A very important fact of problem solving is that we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them, as Albert Einstein’s famous quote goes. In life, you will definitely face many problems and sometimes even severe setbacks. From time to time, life will seem totally unfair, hard and burdensome. Sometimes you may even feel like there is no solution to your problems. But in fact, there is always a step you can take towards a better life.
Many situations in life demand from you to be creative and find an innovative solution. Proactively looking for new ways is the opposite of feeling sorry for yourself and giving up. Everyone can be creative and innovation is the essence of progress, including in your own life, especially if you find yourself in tough situations or want massive success. Thus when facing problems, think hard on how you could innovate your way out.
Let’s look at an example now.
A few years ago I started going to the gym. I never did any sports before in my life and thus I didn’t have really strong muscular foundations. After a few visits to the gym, I got pretty enthusiastic and started to increase the weight I lifted very fast. Legal supplements like creatine gave me extra power and enabled me to lift even more. But because I had no strong foundations, I of course hurt myself. I damaged my shoulder blades, elbow and wrist of my right arm – joints and ulnar nerve.
After the injury, it was obvious that going to the gym and working hard on my muscles was not an option anymore. I felt really depressed. Truly depressed. For the first time in my life, I got enthusiastic about a sport, I could see my progress well, but now such a setback. I never thought that I’d feel depressed about not doing sports.
In the beginning, I was stubborn, of course. “No pain, no gain”, as I’ve read in many articles and magazines. Thus I went to the gym a few times just right after my arm felt a little bit better. With this kind of thinking, I damaged my arm even more. I tried to solve the problem with the same kind of thinking that created it. “If I train harder, it will stop hurting,” I said to myself. How stupid.
I needed to innovate my way out of the situation. I wanted to stay active and improve my fitness level. On the other hand, going to the gym wasn’t an option anymore. Thus I had entered the search mode, looking for sports I could do without hurting my arm. Along the way, it also became more than obvious that I’d have to strengthen my core muscles and improve flexibility if I wanted to do any sports seriously again in my life.
I’ve tried many different sports and found a few that I can do without my arm hurting that much. Hiking (without hiking sticks), swimming, a few exercises like squats, etc. In addition to that, I’ve also found out that yoga, stretching and doing core exercises (planking, resistance band training etc.) really helps me a lot. Massages are a bonus on top of that. My progress is slower, of course, but the foundations will be much stronger in the long term for sure.
Sometimes you have to take one step back in order to take two steps further. Sometimes your foundations are not strong enough for the masterpiece you want to build. Sometimes you push yourself too hard in the wrong kind of way and experience a severe setback. Just pushing forward with something that doesn’t work makes no sense. The definition of insanity is repeating the same behaviors and expecting a different outcome, if we go back to Einstein’s quotes. You have to stop and think. In that kind of a situation, you have to innovate your way out.
There is always a step that can take you closer to your goal. It may not be a linear step, but life is never a linear path. It’s full of ups and downs, rights and lefts, sprints and stops. Life is supposed to be a daring adventure taking you to different places you’ve never even imagined; nice ones and difficult ones. That is how you grow.
You will face challenges in all areas of life. When you face a challenge, don’t rush and don’t panic. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Start thinking. Start looking for new ways of getting out of the hole. Start being creative. Start innovating. Regardless of the area of life you’re facing challenges in.
You can fire off your creative potential by asking yourself the right questions. Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, find a quiet place, take a piece of paper and a pen, and start thinking. Start analysing, start reflecting, think about new ways for improving and taking a step further in life. Start asking yourself difficult questions and look for unconventional solutions.
Ask yourself questions like:
What are 20 things I can do and haven’t thought about yet to improve my situation?
What will happen if I go into the opposite direction?
Which are the best books that deal with my kind of situation and propose solutions? (read them)
Which negative behavioural patterns led me to where I am now?
How can I start doing things differently?
Which effort will bring the best results the fastest?
Who can help me – a friend, formal institution etc.?
What are the resources I can engage to get out of the situation faster?
What is optimal thinking in this kind of situations?
What would [x] do? Where [x] can be Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michel Jordan or whoever your role model is.
Why should I fight?
Innovating your way out is not about getting rid of hardship and burden. It’s not about finding an easy way out (maybe only sometimes). It’s not about a miraculous solution that will easily solve your problems and take your life into a totally different direction. It’s about finding hope that it can be done.It’s about finding a path that encourages you and gives you strength and willpower to move forward. Innovating your way out is about striking an early win that motivates you to stand up and start walking.
There’s one more catch when it comes to innovating your way out. Every innovation usually brings a decrease in short-term productivity and an increase in long term-productivity. Thus innovating your way out is the harder step in the beginning. It takes additional courage and effort to do it. But with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard.
Innovating your way out doesn’t mean doing anything stupid. It doesn’t mean finding a way to put out all of your aggression and dissatisfaction. It means finding a smarter way to get out of your situation. It means leveling up your skills, your thinking, and your beliefs. It means looking at the problem from a different angle and building a superior strategy with an adequate solution based on that angle.
Have you found yourself having money problems? Tackle your money beliefs, educate yourself about money and investing, find a way to save one dollar a day, look for ways to earn some extra bucks, come up with a crazy business idea, become really good at something etc. Innovate your way out of money problems. It’s not easy, but it can be done.
Are you facing a setback in your career? Innovate you way out. Change the industry, start blogging, take a new course, level up your skills with massive online open courses, write 1000 e-mails to people for new opportunities, do something that’s totally different from your previous behavioural patterns.
Do you feel trapped in negative thinking and negative emotions? Don’t stay locked in an emotional cage. Innovate your way out. Read all the available books about psychoanalysis and cognitive distortions. Go see a therapist. Start meditating. Innovate your way out.
Regardless of the life area, there is always something you can do. Be creative. Innovate. Find a new and better way to do things. Win.
By far the biggest waste in life are cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are all extreme negative thoughts that bring bad feelings as well as longer periods of depression or severe negative moods sooner or later. You simply can’t live a positive life with a negative mind. By having too many cognitive distortions, you’re trapped in living a zombie life, seeing the world as very dark and full of terror. What a waste.
There’s good news and bad news regarding cognitive distortions. The good news is that you can get rid of cognitive distortions and live a fuller and happier life. Without cognitive distortions, you can be much more positive, lean, agile and with a greater capacity to love yourself and the world around you. You develop inner strength that allows you to go after your goals with positive feelings.
The bad news is that the way of getting rid of cognitive distortions is counterintuitive to us. For most people, assumptions about how to deal with cognitive distortions go something like this: I need [x]. Having [x] will make me happy in life. By having [x] and being happier, my negative thoughts will go away, I will free myself and be more motivated and become successful. As you’ve probably guessed [x] is usually a good car, a well-paid job, a dream spouse or anything similar from the materialistic world.
There are several problems with that kind of thinking. The first wrong assumption is that happiness comes from the outer world. Well, it can come, but only for a very short period of time. Buying something you want makes you happy for a few days, after that you’re back in the same situation of negativity.
The second very big problem with that kind of thinking is passivity. You put yourself in a passive role, waiting for life to reward you just because you deserve it, just because you’re something special. It doesn’t work that way. Life rewards those who master its rules and put all their creativity, cleverness and hard work into achieving their goals. Life wants you to be proactive, not passive and reactive. A passive role has never brought real happiness. You can find a lot of passive people who fake happiness, but you don’t want that.
The next false assumption is that it’s going to be easy to get rid of negative thoughts. One new item, thing or person in your life, and your mind will get updated with a new, more positive “software”. You’ve probably been thinking negatively for years, it’s part of how you were raised, maybe your parents were too critical of you or you grew up in an abusive family. It’s been there for years; and it’s going to take a lot of effort and hard work to get rid of it. It’s not fair, but you have to face it. Nothing worthwhile comes easily and getting rid of your negative thoughts is definitely worth it. No matter how hard it is.
The process of getting rid of cognitive distortions works the other way around. First you have to work on your mind, first you have to improve your mental state and change your inner world. Working on your mind will improve your thoughts, better thoughts will bring more positive actions, more positive actions will bring more positive outcomes. That’s a proactive position. You tackle the software in your brain to get rid of bugs and function optimally. You level up your game. You first have to work on your mind to become more focused, more decisive, clearer about what you want out of life, and more positive.
It’s really important that you distinguish between the process and the event. Getting rich is an event. Meeting your perfect spouse is an event. Getting a raise is an event. Having a positive mind is an event. But before any kind of event like that, the process always comes first. Getting rich is a carefully orchestrated process that usually takes years if not decades to finally reach the final event. It’s the same with your mind. There are no shortcuts. There is no easy way out of negative thinking, there is no event without a process. But it can be done.
You can’t just think positively
You can find many self-help books that praise positive thinking. Well, it’s true that positive thinking is an important part of a happy and successful life, but you can’t just decide to think positively. If it were that simple, everyone would be happy and optimistic and super positive in life. You can’t force yourself into positive thinking, it will only make you miserable. Every time a negative thought crosses your mind, you will get mad and angry and disappointed, and that only means even more negative thoughts.
In order to get superior results, you always need a superior strategy. You need to tackle the problem more smartly and systematically. There are two ways how to do it, the first one is the hardest, but gives the best results, the second one is a simpler version, but probably suitable for most people.
If you have really big problems with depression, negative thinking and heavy moods, they probably won’t go away without professional help. In this case, I suggest that you enter the search mode, and do research on different types of psychological therapy, read a few professional psychology books, not self-help ones, visit a few specialists, try to get to know yourself as well as you can on your own and find the therapy that suits you best or you think could help you the most. It may take a lot of time, money and energy, but you don’t want to waste your life and live like a zombie. Your life is the most precious thing you have.
The second, simpler version is to systematically tackle the problem by yourself. You can still do research on your own, but the best resource I’ve ever found by far is a book called Feeling Good, written by David D. Burns. If you want to get rid of your thoughts, you first have to understand what they are, where they are coming from, the different types of negative thinking that exist and how to deal with them. You can find all the answers in the mentioned book.
Methods and techniques in the book are part of cognitive psychology. The foundation of cognitive psychology is the hypothesis that all your moods are created by your cognitions – thoughts, where cognitions refer to the way you look at things, from your perceptions and mental attitudes to beliefs.
Based on that fact, you simply feel depressed when your thoughts are dominated by pervasive negativity. Your negativity is therefore probably not based on accurate perceptions of reality, but is instead often the product of mental slippage. The extent of negative thinking is enormous. Your mood slumps, your self-image crumbles, your body doesn’t function properly, your willpower becomes paralysed and your own actions defeat you.
You can feel trapped inside your own mind.
Ten types of negative thinking
I suggest you buy and read the book, as it can really be a life-changer. Nevertheless, here’s the summary of ten different kinds of cognitive distortions that are really eye-opening and the first step to understanding your negative thoughts. Before we look at ten types of negative thinking, let’s look at the scientifically proven hypothesis of the extent that negative thinking really has.
“Every bad feeling you have is the result of negative thinking. Self-defeating emotions are caused by negative thoughts, illogical pessimism and strong inner critique. Your emotions result entirely from the way you look at things, by your internal dialogue on a series of events that happen to you. If your understanding of what’s happening is accurate, your emotions will be normal. If your perception is twisted and distorted in some way, your emotional response will be abnormal.”
Here are ten types of negative thinking, described in detail in the book Feeling good:
All-or-nothing thinking
“You evaluate yourself and events that happen in your life in extremes, it’s either totally black or totally white. That kind of thinking is the basis for perfectionism. It causes you to fear doing any mistakes, it causes you to fear doing something imperfectly. If you don’t do it perfectly, if you make a mistake, you see yourself as a complete looser. You have the same interpretation if something doesn’t happen as you wanted or expected. It can go from all to nothing really quickly. You can see yourself as zero with one single small change in the outside environment. That kind of perception has nothing to do with reality. Absolutes do not exist in the universe.”
For example, your spouse must behave exactly to your expectations, or they are not the right one.
Overgeneralization
“With overgeneralization, you arbitrarily conclude that a thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again. For example, the pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization. Without cognitive distortion, a rejection can be temporarily disappointing, but cannot be seriously disturbing.”
You know how it goes: I will never get a girlfriend… (Based on one rejection).
Mental filter
“Mental filtering simply means that you pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving the whole situation as negative. Because you aren’t aware of this mental filtering, you conclude that everything is negative. All that you allow to enter your conscious mind are the negative things.”
For example you have your dream job, it’s just your pay check that could be a little bit higher, but all you can see is that the pay check is not adequate.
Disqualifying the positive
“It’s about the unwanted ability of your mind to transform neutral and maybe even positive events into negative ones. You don’t just ignore positive experiences, you cleverly and swiftly turn them into their nightmarish opposite. “
For example, if you get a compliment and your mind starts questioning the compliment and maybe even seeing it as manipulation that could definitely be this kind of cognitive distortion. It doesn’t make sense to constantly throw cold water on the good things that happen in your life.
Jumping to conclusions
“Jumping to conclusions means that you jump to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation. It’s as if you had a crystal ball that foretold only misery to you.”
For example, you make assumptions that other people are looking down on you, and you’re so sure about this that you don’t even bother to check it out and talk with other people. You would rather have a negative belief about what other people think of you.
Magnification and minimization
“With magnificational or minimizational thinking, you either blow things out of proportion or shrink them. Magnification commonly occurs when you look at your own errors, fears or imperfections, and exaggerate their importance. When you think about your strengths, you may do the opposite – you look at your strengths in a way that makes them look small and unimportant. Of course if you magnify your imperfections and minimize your good points, you’re guaranteed to feel inferior.”
Emotional reasoning
“Emotional reasoning means that you take your emotions as evidence for the truth. Because things feel so negative to you, you assume they are true. But in reality if your thinking is distorted, your emotions have no validity of reality. Just because you feel overwhelmed and helpless, for example, it doesn’t mean that your problems are impossible to solve.”
Should statements
“You try to motivate yourself with statements like “I should do this”, “I must do that” etc. These statements cause you to feel pressured and resentful. With that kind of statements, you achieve the opposite result, feeling even more unmotivated and apathetic. When the reality of your own behaviours falls short of your standards, your “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” create self-loathing, shame and guilt.”
It’s the same when you direct “should” statements towards other people. In most cases, you feel frustrated, because you want someone to behave according to your expectations. When the all-too-human performance of other people falls short of your expectations, which definitely happens from time to time, you feel bitter and self-righteous. You either have to change your expectations to approximate reality or always feel let down by human behaviour.
Labeling and mislabelling
“Labeling means creating a completely negative self-image based on your errors. It’s an extreme form of overgeneralization. Labeling yourself is self-defeating and irrational. Because we label ourselves or others, for example with the label “I’m a born loser”, we resent ourselves or others, and jump at every chance to criticize. But it doesn’t make any sense to focus on every weakness or imperfection of yourself or others as proof for being worthiness.”
You must consider that a human life is an ongoing process that involves constantly changing the physical body as well as having an enormous number of rapidly changing thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Your life is therefore an evolving experience, a continual flow. You are not a thing. That is why any label is constricting, highly inaccurate, and global. Labelling means that you have a fixed mindset, but in life you can always grow, improve and change. Nothing is permanent and there is always a move you can make towards a betterlife. You have to innovate your way towards a better life.
Personalization
“The last cognitive distortion is personalization and it is the mother of guilt. You assume responsibility for a negative event or thing, even where there is no basis for doing so. You arbitrarily conclude that what happened was your fault or reflects your inadequacy, even when you are not responsible for it. Personalization causes you to feel crippling guilt.”
In the case of personalization, you usually confuse influence with control over others. What the other person does is ultimately his or her responsibility, not yours.
These are ten cognitive distortions identified by David D. Burns. You can read more about them in his book Feeling good. I really recommend it. Here is a good summary of why dealing with your negative thoughts is so important:
“Your thoughts create emotions; therefore your emotions cannot prove that your thoughts are accurate. Unpleasant feelings merely indicate that you are thinking something negative and believing it. Every time you feel depressed about something, try to identify the corresponding negative thought you had just prior to negative feelings and during the depressed mood.
Because these thoughts have actually created your bad mood, by learning to restructure them, you can change your mood. Your emotions come entirely form the way you look at things. If your understanding of what is happening is accurate, your emotions will be normal. If your perception is twisted and distorted in some way, your emotional response will be abnormal. Feelings aren’t facts.”
Free yourself!
Dealing with cognitive distortions
The first step in dealing with cognitive distortions is building up your sense of self-worth and self-esteem. When you are in a negative emotional state or, even worse, depressed, you usually believe that you’re worthless. The stronger the negative feelings, the more you feel like no one.
Thus the first step is to closely examine what you say about yourself when you have negative feelings. Negative events grow in importance until they dominate your entire reality. All the distorted thoughts feel real to you. The illusion you have about yourself is very convincing.
An important fact in the whole picture is that achievements and other external rewards can’t really help you with your feeling of self-worth. They can bring you satisfaction, but not happiness. Moreover, love, approval and friendship also can’t help you much. As stated in the book, a great majority of negative and depressed people are loved very much, they just can’t see it, because their focus is completely elsewhere.
The only way to do it is to tackle your inner dialogue and your inner critique.
The method that David S. Burns recommends for tackling your self-esteem is:
Talk back to your inner critique
Train yourself to recognize and write down self-critical thoughts as they go through your mind
Learn why these thoughts are distorted
Practice talking back to them so as to develop a more realistic self-evaluation system
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 mentioned ten different types, and the third one is your rational response (“Not true, I do a lot of things right”).
Genius people always test and implement new things in their life as quickly as possible. If you aren’t willing to use the tool and take time to deal with your thoughts, you simply won’t be able to do the job. The table tool will help you locate the mental errors that depress you and fix them.
Even if this article is eye-opening for you and you do nothing afterwards, all the reading was a big waste of time; and waste is your biggest enemy to a happy and successful life.
Emotional accounting
The most important thing in cognitive therapy is to observe your thoughts and your feelings. Thus you can add two more columns to the above-mentioned table and do some emotional accounting. You can specify the type of feeling and its intensity (0 – 100) from before the rational response to cognitive distortion and afterwards. It’s a good way of determining how much your feeling will actually improve.
Thus columns in your table would be:
Automatic negative thought (“I never do things right”)
Type of negative feeling and intensity (Anger, 90%)
Type of cognitive distortion (Overgeneralization)
Rational response (“Not true, I do a lot of things right”, for example…)
Intensity of negative feeling (Anger, 30%)
An important part of emotional accounting is also the mental biofeedback. It simply means clicking a button each time a negative thought about you crosses your mind. With this technique, you will always be alert for negative thoughts about yourself. You should probably do this exercise first, before any others, just to become aware of your negative thoughts and how many of them you have.
That’s basically it. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Nevertheless it’s definitely worth it. You don’t have to do anything especially worthy to create or deserve self-esteem. All you have to do is turn off that critical, inner voice. Your inner self-abuse springs from illogical, distorted thinking. Your sense of worthiness is not based on truth, it’s just the abscess that lies at the core of your negative thinking. Deal with your inner critique and your thoughts will improve.
Negative thinking can really paralyze you, your willpower and your desire to do things. Mindsets like hopelessness, helplessness, overwhelming yourself, jumping to conclusions, self-labelling, undervaluing the reward, perfectionism, fear of failure, fear of success, fear of disapproval and criticism, coercion and resentment, low frustration tolerance, guilt and self-blame are usually most commonly associated with procrastination. And you deserve better.
You should identify your negative thoughts, your cognitive distortions and your paralyzing mindsets. Keeping a schedule of negative thoughts, fixing your cognitive distortions, keeping a daily activity schedule as well as rewarding yourself and giving yourself credit is a way towards a whole new, more positive life. Focusing on your progress, what you’ve done and fixing your negative interpretations and beliefs will help you with your feeling of self-worth and thus you will be able to enjoy life more. At the end of the day, the most important thing is that you respect and love yourself.
Here is a good checklist you can download to refresh your memory about cognitive distortions when needed.
Start small. It is first action and then motivation, not vice versa. A little action leads to motivation and motivation leads to more action. Don’t just wait for motivation to come out of nowhere. It won’t happen. Just do it. Take a piece of paper and start writing down negative thoughts you have about yourself. Take a piece of paper and write down three small things you will do tomorrow. Then do them all.
Source: David D. Burns, Feeling good: the new mood therapy
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.
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.
An important fact in life is that with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard. If you don’t make steps forward in life, you go backwards. If you don’t improve, you regress. By putting in extra effort and stepping out of your comfort zone, you level up your skills and become more competent.
It’s also true that to achieve your maximum potential in life, you must have a long-term perspective and the will to curb your desires for instant gratification. But to stay motivated, you also need to see the results of your hard work as soon as possible.
To stay motivated, you need to see the results of your hard work as soon as possible.
That is why business knows the so-called concept of “low-hanging fruit”. The low-hanging fruit are simply targets and goals that are easily achievable. It’s the concept most often used in sales, meaning that you first try to sell your products to the customers that are the easiest to sell to.
It’s obvious that there’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit. Sooner or later, it runs out and you must start putting in more and more effort to meet your goals. Thus a completely wrong approach is to go only after the low-hanging fruit. Nevertheless, going after the low-hanging fruit first and then intensifying the effort with a long-term view in mind makes a lot of sense. It’s probably the winning combination.
The low hanging fruit are your early wins
Early wins are very important, because they boost your self-confidence. Early wins motivate you and show you that it can be done. Early wins push you to go forward and achieve more. Early wins help you to go from the search to the execution mode. Early wins help you to overcome fatigue before achieving your final goal.
On the other hand, early failures can dampen your spirits. They can make you regret that you’ve even tried. Early failures usually happen because you go way out of your comfort zone into the panic zone, or because of naivety, lack of focus, lack of strategy or lack of flexibility.
In the search mode, it’s expected of you to fail and learn. But when you find your fit and start executing, you really do need early wins.
Besides the low-hanging fruit, there are several other options to help you with the transition from the search mode to the execution mode. Here’s a list of what you can do to keep yourself motivated:
But now it’s time to go back to low-hanging fruit.
Low-hanging fruit in different areas of life
Let’s look at different areas of life, how and why the low-hanging fruit is so important.
We can start with health. First, as advised on this blog, you should enter the search mode – read about different diets, try different foods and sports, talk to people, listen to your body, gather information and feedback. You should try to find your best fit. After that, you should decide to stick to a specific new diet and practice the selected sport regularly every week. You decided to go from the search mode into the execution mode.
Okay, let’s say that you’ve been in the execution mode for a week. You can clearly see that it takes a lot of discipline, effort, time and even money to make changes regarding your fitness and health. It’s clear that it will take weeks if not even months to see a real body transformation and an improvement of your fitness level. But you need motivation through all these weeks before seeing real results. You need motivation to keep walking after your first step.
You can definitely stay motivated by changing your computer wallpaper, finding an exercising buddy, making a photo of yourself every week to see progress and so on. But you should also consider low-hanging fruit that can help you with your transition.
Here are some ideas for low-hanging fruit:
Before doing any serious exercise, take a walk every day with your best friend, just to feel better and to see how good it is to be filled with oxygen. At first, it shouldn’t feel like hard exercise at all.
Groom your body to look better in the mirror.
Go to a spa or a massage to connect with your body better (or do yoga).
Drink a lot of water so your body will cleanse and you’ll feel better.
Start using olive oil, brown sugar, Himalayan salt etc. as reminders that you eat healthier.
For once, don’t eat that hamburger, order a healthier meal and feel good about yourself etc., you will start feeling proud of yourself and strengthen your willpower
The domino effect
Small decisions will lead to greater changes and they will accumulate. It’s called the domino effect or compunding interests.With employing this strategy you’ll start seeing progress and feel better even in a very short period of time. Other people will start to see your progress and after the first compliments, your desire and will for improvement will grow even stronger.
Practical examples
It’s the same in all other areas of life. The low-hanging fruit for money is to save a little. Don’t buy one item you always buy in the grocery store, maybe ask for all the change back, maybe there’s something you buy every day out of habit but don’t really need, you can reprogram your debt etc.
On the other hand, you can sell things you don’t need, you can ask for a raise, you can do some extra work etc. You can make small changes without any big shock. When you see money piling up, you’ll become motivated to implement bigger changes.
If you want to improve your relationships, for example by meeting new friends or spouse or being more social, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. The easiest way to meet new people is to be introduced to friends of your friends. It’s also very easy to renew relationships with some of your old friends you’ve lost contact with. It’s also very easy to make new friends by using social networks and so on.
As you can see, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in different areas of life. The problem, as mentioned before, is that you run out of it very fast. But the purpose of low-hanging fruit and early wins is not to make life completely easy, but to motivate you more and to keep you on the right track.
For every new thing you want to do in life, first enter the search mode to make the map of the terrain and then think about the low-hanging fruit that can help you with the transition into the execution mode and keep you motivated on the path to achieving your final goal.
Low-hanging fruit for this blog as an example
There is another example we can look at. It concerns this blog. Because the market is saturated, with more than 2 million blog posts being published per day, it’s very hard to acquire organic traffic. And you need thousands of dollars to get any real visibility by using paid channels. It’s a challenge that can test your motivation.
In the long term, both paid and organic traffic are the ways to go, but in the middle, some low-hanging fruit is essential. To start seeing first results, to make different tests and experiments, to stay motivated, to keep writing articles and marketing the blog, the low-hanging fruit is the first step to do.
Here is a list of 20 ideas for low-hanging fruit I tried when I started my blog:
Writing to people in my address book and telling them that I’ve started a new blog
Linking to my blog from all my Slovenian pages
Posting blog posts on social media (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter)
Starting to follow people on Twitter and getting some traction
Making and pinning images with quotes on Pinterest
Publishing summaries of articles on LinkedIn influencers
Writing a few short guest posts per month
Finding and posting on productivity and personal development forums
Writing comments on productivity and personal development blogs
Answering questions on social media like Quora
Posting blog to all directories, aggregators, RSS lists and other similar sites
Making and posting Agile and Lean Life slides on SlideShare
Adding a signature to my e-mails
Sharing blog posts on social groups (Facebook Groups, Reddit…)
Submitting an article to PDF sites
E-mailing people who I think would be interested in the content
Using people on fiverr to help me gain traction
Posting on Scoop.it and Squido Lenses
A little bit of paid traffic won’t hurt
Making a blog exchange network could also be a way to go
Stay motivated and keep going towards your goal by first picking up the low-hanging fruit. Bon appétit.
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.
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!
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.
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.
