing all the things that you are committed to. That is how life should be. Waking up energized and excited, looking forward to all the activities and commitments.

The best mental attitude you can have is: “Nothing will get in the way of me and a few daily hours dedicated to [enter your commitment].” Nothing. Day after day. That is a clear sign that you have successfully made the transition from being interested to being passionately committed. Look for the same thing in other people. Deal and spend time only with people who are committed, not people who are interested.

A story about how interested is not committed

There is a quite famous Pig and Chicken fable about being committed not only interested. Here is how it goes:

A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.

The Chicken says: “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”

Pig replies: “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?”

The Chicken responds: “How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?”

The Pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved!”

That is the difference. Love and commitment are your friends on the road to success. You can move on and learn from quick no’s. You can be super happy if you get a yes. But interesting is your biggest enemy. Interested does not equal committed – that goes for all the people you interact with and so does for yourself.

If people don’t see you kind of obsessed with your goal, you are definitely not trying hard enough.

The key takeaways

Here are the key takeaways from the article and the Pig and Chicken story:
- Don’t be only interested in things, find a few goals that you are really committed to
- You know when you are committed to something when you put in the effort on a daily basis
- Make sure you commit yourself to the right things with searching for your fit
- To achive that you have to simplify your life and follow your True North
- “Interesting” is the worst feedback you can get, look for people who are committed as you are