Blaz Kos

success

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  • When your ego blocks your progress

    One day, I had to make a withdrawal on an ATM. I entered my PIN and the wrong PIN message appeared on the screen. I entered the same PIN, same message. I got a little pissed off and entered the same PIN the third time. The ATM took my card and I had to go to the bank the next day to get it back. Immediately after entering the wrong number for the last time, I remembered that my card had been renewed a few days ago and my PIN had also been changed.

    Here’s another story. I got a creative idea for acquiring traffic by using paid channels for this blog. It should have attracted a lot of visitors for a good price. I executed the idea, but it didn’t drive even nearly as much traffic as expected. So I threw in even more money. “It has to work, it’s such a good idea,” I thought to myself. It still didn’t work, so I threw in even more money. After the third investment with no return, I admitted to myself that the idea was, at the end of the day, not that good.

    “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” as the famous quote goes. But it’s really easy to say that. In both cases, I was so sure of myself, I was 100 % confident that I knew what I’m doing. There was no other option. Even after getting the first feedback showing me that something is not working, my ego overshadowed the facts. I was repeating the same thing and expecting different results.

    It’s good to feel alive, but it can also be painful

    First of all, wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s why the idea of the Agile and Lean life is not to make big risky bets based only on your assumptions, but to start with small experiments that show you the right way through validated learning. You minimize the risk as much as possible by making small steps and gathering feedback from your environment as soon as possible.

    Starting to follow the agile and lean strategy is quite a big mental leap. You don’t fall in love with your idea, person or anything else, and blindly follow it hoping that you’ll get lucky. You see everything you do in life as an experiment that will lead you to the outcome you want. You start small, you test everything and you stay as agile and flexible as possible. You know what you want to experience but you have no assumptions on how it will manifest. You let tests and experiments lead the way.

    The problem with staying lean and agile is that it’s extremely boring and difficult. Taking risks, having an idea, falling in love, being right, having a strong opinion… All this brings excitement into your life, makes you feel good about yourself and feel worthy. It’s fuel for your ego. But if you’re wrong and blindly follow your ego, disappointments may come sooner or later; and usually they do. All the highs become deep lows.

    Thus a much better strategy is to wait for an opportunity where the risk is low, but there are a great possibilities for a big gain. To do that, you need a different approach. You need knowledge, patience, stamina, insights, to be surrounded with the right people etc. To gain all that, you need to scientifically test, experiment, learn, understand and be committed to real progress while staying flexible. You have to do all the boring and hard stuff day by day. You have to admit to yourself that you were wrong almost after every experiment.

    Egocentric person

    Never let your ego block your progress

    The first big challenge for your ego is changing how you act in life. You should switch from acting out of your ego, meaning your assumptions, beliefs and convictions, to acting out of feedback that you regularly gather from your environment by performing experiments. It’s the best way to stay flexible.

    The second challenge is facing the results when data disprove your ego assumptions. The feedback you get from your environment is different from what you expected. It hurts. It seems impossible. It lowers your feeling of self-worth. You don’t feel so smart anymore.

    You entered the wrong PIN. Period. The campaign is not delivering any results. Period. She does not share your feelings. Period.

    It’s hard to face the fact that you’re wrong. It’s so hard to admit that the objective reality is different from your subjective reality, just because your subjective reality feels so real. That’s why you build illusions in your head. You also have a tendency to finish things that you begin. For example, you usually watch a movie until the end, even if it’s bad. Those are all reasons why you want to persist at things that don’t work. It’s hard to stop doing something that you’re so sure of and on top of that you want to finish what you have started. That’s why you need the search mode in your life – to start small, to gather feedback from day one, to fail fast and stop doing things that are not working.

    Here are some additional tips on how to deal with your ego:

    • Make sure you see validated learning as progress. Make sure learning feeds your ego, simply because you’re following a superior life strategy, you are gathering insights how to live a better life, more suitable for you, independent of your interpretation of the world.
    • Don’t get stuck in analysis-paralysis. Just write down experiments you’ll make and start gathering feedback from your environment.
    • Always question everything. Follow your curiosity more than your ego. Don’t ever let your ego prevent you from learning something new.
    • Have a system for when to persist at something and when to stop and try new things. Make sure you follow your system, and that your ego and your emotions don’t distract you.

    Tough decision

    When to persist

    The tough question is when to persist and when to admit to yourself that something isn’t working and you should leave it behind. It’s more art than science, but there are some indicators that can help you identify what the optimal thing to do is.

    In lean start-up, there is a rule that you don’t fall in love with your business idea, but you become passionate about finding the right solution for the problem your business idea is solving. By experimenting and gaining customer insight, you may find out that your idea was not that good, but you may also find a much better solution to the problem. You have a vision, you’re passionate about the problem to fix, but you stay totally flexible about how to fix it. It’s the same in your personal life.

    • Don’t fall in love with the idea that you’ll meet one person who will stay with you forever, be loyal to you no matter what, and everything will be perfect all the time; like in Hollywood movies. Fall in love with the idea that you’ll have honest and loving relationships with superior communication and extra contribution. The right people will come into your life.
    • Don’t fall in love with the idea of having a magazine cover body in three months. Fall in love with the idea that your body is a temple you must take care of. A temple that needs healthy food to function, regular stretching and exercising, and so on. Fall in love with the idea that you’ll take care of your body, and stay flexible about what it needs and when.
    • Don’t fall in love with the idea of an ideally paid job. Fall in love with an industry you really know you can contribute to, fall in love with the idea of developing your competences to the full and providing as much value as possible to the market. Stay flexible about how things will manifest. Maybe you can contribute much more value by being an entrepreneur or a freelancer.

    It goes the same for all other areas of life.

    Another rule in lean startup is to make a pivot when each additional experiment leads to less progress. In such a case, you hit a local maximum. Pivot refers to a fundamental change in your business strategy. You change direction but you stay grounded in your vision and learned facts.

    After knowing that and applying it to your personal life, there really is no more dilemma of when to persist at something and when not. It’s not about letting something go, but about redefining your strategy based on what you’ve you learned along the way. You still follow your heart, your vision, the things you want to experience in life, you just take different steps, manifesting it in a different way. You should fall in love with what you want to experience in life, not how it should manifest. Then there is no question of whether you should persist or not, just what your next step is.

    Here are some examples of that kind of thinking and their healthier alternatives:

    • The relationship didn’t work out, I’m never going to find the right partner. And I was so in love. I don’t want to fall in love anymore.
    • I had a great experience with a person, but we aren’t the right fit. I tried many things to improve the relationship, but everything led to the same result – fighting. Still, I’m grateful for the experience and I’ve learned that it’s not acceptable for me if my intimate partner smokes. It just bothers me too much and I become passive aggressive. I am keeping my heart open and my love capacity full for the next person I’ll spend a part of my life with. After my sadness of breaking up passes, I’m going to start making new acquaintances.
    • I’ll never find a job I really love. I sent so many applications, but I didn’t get any interviews. I guess I have to send out another fifty.
    • Sending out CVs doesn’t work. But I know I’m really good at marketing. I’m going to read one book about marketing each week, I’m going to go to all marketing meetups. I’m going to start a blog about marketing, I will send personalized creative presentations of myself and my skills to a few companies I really want to work for.

    But if you don’t stay flexible and you let your ego ground you in your subjective reality, you have a great chance of becoming a zombie and living a zombie life – where being a zombie means you invest a lot of energy into something with no or little progress. You get more and more depressed after each CV you send out. You hope that your partner will magically change, just because you’re in love. On the one hand, there is no growth and progress, and on the other, you’re consuming your resources and draining your energy. But that is a big waste of your precious life.

  • Do not judge – observe, notice and learn

    We would all like the world to be more similar to us. Because that would make it much easier to live in. The more your personal values are aligned with your environment, the better you fit in somewhere. The more your values are aligned with the values the world is currently respecting, the better off you should be, assuming you don’t face any other tough situations, like strong cognitive distortions.

    Let me give you an example. If you strongly believe in nationality and borders, it probably irritates you that both are becoming less and less important due to globalization. There’s a difference between your values and the values of your environment, and that causes friction. On the other hand, you may be a technology enthusiast and love the general priority given to technological advancement. Your personal values are aligned with what the markets respect. It’s the same with political and economic systems, global trends and other environmental factors. Since the world is becoming flat, all people can feel the global influence of values changing.

    But another important trend is also occurring. The world is becoming more and more diverse and interconnected. That’s a big benefit you should take advantage of. As the world becomes more tolerant and one big global market place, you can easily find communities with the same values as you. You aren’t alone or in a minority anymore. All you have to do is connect yourself online.

    Being able to connect with people sharing the same values as you without immigrating is a big advantage you should deeply respect. Even more: you should encourage diversity and let other people be who they are and connect with people and societies they most fit into. Variety is the spice of life, diversity makes life interesting. If you don’t see it that way, shifting your thinking in that kind of way will strongly enrich your life.

    From judging to observing, noticing and learning

    People are very forgiving towards themselves and judge others so quickly. It helps us feel our own importance as well as protects our values. Quickly judging others is how we try to shape the world to be more in line with our values.

    You can do a simple test. If you stand firmly for something, you can easily find people who will brutally criticize you publicly and even more cowards who will do it anonymously on the internet. Just look at the comments on anything published online.

    There’s nothing wrong with discussion, arguments and debates. There’s nothing wrong with showing data and describing the objective reality as closely as possible. But the fastest progress comes out of constructive debates, merging different views and out-of-the box experiences. Variety also allows people to live in different communities the way they want to, the way they want to experience the world.

    You can benefit from that in many ways. As Scott Fitzgerald nicely said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It’s the best way to learn, improve, innovate and expand your thinking horizon. Remember that in 1000 years, science will probably prove that almost everything we believe now is wrong, even though it’s currently scientifically proven.

    If you don’t agree with someone and start judging, you put your ego before learning something new. When you judge someone else, you judge yourself and thus you limit your thinking horizon. You see the world as black and white. Someone is wrong and you’re right. It’s called “all or nothing” thinking and it’s one of the most frequent cognitive distortions.

    Perceiving personality types embrace that kind of thinking more easily than judging types. But even if you’re a judging type of person, which you probably are if you’re extremely organized, you benefit a lot from going from only a judging personality to also observing and learning from different perspectives.

    Here are some ideas for developing observing and learning abilities alongside the judging mindset.

    • Let go of your ego. Never put your ego before learning something new, trying new things, understanding different views and expanding your horizons. It’s how you become a wiser, more aware and enlightened human being. Understanding different views and values makes you a richer person internally. You’ll be able to connect with more people and have more loving connections. Stop judging and start observing how people think, what they believe in and value, and why. Rather than feeling defensive or offensive, ask yourself why, five times if necessary.
    • Practice empathy. Judging most often means deciding what’s right and what’s wrong according to your own opinion, following a subconscious autopilot. But your opinion is a subjective reality and probably far removed from the objective one. In fact, no one understands objective reality, but the more angles we understand, the closer we are. Instead of quickly judging, walk a mile in the shoes of a person with a different view. Ask yourself why, try to think, feel and understand the different angles; and stay respectful.
    • Tolerance. Tolerance is one of the most important values of progress. If you want to improve in life, you have to be tolerant, you have to be open-minded, try new things, experiment, and accept failure. You can’t be tolerant towards trying and implementing new things if you’ve already firmly decided on everything. To build tolerance, you have to trust yourself more and you have to see that your values and beliefs are not threatened if someone else sees things differently. Disagreement isn’t being intolerant; but not respecting other people with different views is.
    • Positive energies. Brutally judging is what divides people and spreads hate. If we subjectively see something as entirely good and something else as entirely bad, there must be a fight between good and bad. But in reality, nothing is entirely good and bad, except pure evil. There are no black and whites, only different shades of gray. Don’t curse the dark, light a candle. Spread positive energies and be a role model for empathy, tolerance, love and integration. We judge because we’re afraid. If we’re loved, we don’t have to be afraid of anything. Love is the first thing that bridges differences.
    • Staying flexible. Being agile means being flexible and adaptable. The more fixed you are in your thinking and the bigger your fixed expectations towards life, the bigger the potential for your disappointments is. The world is definitely different from what you wish it would be. So you have to see it as a playground, a place with endless possibilities where you can put your life together as you want. You have to stay flexible to find your best fits, try new things and adapt, especially if the world is going in different directions than your current values. You only have one life, you don’t want to spend it bitter and angry and grumpy, just because you aren’t flexible in your thinking.
    • Data before rhetoric. Despite different opinions, there are things (systems, ideas etc.) that work better than others in a specific situation and in a specific environment. Every social circle needs an optimal structure for progress. But again, it’s not about judging, it’s not about arguing and fighting, but about scientifically proven facts. Always put data before rhetoric.
    Open Parachute
    Your mind is like a parachute; it only works when it is open.

    Don’t tolerate evil, be a hero

    Being tolerant doesn’t mean simply agreeing with everything. It’s about respecting people and having a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions, beliefs, and practices that differ from your own. It’s about an opportunity to expand your thinking horizon and let diversity of life exist, and enjoy it to the full.

    But no matter how tolerant and respectful and loving you are, there is evil in all of us. And that’s one thing you shouldn’t tolerate. You should understand it, you should be aware of it, you should study it, but you should never tolerate evil behavior. It can especially come out in three types of situations.

    • The first one is in all the people who were raised or born in hostile environments, like war, abusive families etc. A lack of love and healthy environment in the first few years of upbringing leaves a lot of psychological damage. People like this need professional help.
    • The second one is finding yourself in a system or a situation that brings out the evil in you. Once again this means situations like war, gangs, poverty etc. Situations that put people in fear for their own existence and fear of their needs not being met, wake up evil fighting spirits. They bring out the desire for dominance in order to gain safety and resources.
    • The third type are systems that aren’t transparent and where people think they’ll easily get away with hurting others. In situations like that, people’s desire to overpower others prevails. Evil prevails. Look at what anonymity on the internet does. That’s why we need more transparent environments, with an adequate reward and reintegration system.

    The more evil is tolerated, the more it grows and the stronger it becomes. So you shouldn’t tolerate hostile and harmful behavior in any community. Starting in your home, the company you work for and other societies you belong to.

    And secondly, we should all strive to build a better global system that will have zero tolerance towards evil and harmful behavior. Never get so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.

    As Philip Zimbardo suggests in his study of evil: “You must refocus away from evil to understand heroes. Heroism is when ordinary people do extraordinary deeds in certain situations. The very same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination, in those who become perpetrators, can also inspire the heroic imagination in others. Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary. The key to heroism is two things. You’ve got to act when other people are passive and you have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically.”

    Five things you can do to spread tolerance:

    • Act out of desire for prestige, not dominance.
    • Be tolerant, loving and respectful of people and diversity. Go home and love your family, love yourself and others.
    • Fight for a cause that matters to you, but fight as a peaceful warrior.
    • Don’t approve of evil acts and behavior. Report, inform, and don’t only mind your own business.
    • Contribute to transparency and integrity of the society. We’re going in the right direction, we’re living in the most peaceful times in history, we just have to keep up the trend, but be faster in rooting out poverty, domestic violence and other similar situations.

    Do not judge. Observe, notice and learn.

  • Free your mind with your own digital brain

    In order to innovate, create, improve yourself and enjoy life to the full, you need to be as free as possible. You need to be as free as possible on all four levels – physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Freedom simply means that you have the power to act, speak, or think as you want; and as you’ve probably figured out by now, we are more often slaves to ourselves than to anything or anyone else; at least as long as you don’t do anything that would be so stupid you end up in prison.

    On the physical level, flexibility, balance, strength and endurance bring more freedom and options. The better your take care of your body, the freer you are from being a slave to yourself. You can reach higher mountains, dive deeper into the oceans, have sex in more positions, do more sports, and so on.

    On the emotional level, cognitive distortions can be the ones keeping you in an emotional prison. Negative thinking very much correlates to negative feelings and negative emotional states. All four levels (body, mind, heart and soul) are connected, and more freedom on one level means more freedom on other levels.

    On the spiritual level, freedom means freeing yourself from expectations, attachments and fear. The greater your capacity for love is, the freer you are. You free your spirit when you realize that having a good trip is better than just arriving. You want to have a trip full of joy, happiness and bliss.

    On the intellectual level, you need to free your mind. One way of freeing your mind is taking control of it. There are only two options: either you control your mind, or your mind controls you. If it controls you, you’re on autopilot, which often leads to cognitive distortions and other mental errors. The best way to take control over your mind is to practice meditation.

    The second way of freeing your mind is getting to know yourself better with reflection. With regular reflection and by analytically thinking about yourself, your environment and your situations in life, you bring things that burden you from the unconscious to the conscious mind. The best way to do regular analytical reflection is to keep journal, and we’ll talk more about that later.

    The third way to free your mind is keeping your brain as unburdened as possible with unimportant things. There are several ways for doing that. One is to keep trivial decisions to the minimum. You have a limited daily cognitive ability, and every decision, thought or worry takes some of that ability away. Entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and the deceased Steve Jobs even go so far that they wear pretty much the same thing every day, just to keep more cognitive power for decisions that are more important than choosing clothes. You should automate as many things as possible, from what to wear, what to eat and so on.

    Another very useful way is to have your own “digital brain”. With a digital brain organized in the right way, you can free your mind from irrelevant information, you can store things for reference, write down ideas and so on. Not only do you have more cognitive power to allocate for the things that really matter, you are also much more productive and creative; because you don’t lose your ideas, you can find your references really quickly and connect different pieces of information better.

    Don’t get me wrong: having a digital brain doesn’t mean that you become lazy; you just don’t burden your brain with information that isn’t important in a certain moment or with an information overload. There is no way you can create if you only consume. Nonetheless, it makes sense to work hard on your intellectual capabilities. Reading, doing mental exercises, making new yet unknown connections, thinking out of the box etc., are all things that increase your intellectual capacity.

    Your digital brain

    Your digital brain is nothing more than an electronic system for note-taking, brainstorming and archiving.

    The structure of your digital brain should be pretty simple. You should write down or save everything you don’t need in a certain moment but may need someday, save your ideas and, of course, keep everything that helps you to organize your daily life. Below are the things you should store in your digital brain at the least.

    Journal, thoughts and reflections

    The first and most important thing you should keep in your digital notebook (brain) is your journal, especially if you don’t want to keep any paper and want to have everything digitalized. Keeping a journal could mean two things. The first one is actually keeping a journal, meaning writing down what you’ve experienced throughout the day, where you’ve been, who you’ve met and so on. Maybe someday, you’ll want to show that kind of a journal to your kids.

    But an even more important journal type is a journal of your daily thoughts and reflections. It’s about analysing and getting to know yourself, reflecting on your decisions and what’s happening to you and so on. It’s about becoming more aware of your beliefs, values, perspectives, thoughts, mood triggers and so on. Regular reflection is the best way to free yourself from emotional and intellectual burdens as well as to get to smart work, because you become more strategic, proactive and less reactive.

    The good thing about keeping a journal is that you can always go back, look at your epiphanies, cognitions and thoughts, and re-reflect on them. It’s how you grow and improve.

    Here are some types of documents you should keep in your digital brain:

    • Reflection journal – As mentioned, it’s a journal about you, making the unconscious conscious, understanding your motives, desires, frustrations and other psychological traits.
    • Emotional accounting – It’s about keeping a table to rationalize your cognitive distortions. You simply draw a three-column table, where the first column is the automatic negative thought (“I never do things right”), the second one is the type of cognitive distortion (overgeneralization) out of the ten different types mentioned before, and the third one is your rational response (“Not true, I do a lot of things right”). Keeping everything in one place helps you see how you’re improving.
    • Your life strategy – Your thoughts about your life strategy, from your investment and money strategy to your traveling plans, developing competences and so on.
    • Your optimal environment – Keeping thoughts about the people in your life, the situations you face as well as an analysis of your environment, such as your country, macro-economic trends, your office and home.
    • Minimums and maximums – It’s about setting limits in your life, the minimums and maximums you should achieve to keep the balance and different areas in life in check (for example, the minimum amount of times you should exercise per week or the maximum amount of time you should work on average each day).
    • Desired outcomes – Whatever you do, you should start with an endgame in mind. That’s the list of outcomes you want in life, how you’ll achieve them, what could go wrong and how you’ll adapt and adjust your strategy.
    • Personas – It’s a technique that can help you clarify what kind of people you want in your life and the kind of organizations you want to function in.
    • Personal improvement strategy – It’s a list of where and how you want to improve yourself and when you’ll do it. It’s not only a list, but a document with an important life strategic value. This is probably the most important list in your life and has a deep reflection benefit.
    • Personal SWOT analysis – It’s a good tool for identifying your strengths and weaknesses, and can help you make your personal improvement strategy.
    • Traditional journal – It’s also good to keep a regular journal, into which you write about things like what happened to you on a specific day, where you’ve been, what you’ve seen and what you’ve learned. You can just write a few bullet points in your reflection journal.
    • “Thankful for” and “proud of” document – The two documents you should definitely have in life is a list of things that you’re really proud of in your life, like your achievements, strong personality traits, good deeds and so on, and a list of things that you’re grateful for.
    • Other thoughts and reflections – You can also keep all other types of personal documents and your thoughts, like quotes, positive affirmations, messaging archives, personal e-mail archives, dreams, associations and everything else that strongly impacts your life.

    Cloud computing

    Tasks and lists

    The second thing you should keep in your digital brain are various lists. You don’t want to try to remember everything, and you don’t want to torture your brain to recall everything you have to buy in the grocery store or be mad because you’ve forgotten something. If you help yourself with lists in your daily life, you’ll have much more cognitive power at your disposal.

    Lists also help with one more thing, if you write them correctly. They help you with not feeling overwhelmed. The right way to do it is to have all kinds of lists that free you from anxiety and a feeling that there’s too much to do. You only keep one list (or board), showing what’s in process (to-do list) for the following week. With an approach like that, you try to focus on one weekly or bi-weekly sprint, and you try to live in the moment more.

    Here are some lists you should keep:

    • Your vision list – It’s a big list of everything you want to experience in life. It feels good when you look at a list that shows what you’ve already experienced in life and what else you want to live to see. It empowers you and helps you focus on the positive.
    • Your “maybe someday” list – There are some things for which you aren’t sure whether you want to experience them in life or not. You can keep a “maybe someday” list to prevent burdening yourself too much with all the things that exist in the world. If one day you decide that you want to experience something from this list, you put it on your vision list, if not, you delete it.
    • “Not to do” list and distractions list – You should keep a list of things you know you won’t do or don’t want to do in life. It’ll help you stay focused and say no more easily.
    • Being a minimalist list – It’s a simple list of things you don’t need anymore and plan on giving away, selling or dumping. If you don’t do that as you go along, you can keep a list and then do a cleaning every three or six months.
    • Reading list and wish list – A good list to keep is a list of books you want to read in life. Make sure that you cross a book off the list every two weeks, or at least one per month. You should also keep a list of things you want to buy and have. But think twice before making purchasing decisions.
    • Your shopping lists – Simply a list of things you should buy the next time you visit the grocery store.
    • Daily/Weekly To-Do list – You can have a to-do list, but I recommend visualizing your tasks with a Kanban board. If you don’t want to have a physical board in your life, you can keep it electronically. One way to do it is with a software application like Kanbanery. The other ones are notebook applications that also have post-it notes integration.
    • Other lists – You should keep all other kinds of lists in your digital brain, for example a weekly home cleaning and maintenance schedule, gift ideas, things not to forget, things to do with your spouse etc.

    Business and other ideas

    Your digital notebook should also be your brainstorming tool. You can get your business and other ideas (like ideas for blog posts, for example) randomly throughout the day and when you do, you should write them down immediately. We can quickly forget ideas, even if they’re really good. So make sure you write down every idea you get, bad or good. Noticing and identifying your ideas throughout the day will also improve the quality of your ideas in the long run.

    The second way is to take time and brainstorm. You should do that regularly, at least on a monthly basis. It’s how you keep your creative muscle strong. Having good ideas is an important part of success in life. The good news is that everyone is creative, you just have to practice enough.

    Here are two additional resources:

    Mind maps and summaries

    As you reflect on yourself, you should also reflect on the things you read, listen or see. For example, after reading a really good book, you should go through your highlights again, making a summary or a mind map of things that fascinated you the most. You’ll get much more out of it and you can go back and refresh your knowledge anytime. I do mind maps in the Mindjet MindManager and then save them in my digital notebook.

    Notes

    You should also keep notes in your digital brain, all kinds of notes. Notes from team and client meetings, classes, phone calls, sales visits, all other types of meetings, the conferences you attend and so on. The good thing is that you can send a note to all other parties involved to confirm everything you’ve agreed on. It’s part of good communication and it helps keep clarity.

    What you can also use are templates for different kinds of meetings or activities. For example, you can have a business meeting template. The purpose of a template is to first maximize the value of the meeting, making sure that the subject is clear etc. as well as to prepare and share the minutes faster.

    References

    You should also keep all different references and resources in your digital brain. The webpages you like, infographics, blogposts, articles etc. Things you’ve read and want to keep, things that you may need again someday and so on. I call my reference notebook Intelbox and I keep all kinds of useful information and good ideas in it.

    Documents and archive

    Last but not least, your digital brain should also be your document archive. You want to keep everything in one place, systematically organized and easy to find. It’s good if you can digitalize everything and keep a no-paper policy. I know it’s not always possible, especially when it comes to the government, but you should keep things on paper to the minimum. You should digitalize as much as possible.

    Since your archive will become bigger and bigger as you go through life, it’s really important to have things organized from the very beginning; you should also do regular cleaning and organizational updates. Your archive can be the place for storing your personal documents, business documents, bills, medication and medical records, etc.

    It’s also good to have different information you only need sometimes in one place, for example the tax ID number, clothing size, different home measurements (window size, quadrature…), manuals, and so on. You can also keep important phone numbers, insurance policy, a “what to pack” list for traveling and so on in your notebook. There are numerous ways of using your digital brain.

    Advanced uses of your digital brain

    Thanks to technology, applications are becoming more and more powerful. With multiple users, sharing abilities, extensions and synchronization across applications, there are many advanced ways of using your digital brain, either all in one application or with different applications synchronized.

    Here are some examples of using your digital brain in an advanced way:

    • Tracking your time
    • Tracking your finances and investments
    • Keeping a digital rolodex (scanning business cards and keeping contacts in one place)
    • Your weekly menu and different recipes
    • Tracking your calories
    • Your fitness and sports journal with a plan and tracking progress
    • Writing blog posts or your own book etc.

    Recommended applications

    I use the following applications to keep my digital brain:

    • Evernote – Evernote is an extremely powerful and popular notebook tool. It gives you everything you need to organize your digital brain. You can encrypt sensitive data, it’s synchronized across all devices and keeps a copy in the cloud, you have an extensive app market with a post-it extension, for example, and so on. There are also many templates available.

    You can easily enter data, for example capture websites, e-mail documents, synchronize applications, and so on. You can directly scan documents into Evernote, you can make audio notes, save pictures, easily share notes you write down and so on. There really is basically everything you need to keep your digital brain structured and organized. I strongly recommend it.

    • Dropbox – I keep almost everything in Evernote, except files. For my files, I use Dropbox, where I have a directory Intelbox and in it, all the different files I may need as a resource or reference one day. From free eBooks to presentations, papers and other materials. By using Dropbox, you can easily access and view files from all the devices you have. Sharing is also very easy.
    • Google Inbox – Another important part of my digital brain is my e-mail client. I keep an archive of my e-mails in my Gmail account. I try to keep it as clean as possible and I try to write a minimum amount of e-mail. I use the Inbox application, which really keeps things with e-mail productive and simple.
    • Other applications – I also use some other applications as part of my digital brain, for example Pocket, Mindjet Mindmanager, WordPress and Twitter. And I must not forget IFTTT, for keeping things as automated as possible. There are many other specialized apps on the market, but I recommend you to keep things as centralized as possible. Evernote is a good place to start.

    If you’re interested in organizing your digital brain with Evernote, here are some recommendations for further reading: How to organize Evernote for maximum efficiency.

     

  • How people fuck up their lives

    There are generally two ways how people fuck up their lives. Don’t get me wrong, I know that many people living in poverty without access to education don’t have options and are forced to do terrible things that don’t bring any good to them and others. But there are also many adults who have all the options and possibilities in the world and still end up fucking up their own lives or lives of people around them. It’s hard to answer why, but it’s very easy to see how.

    The first way is making one big wrong decision. You marry the wrong person. You take a big bribe. You drive drunk or tired. You cheat. You have a kid when you aren’t ready yet – materially or emotionally. You don’t exercise at all. You rob a bank. One big wrong decision can completely turn your life around, and make a mess out of it. So you should consider all big decisions very carefully and think about the long-term effect that they will have on your life.

    Fuck up your life with one big deciision

    The second way to fuck up your life is regularly making small wrong decisions. They’re called habits. You spend more than you earn. You drink alcohol every day. You stuff yourself with fast food daily. You don’t kiss and hug your spouse. You play Solitaire during working hours. You watch TV instead of reading. You go to a job you hate day by day. Small wrong daily choices accumulate until a crisis occurs. What you choose today has an impact forever.

    In both cases, the worst you can do is avoid the problem even once it’s obvious that you’ve made wrong decisions or are still making them. When you make wrong decisions, decisions that don’t lead towards your progress, improvement and positive (purer) energy, life will kick your butt sooner or later. You get close to bankruptcy. You fall ill or get injured. You’re on the way to divorce. You get fired. You get caught in the act. Once more, the worst thing you can do is to avoid your problems.

    For sure nobody can make good decisions only. After all, good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. But you have to kill the monster (problem) while it’s still small. If you run a mile away from your problems, they’ll only get worse and they’ll be harder to solve. Don’t stick your head in the sand and hope that the problems will go away. Even if they do, it will only be temporary, life will kick you again sooner or later, this time even harder.

    Fuck up your life with small decisions

     

    That’s how people really fuck up their lives. They wait, feeling powerless and like a victim, until it’s too late. Enough courage and a superior strategy with immediate action are the best things you can do to solve your problems when they occur. You have to make a series of good big and small decisions that prevail over the bad decisions you were making in the past.

    A very important fact you should also be aware of is that this works the other way around as well. You succeed in life because you make some really good big decisions and/or a series of small right decisions. You marry a person that really supports you and empowers you. You find the right job you can shine in. You exercise regularly. You save and invest. You put your integrity above everything else. To make good big and small decisions in life, you need a long-term view and you have to be very clear about what you want in life; you have to fight for it.

    Make the right decisions, no matter how big or small they are. And when you know you’ve fucked up, don’t run away from your problems: the sooner you tackle them, the more control you have over the damage. Face it or you’ll lose by default. Now make as many right decisions as possible.

  • 5Ts – Elements you should look for in your environment

    Your current position in different areas of life is the result of who you are – your genes, behavioral patterns, values and beliefs, decisions etc. and environment, from the people you spend time with to your company culture, the industry you work in, market trends, government, and so on. Your environment determines your potential as much as you determine it with your own personal power. The environment as a system can either empower your ambitions or stifle them.

    In many cases, people who thrive in a certain environment would suffer in another kind of environment. A corrupt politician does better in a country with lots of corruption than he does in transparent and fair systems; meanwhile a person who focuses on creating and delivering value has a hard time succeeding in an environment that respects political connections and bribes more than free markets.

    Thus you should always look for an optimal environment that can support your ambitions and is in line with your values. You may do better either in a big company or a startup, in a technology company or the traditional industry, you may work better as a specialist or a generalist or even an entrepreneur. You may feel better living in a crowded city or far away from the noise and a mass of people. You have to figure out which environment suits you best.

    The good news is that the world is becoming more and more flat. Location doesn’t matter as much as it used to, as long as you’re connected to the internet. You can innovate without having to emigrate.

    Nevertheless, there are five elements that you should look for in every environment and will contribute to your long-term success. These are the elements that encourage creating, delivering and capturing real value by being human and keeping personal integrity, achieving it with prestige, not dominance. A system that supports these five values still has competition, the world is still tough, but also fair, empathic and collaborative. The bottom line is that we’re all connected, we all share one world and for now, only one planet. Hurting anyone else simply means hurting yourself.

    For your long-term success, make sure that both your private and professional life take place in environments with the five values listed below; because the world is changing and those who profit from secrecy and deception will soon discover they only have a few places left to hide. The first three values you should look for in an environment are based on research that dr. Richard Florida did on thriving societies in today’s world, published in his book The Rise of the Creative Class.

    Talent

    The first T is talent. Talent is the basis of everything. Jobs are created where talented people are. Capital follows the talent. A critical mass of talented people creates innovation, out of the box thinking, (healthy) mutual competition, interdisciplinary dream teams, and so on. You need enough expert minds and complex communication in order to encourage creativity. That’s why the best universities in the world are so important for progress – because you’re in a system with a critical mass of talent that empowers you.

    First of all, you should work in a system full of talent. The measurement for that is quite simple: if you’re the smartest person in the room (system), you’re in the wrong room. You want to be in a room of highly talented, educated, skilled and motivated people. Today, teams win, not individuals. Consequently you want to see your connections as part of a larger team that’s trying to achieve something, not only in your professional life but also in your private one (spouse, family…). Talented teams produce innovation and progress!

    Technology

    The second T you want to look for is technology. Technology is leverage, technology helps with progress and efficiency. Technology is the thing that increases your productivity, connectedness, mobility, quality of life, access to information, knowledge, resources and much more. Technology is also the thing that brings better transparency and collaboration among talented individuals.

    All societies (systems) that thrived in the past and will thrive in the future innovated in one way or another. Talented people created a tool to do something better, faster, more efficiently etc. The future belongs to the creative class, and the creative class creates and delivers value by using technology. That’s why you should try to work in systems that use, operate, leverage, encourage and invent new technologies.

    Tolerance

    The third T is tolerance. You want to live in a diverse, heterogenic, integrative environment that’s tolerant and empathic. Innovation means always trying new things. Maybe you’ll have to try 10,000 options that don’t work before inventing something that does. Failure with validated learning is inevitable in the process of inventing new things. And you need the courage to fail. You need an environment that doesn’t judge failure but tolerates it. You also want an environment that’s tolerant towards people experimenting and trying new things.

    That’s why tolerance is so important in the system you function in. Not only does that diversity encourage you to keep your mind open and try new things, you can also more easily find new connections that weren’t discovered yet, and don’t have a lot of societal pressure judging you if you fail. No tolerance means no innovation, no innovation means no progress.

    Coworking with right people

    Transparency

    A lack of transparency may be a huge political advantage, especially for corrupt acts and unfair benefits; corruption inevitably occurs when a select few have access to important information, which allows them to use it for personal gain. But it’s also true that the world is changing and those who profit from secrecy and deception will soon discover that they only have a few places left to hide. Because a lack of transparency creates unhealthy systems. To quote Dalai Lama: “A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.”

    Transparency is simply defined as a lack of hidden agendas and conditions, accompanied by the availability of all information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision-making. Transparency is so important because it’s the essential condition for a free and open exchange, whereby the rules and reasons behind regulatory measures are fair and clear to all participants.

    In a non-transparent system, effort is rarely rewarded. That’s why talent in systems like that has little value. That’s why you want to work in a transparent system. You don’t want to keep questioning how much your co-worker earns, you want to know that you’re paid according to your value added and be sure that your co-workers are as well. The key ingredient of transparency is honest, deep and direct communication. So look for systems that encourage transparency and honest communication.

    Transcendence

    Last but not least, we are at the fifth T. The last T refers to transcendence. Transcendence is about fighting for an important and good cause. Transcendence means having a strong why, a why that’s stronger than all the obstacles you meet along the way.

    Transcendence is about being in an environment that has a big vision, an environment that encourages you to constantly improve and become your best. It’s about an environment where you fit in, because you know you can develop your talents and feel purpose in life.

    It concerns a transcendent environment, where things are not only about you, but about the whole team and the whole ecosystem, even the whole world. It’s about you becoming your best, it’s about you leaving a legacy and it’s about making the world a better place for everyone else.

    It’s about a system that encourages you to be a good person. People are often not bad and evil, but the system and life situations bring out the worst in them. Think about the Stanford prison experiment. There’s evil in all of us, the only question is what kind of a system we’re functioning in, which part of our personality the system brings out.

    You want to be in a system that brings out the best in you. Transcendence is what really defines you as a human being and what separates humans from animals. A transcendent ecosystem is a system that empowers more divine forces in you than animal instincts.

    You can also influence your environment

    What’s important isn’t only that you find an environment that fits you best and empowers you the most, but also that you help to construct and develop ecosystems that encourage talent, technology, tolerance, transparency and transcendence. If you want to achieve your maximum potential and peak performance, you have to find your optimal environment, online or offline.

    But when you do that, it’s your duty to help develop other systems and societies, so that other people will also have more options. You best achieve that by being a role model and by being socially active. Let me illustrate this with a story.

    A man asked Mother Theresa what he can do to promote world peace and make the world a better place. She replied: “Go home and love your family.” A family is the first place where family members should support each other in developing talents, using technology as a leverage, being tolerant to mistakes and trying new things, being transparent and having a strong sense of purpose and mission.

    You are a product of your environment as well, so choose it carefully.

  • A short morning meeting with yourself

    The most popular agile development framework is called Scrum. An important part of the Scrum process is the so-called Daily Scrum. The Daily Scrum is a very short meeting with a team before the work begins, especially meant to coordinate team effort and overcome eventual roadblocks.

    The meeting shouldn’t last longer than 15 minutes and it not only coordinates, it also contributes a lot to keeping a strong working momentum, motivation and communication. The meeting agenda is very simple and straightforward. Every team member answers the following three questions:

    • What have you done since the last meeting?
    • What are you planning to do today?
    • Is there anything preventing you from achieving your goals?

    The purpose of the meeting is not to resolve issues, but just to detect them and bring them to the awareness of all team members. Another very important part is that the meeting should always be held at the same location and at the same time every day, and should start on time.

    The meeting should also be a stand-up meeting. Meetings can be big time wasters, especially if people aren’t on time, there’s a lot of small talk, there’s no clear agenda and purpose to the meeting and so on. But if you stay standing up, the meeting members are definitely not tempted to exceed the time limit.

    Your short morning meeting

    In agile development, the Daily Scrum has many planning and clarifying benefits. It doesn’t take long, the investment is small (if it’s done right), and the rewards are big. That’s why you should also have a short morning meeting with yourself, because you want to:

    • Be constantly connected to yourself and listen to your mind, body and emotions
    • Align your daily tasks and effort with your sprint and endgame
    • Keep momentum and motivation
    • Detect and consider roadblocks in the process you follow and keep a flexible mentality
    • Focus yourself for the rest of your day

    The best thing to do is to make your short morning meeting a part of your morning kick-off routine. Because you should hold this meeting at the same time every day. Before you start working, you take 5 to 15 minutes, open a notebook or word processor, and answer three very simple questions:

    • What did I do yesterday?
    • What do I plan to do today? (Limited to three to five important things you can do in the flow…)
    • Is there anything preventing me from achieving my goals?

    By answering these three simple questions, you’ll refresh what you were doing in the past to keep the momentum, you’ll focus your activities for the upcoming day and you’ll think about the potential roadblocks that you can encounter through your day. Being aware of the roadblocks makes it easier to handle them later.

    While having your short morning meeting, make sure that you don’t listen only to your mind, but also to your body, spirit and health. Consider your level of energy as well as your emotions, intuition, mission and other feedback you get from yourself and your environment.

    If you visualize your progress, don’t forget to move sticky notes on your Kanban board.