Blaz Kos

success

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  • The best preventive cure for your mistakes

    There is a saying in the start-up world that the “product-market fit” cures many sins of management. What this means exactly is that when you’re starting a new business (and even later), you do make many mistakes.

    Setting the wrong prices, hiring the wrong people, mismanagement etc. But if you have a product that customers crave, if they’re prepared to pay a solid price for it (and your profit margin is high enough), then you can survive making more mistakes.

    On the other hand, if you don’t have a “product-market fit” or you are starting business with low margins and a small volume, even the smallest mistakes can throw you out of business.

    Thus you want to have as much traction as possible, with a very high margin and a strong competitive advantage. That isn’t easily achieved, but it is a must if you want to succeed in the business world.

    Promising startups usually acquire lots of capital (and attract a lot of smart people) to reach the “product-market fit”. Capital and/or knowledge are their buffer, their lifeblood, their stockpile on the way from an idea to the “product-market fit”.

    The more money and knowledge that a start-up has, the faster it can move, since more tests and experiments can be done in a shorter time in the search mode. Interestingly, without proper knowledge, too much money can stifle innovation, creativity, the scientific approach and focus on the right things.

    Basically, capital and knowledge (and other resources) help you find the product-market fit and then you get yourself into a position to create even more resources.

    The best preventive cure for your mistakes

    Perfect fit is the best preventive cure for your mistakes

    It’s no different in your personal life. The better the personal fit and the position you have, the more mistakes you can afford to make.

    Having a chance to make more mistakes also means opening more opportunities for you and finding new ways no one has found before (meaning being more efficient). Let’s see what I have in mind, starting with your health.

    Practical examples

    If you’ve been an athlete from a young age onwards, you’ve developed a strong, solid and muscular body. When you’re older, you can afford more laziness and a poorer diet (not that I recommend it) than people who have never done sports in their life. Muscles have their own memory and you can quickly get back into shape after a few years of pause.

    It’s the same if you are really good and talented at a certain sport. You still have to train hard, but you can afford many more mistakes, for example training less, trying new techniques and so on. Someone that is not as talented will never catch up, if you really have naturally good skills.

    Talent, meaning doing something that’s your personal fit, in combination with hard and smart work and the right kind of environment lead to miracles – the outliers.

    If you find your fit in personal relationships, you can afford more mistakes. It takes time to compromise and catch the rhythm with a new person, but if there is the right fit, meaning both partners really want the relationship to work, then tolerance towards mistakes is much bigger.

    If there is no real fit, every small mistake can endanger the relationship. There are always lines you aren’t allowed to cross, like physical violence, cheating, but you get the point.

    Money is the most obvious one in this context. The more assets you have, the more you can experiment, learn and try new investments. The better personal investment strategy you find, the more money you will make.

    If you find your revenue fits and investments fit, you can really become rich. Finding your fits simply means you’re passionate and interested in something, so putting in hard work is no problem.

    It’s the same with your career. The better you are at your occupation, the more you can achieve. The higher on the social ladder you are, the more mistakes you can afford. Well, the right kind of mistakes, not all of them.

    But again, you get the point: the better you are at something and the better position you have, the freer you are to try new things, experiment or just make normal human mistakes.

    The worse your position is and the more you’re doing things that aren’t right for you, the sooner you will make a mistake that could be fatal and cause a collapse in one of your life areas.

    In summary when you find your fit in life:

    • You have an unfair advantage because you do or have something that you are naturally good at or is meant to be. Rarely put people the effort in to find their true fit, that is also why they are so unhappy.
    • Since you are naturally good at something, you can afford more mistakes and errors, but not only that you can also experiment more which can lead to even greater success.
    • There is still a limit how many and how big mistakes you can make before you get yourself out of the game, but your error buffer is bigger. The two most common mistakes are not giving your best or not innovating enough when you are in an unfair position.

    Find your fit and shine

    Thus if you want to feel freer in life, if you want to be in a position to try more on your journey, experience new things and be able to afford more mistakes, find your personal fits.

    You should introduce the search mode into your life and before executing anything, find the one thing that really suits you best.

    Find the right person to build an intimate relationship with. Find a person for whom all the struggle is really worth it; and it will be worth it. Find a career that really suits you best, one that you are passionate about and where you can really deliver value added.

    Work hard to be in a good position and then take bigger and bigger risks that will take you even a step further. But take risks you can still afford (usually risks with small downside and big upside), not risks that could potentially take you out of business.

    It’s called a positive/negative spiral. The more you achieve, the more risks you can afford, the more risks you can afford, the more you can achieve and so on. And vice versa: failure leads to failure. And if you don’t have outer resources at the beginning (money, real-estate, statues etc.), you can start with investing inner resources (knowledge, skills, creativity etc.).

    Resources -> Product-market fit -> More resources

    To accelerate the whole process, you want to find your personal fits, where your progress will be the fastest and you can afford to take some risks immediately, no matter your starting position, because of your natural talent (inner asset).

    Know what you want, find your personal fits and then execute and find yourself in a positive spiral.

  • T-shaped skills in every area of your life

    While the concept of T-shaped skills is not so new, it is now more important than ever. The world is becoming more and more complex and T-shaped skills are a razor that can cut through all the complexity.

    Your T-shaped skillset must constantly become broader (- general knowledge) and narrower (| specialized knowledge) as the world becomes more complex, nevertheless having T-shapes skills is one of the biggest competitive advantage you can have in the creative society when contributing value for the markets or when achieving your goals.

    Let’s see why. Well, to really understand the whole story, we have to go from dashes (-) and I’s to T’s, PI’s and even hashtags (#).

    Dash-shaped skills and low value added

    Dash (-) shaped skills simply means having some general knowledge about everything. You are a generalist, no real specialist at anything. This kind of people are usually called jacks-of-all-trades and considered as masters of none. If you are a generalist, your T doesn’t have any support to lean on and with that, several problems occur.

    The first problem is that it’s hard to gain respect from people, especially other specialists, if you don’t excel at something. The second problem is that the world is becoming so complex and saturated with information that as a result, being a generalist means pretty much nothing.

    Your general knowledge must be in a specific context to have any power at all. That context usually comes from having a connected specialized skill.

    Having dash-shaped skills usually also means providing low value added. With all the knowledge accessible to you with one click, it’s easy to become a generalist at anything. If you are a generalist, the value added you provide is only a little bit higher than providing manual work that anyone can do.

    Let’s look at some facts and practical examples:

    • People will respect you when you are really good at something. Furthermore, the halo effect will happen and they will think that you are even better in other areas of life. It’s hard to achieve that if you don’t have your own forte, but just general knowledge about something.
    • If you want to provide value to a team, you do have to be a generalist capable of working efficiently in a team, but people will recognize your value if you contribute a specific kind of skill.

    If you are an extremely good copywriter and additionally have general knowledge about internet marketing, then the combination of both is really powerful. But if you only have some general knowledge about the internet, then marketing is not nearly as valuable. General knowledge is context and foundation.

    Usually when you go to a generalist doctor, you can know more about a specific problem you have than he does, just by searching for information and cases on the internet.

    Twenty years ago, there may have been room in this world for generalists, from doctors, lawyers to managers, marketers and others. But the value of generalists was made obsolete by the internet, search engines and the curiosity of people who don’t want to be only specialists but want to know and master more from their industry.

    And there’s enough people like that. High competition, low value added.

    I-shaped skills

    The basic fact is that if you want to get paid well for your work, you have to be good at something that is high in demand, but has a rare supply. In other words: you need I-shaped skills: you need to be good at something that not many people on the market are good at.

    The good news is that there are more and more disciplines you can be good at. While internet marketing was a specialization 10 years ago, now you can be a specialist for paid advertising, search engine optimization, social media marketing and so on. It’s not much different in other industries.

    The bad news is that it’s becoming harder and harder to be a specialist. We annually produce more information and knowledge than we have in the whole history of humankind. Thus becoming a specialist means very hard work and constant improvement.

    Another big problem is also that faculties are producing more generalists than specialists, so becoming a specialist is a task you have to undertake on your own.

    But there is an even more important secret to having I-shaped skills. Creative capitalism or the knowledge economy respects talented people more than anything else. Not only talented people, but those talented people who work hard to develop and capitalize their talent.

    The higher the demand, the rarer a skill and the better you master the skill, the more value you provide to the market. Markets are prepared to reward you completely disproportionately to the average for that kind of skill, to your advantage, of course.

    Four groups of I-shaped skills

    There are four groups of I-shaped skills that are highly respected on the market in general.

    The first group are business skills, like management, marketing, finance, sales, e-commerce etc. But you really have to be extremely good at it. Some disciplines, like marketing, are so broad that you need to find your niche inside the industry.

    The second group are engineering skills, from IT to biotech and all other promising industries. Scientists are extremely valuable in the knowledge economy. This group also includes specialists like doctors, lawyers, investors, etc. who are really good at their jobs and specialize for things high in demand.

    The third group are creative people – people who know how to be different and better, people who have awesome ideas and know how to bring them to life; entrepreneurs for example.

    The fourth group is show business and all successful musicians, sportsmen, artists, actors, entertainers and so on can be included in this group.

    In all four groups, you have the top 1 – 4 % who are paid extremely well (a.k.a. rich people), 16 – 20% of people who are above average (a.k.a. upper middle class) and others who earn average respect and salaries from other people and markets.

    There is no doubt that you want to become extremely good at something. At something that is rare, hard to learn; at something that is currently high in demand and will be high in demand in the future. But there is even more value added that you can put on your I-shaped skills. You want to see the forest, not only the trees.

    T shaped internet marketer
    Example of T-shaped internet marketer.

    T-shaped skills with E power

    People who are extremely good at something and become aware of how valuable they are usually become hard to work with. You know, everyone from assholes and divas to people who want to have special benefits all the time.

    Working with people like that is hard and if you aren’t a true star or Jennifer Lopez, your value added can start fading, since teams are becoming more important than individuals.

    When it comes to complex problems in the business world that are more difficult to solve, interdisciplinary teams provide the most value. And there is no I in TEAM. Thus you need to develop a broad set of skills that are a dash over your I.

    A combination of those two, being a specialist for one thing and a generalist for a few others, especially people skills, gives a really powerful combination.

    For example, the idea of agile teams in software development is to be cross-functional and self-organizing, meaning all members need to have some specific competences, but all members also need general competences that allow them to deliver everything by themselves and work together efficiently. In agile teams, there is no room for general project managers.

    I is something you are talented at. I is something you are passionate about. I is something you love to focus on and work hard for. I is something for which you have good ideas easily. I is something at which you want to constantly improve and push the limits. I is something at which you constantly persist and keep creating new products to serve people.

    A dash over the I is your curiosity. A dash over the I is context knowledge that empowers your I. A dash over the I is leverage, since you need to work with other people, understand paradigms, the rules of life and industry, and future trends. A dash over the I is your foundation that allows you to dive as deep as possible.

    General skills that are good to have no matter what you are doing as a specialist:

    • A broad knowledge about something (law, economy, software development, linguistics…)
    • A broader context for your specialized skill set (SEO expert – e.g. internet marketing)
    • A basic knowledge of how humans and the society work (biology, psychology, sociology…)
    • Understanding the industry you work in, its trends and paradigms
    • Basic knowledge of how the business world works

    Soft skills you have to be good at, unless you are an ultra-geek or a genius:

    • Teamwork
    • Communication skills and networking, with good enough English skills
    • Time management
    • Information technology
    • Tolerance and open-mindedness

    Soft skills that provide additional value (you can even become a specialist):

    • Leadership and organization
    • Negotiations
    • Presentations and giving lectures
    • Creativity and innovation
    • The basics of marketing and sales

    There is another competence I have to emphasize, no matter how good of an I, T or dash you are. That is execution (E). Ideas have almost zero value. We all have ideas. There are too many ideas everywhere. Execution is much more important than ideas.

    It doesn’t matter that you’ve read a hundred books about swimming if you haven’t done a single stroke in the water. It doesn’t matter that you have a very rare knowledge and a thousand ideas if at the same time you’re a lazy procrastinator, unable to deliver. I and T without E are almost useless.

    Different areas of life and T-shaped skills powered by E

    Until now, we’ve more or less talked only about business and skill combinations that can get you paid the most on the market. But you can use the same concept in all other areas of life.

    Having strong foundations and diving deep into something that interests you is a winning combination in all areas of life. With strong discipline and execution, of course. Let’s look at a few examples.

    Practical examples

    If you want to be healthy, doing only one sport you love isn’t enough. You also need to know the basics of a good diet, you need to work on your core muscles, flexibility, condition etc. All that is a strong foundation that enables you to be really good at a specific sport. The T-shaped skills approach.

    If you want to have good relationships, you need to find people with common interests and the same values. But you also need to be good at communication, know how to manage difficult situations, have ideas for what to do together and so on. Good people skills are a foundation for good relationships. But in order for relationships to work in the long term, you also need more profound connections, based on common values and interests.

    It’s the same with money. You need to have a broad knowledge of how financial markets work, about different investing options etc. But if you really want to make a good return, you have to become extremely good at one type of investments. You have to be better than 90 % of other investors in the same asset class.

    We can even apply the same concept to spirituality. Before you believe in something 100 %, be it a religion or any other spiritual idea, you want to understand why having such a belief is important. You want to understand different religions, spiritual concepts etc. It’s the foundation for finding something that will really empower you to the full. It’s the foundation that will give your life a greater meaning.

    Same goes for all other areas of life. You want to do things that you know are fun for you and you are good at, but that shouldn’t stop you from constantly trying new and new things. As mentioned your T-shaped skillset must constantly become broader (- general knowledge) and narrower (| specialized knowledge) in all areas of life.

    PI-shaped skillset can take you even a step further

    Becoming a really well-shaped and strong T in life is basically a lifelong process. It’s not easy and it demands constant improvements, hard work and finding a balance between acquiring general and specific knowledge. You have to keep expanding and narrowing your T-shaped skills.

    But more and more people are aware of the T-shaped skills advantage, so there is another level where you can take your skills even a step further and provide much more value added. If you are a true achievement-oriented freak.

    The concept is the so-called PI-shaped skillset. The idea is that you are a generalist on one side, but a specialist at two or even more things on the other.

    A magical power comes from transferring ideas and knowledge from one specialist area to the other and vice versa or from combining two fields into one product. For example, you are fitness specialist and a programmer, and so you make a fitness app.

    As mentioned before, becoming extremely good at more than one thing in life is pretty damn hard. Therefore people who are capable of PI shaped skills are usually people who have developed certain competences at a young age.

    For example, playing a specific sport or a musical instrument, practicing a certain type of art or hobby, the latter combined with a completely different field of study, can give magical results and PI-shaped skills by default.

    It’s good to be aware of the competences you’ve developed over your lifetime and whether there are any good ways to combine them.

    All others of us, who hadn’t developed certain specialized skills in our youth, have to make a decision whether being a T is good enough or we want to sacrifice more time and other areas of life to become PIs.

    It’s a question everyone has to answer for themselves. Nevertheless, make sure and work hard to be more than only a dash or an I. You know you have a greater potential and it’s your duty to work hard to bring that potential to life.

    Homework

    To sum things up together with pointing out action items:

    • Find something that you’re passionate about and is/will be high in demand, focus yourself, dive deep and constantly improve. Sooner, you start to go deeper, be better. Don’t feel bad that you won’t be able to master many things, the world has just become too complex.
    • When you are an expert, never lose your general curiosity. Constantly read about your industry and other subjects. Try new things. Understand how the business world and financial markets work. Understand how we humans work. Understand trends and paradigms. Combine different areas. Have fun.
    • Take your game to a whole new level by systematically combining your different specialties. Win.

    Reaching the ultimate level – Hastag

    You want even more than pi? Well, there is one more level, the ultimate competence level. Become a hashtag #-skilled person.

    • (Dash one) A generalist in a few industries.
    • (Dash two) Develop soft skills.
    • (I one) Be a specialist at one thing.
    • (I two). Be a specialist at a completely different thing.
    • Combine all four. Win big.

  • Marketing is everything

    Markets respect only three things, no matter your age, race or any other factor: creating value, delivering value and capturing value. Creating value means product innovation, delivering value means marketing innovation and capturing value means “no money, no value” or revenue model innovations. You can be innovative on all three levels and all this combined is called the business model generation.

    Capturing value is the final act of product development, a reality check for how good you are at innovating and at delivering value. Market gives you feedback concerning how much your work is worth in dollars. But there’s a lot to do before you can capture value.

    First you need to be creative and come up with innovative solutions. You need to find problems that aren’t yet being solved or drastically improve current solutions. You need a unique value proposition and an unfair advantage, like carefully protected intellectual property. You need a very clear idea of the key partners, key activities and key resources you have to engage in order to create value and present your value proposition to the market.

    Achieving all that is hard. But it’s still the easy part. Every month, over 20,000 new products are launched. That’s more than 650 a day. Most of the launched products fail. Many of them fail because there’s no real need for them. But even more of them fail because of bad marketing and sales.

    Besides creating value, you also need to deliver value to the market. That means marketing to different customer segments, establishing relationships with customers and engaging different distribution channels. While doing that, you need to communicate your unique value proposition, tell how you are better, faster and different.

    Most entrepreneurs think that their product will just sell itself. They fall in love with their product and because they usually see it as valuable for themselves, they think it’s valuable to almost anyone in the world. That’s usually not the case. Even viral products like Facebook had a superior marketing and sales strategy at the beginning.

    Facebook team didn’t address just anyone. They started with the best colleges in the world, like Harvard, and went from college to college. After mastering one niche and customer segment, they spread to different social circles.

    In the movie The Social Network, which tells the story of Facebook, you can see how before the summer holidays, everyone was thinking about the things they will do in the summer, but only Mark Zuckerberg was thinking about his goal, namely getting as many targeted college students to subscribe to Facebook as possible. He knew how important marketing is.

    Marketing is everything

    Without marketing, there is no product at all

    First of all: without adequate marketing, people can’t even know about your product at all. If they don’t know about your product, they can’t buy it. Secondly, people see hundreds and hundreds of ads per day for many different products. Markets are saturated and millions of products are competing for consumers’ attention and wallets.

    If you want to get attention, you have to be different, unique and ten times better than all of your competition. Different and better. Thus your marketing has to be not only creative, but also supported by all the necessary metrics and optimization strategies.

    Marketing is becoming more and more complex, but it’s your only option for success after having a good product. You have to be different and you have to be a few classes better than anyone else.

    Because all of this is tough, everyone hopes for their product to go viral. It can happen, but it’s a very rare phenomena and usually a very carefully orchestrated process. Besides an awesome product, you need tons of money to test, experiment, optimize and lower your customer acquisition cost (CAC). Facebook did it, but as mentioned before, that didn’t just happen by itself, they aggressively fueled their engines of growth.

    Marketing will kill a bad product

    In the marketing world there is a saying that nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. It simply means that if the product isn’t really good, if you don’t have good customer support, if the product is not accessible to customers etc., it will go off the market sooner or later.

    Consumers have become very well-educated and demanding, therefore you must really impress potential customers with the whole experience around your product if you want them to stay loyal.

    There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s very risky to wait too long just to see if marketing will kill your product. That’s why the lean startup philosophy was also invented. Before lean startup methodologies, you had no other option but to invest tons of money into research and development, build a product, prepare all the marketing materials etc. and then after a long product development process, you could start with marketing to get feedback for whether your product sucks or not.

    The greater risk in business, the market risk, came at the very end. And if you had a bad product, a product that the market didn’t need, everything was lost, including all the money invested into the long and expensive product development process.

    The lean startup philosophy takes a different approach. It includes potential customers or, to be more exact, early evangelists, into the development of the product in the very early stages. From the very early beginning, you try to build a product that doesn’t suck, but the only way to do that is by engaging customers into the development process. Besides product development, you also do customer discovery. You start selling and marketing even before you have a product.

    You fall in love with a problem, not a solution, develop a minimum viable product, you find your early evangelists – people who are prepared to invest their energy and knowledge into giving you feedback just to have a product for their problem. After that you systematically build additional product features according to the market feedback, not your personal opinions. In the whole lean startup process, you basically start with marketing and sales on day one.

    Marketing is like riding a bike

    You have a product that the market wants (this is called the “product – market fit”), you have first customers, now what. It’s the same as riding a bike. When it comes to riding a bike, one thing is certain and that is that the moment you stop moving, you fall. It’s the same with marketing. It never ends. Besides improving your product, you have to constantly game up your marketing, creative and analytical aspect.

    Entrepreneurs must be in love with marketing and selling; even more than building products. For common people, the saying goes I think therefore I am, but for entrepreneurs, that saying is very different; it goes I sell therefore I am. The moment the entrepreneur stops selling and marketing, everything falls.

    Marketing versus sales

    Many people don’t know what the difference between marketing and sales is. I have a good analogy. You have a product. You want to convince one person to buy it. You sit down with them and you start convincing them by telling them why your product is good, why they should buy it, you explain about the special price you can offer them and so on. They have questions and objections and you try to answer them all, with a single purpose: closing the sale.

    You can do the same with a room full of people. But your product is so good that you want to sell it to thousands and thousands of people. How can you do that? You need a medium, something that will deliver your message to thousands of people.

    You can do that with ads on TV, radio etc. The downside is that you cannot put your whole one-hour sales pitch on your chosen medium. That’s why you need to get creative and format a message that will be in accordance with limitations but will still convince people. That is marketing.

    Personal marketing is everything

    Marketing is everything even in personal life

    It’s no different with marketing and selling in your personal life. First you need to be a “good product”. You have to provide value to the market. To do that, you need to develop your competences, knowledge, skills, social network, attitude, psychological capital and so on.

    The more rare competences in the greater demand you can offer to the market, in a better position you are.

    If you don’t provide value, marketing will probably do more damage than good to you in the long run. People will see you as someone who’s all bark and no bite. So first make sure that you do provide value. As mentioned, the higher the demand and the lower the supply of a specific value or competence, the better for you. After that, you need good personal marketing and selling. You need to build your personal brand.

    You market yourself with your CV, blog posts, articles, interviews, the projects you run and so on. You sell yourself in job interviews, yearly performance reviews, when dating, selling your products, with ideas and other stuff.

    In addition to that, internet and social networks have given a completely new dimension to your personal marketing. You’re probably doing personal marketing just by going online, whether you like it or not. You leave a digital trail everywhere. Everything you do online and post on your social networks is part of your personal marketing. And it will probably stay online even after you die.

    Even if you don’t use social networks, don’t want to market and sell yourself, and see all this as an act of evil, you still have some kind of a marketing strategy (and part of your life strategy). A strategy that probably leads to people not knowing how good you really are. Don’t let that happen. Trend so much that you will transcend. Except that marketing and sales are an important part of life. Learn them both.

    If you want it or not, even in personal life, marketing is everything.

    Homework

    Lessons learned:

    • Keep your creative muscle strong with regularly brainstorming (business) ideas, innovate, be different and constantly improve yourself to provide as much value to the markets as possible.
    • You must learn how to market yourself, otherwise other people won’t know what you can bring to the table. Personal branding and marketing are no evil things, they’re part of the success equation. But be careful, good marketing will quickly kill a bad product.
    • Never stop marketing yourself, marketing is like riding a bike. Nevertheless, do it in a smart way. Especially develop and market competences that are high in demand and low in supply. Stay lean and agile about it.
    • Whatever you do online, every one of your posts, becomes part of your personal brand. Use all the channels to tell your story and make sure it’s an interesting one.

  • The only way to really improve your English skills

    The world is becoming one big global village and English is its official language. Being a native English speaker is thus a really big advantage, but only a small percentage (approximately 5.5 %) of the world’s population are native English speakers.

    The rest of us have to work hard and try to develop English skills that are as close as possible to the ones of native speakers; even more so if you don’t speak any of the other big languages (100 mio +) like Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, Hindi and so on.

    Let’s look now at some semi-efficient and very efficient ways of really improving your English as well as at some additional general advice, no matter if you want to improve your reading, writing, speaking or listening skills.

    Not the best ways to improve your English skills

    The first thing that usually comes to people’s minds when they’re thinking about improving their English skills is going to a traditional English course. You meet once or twice a week and take a specific lecture, have a little bit of conversation and take a few tests. Maybe your company is even prepared to pay for that kind of a business English course. Unfortunately, that kind of an approach only works well in a few cases.

    The first case is if you know nothing about English and you’re really starting from scratch. Then it makes sense to go to a beginner course and start working on the basics and foundations. The good thing is that you can ask your tutor questions and make progress in your knowledge step by step. But as soon as you learn the basics, your learning speed goes down fast (if you can read this article that’s definitely the case), unless…

    You take it really seriously and that is the second case when a language course is useful, even if you are not a beginner. You take the course with a long-term view in mind, to keep doing it for a few years. In addition to that, you do all the exercises at home, you make some extra effort outside the classroom and so on. It’s the easiest to do while you are a student, but if you want it strong enough, it can be done even later in life. In the long term, you probably improve your English the most, but it takes a lot of time, energy, money and effort.

    Besides off-line courses, online options come up. They’re a very good and affective way to learn, but only under one condition. If you’re really disciplined. It works only if you’re able to schedule a few hours a couple of times per week just to learn English and forget everything else. With the expansion of MOOCs (massive online open courses) you have a lot of options to learn English or any other skill online, but…

    Many studies have shown that people do buy online courses, subscribe, feel good about themselves, but only a small percentage of people actually commit to regular online learning and finish a course. Because it’s hard. You have so many things to do, so many distractions, you’re tired after a working day and so on. You can subscribe to a dozen free and paid courses, but if you don’t schedule regular time to practice, everything is just a big waste.

    Let’s move on. What you also probably do is travel. While you are abroad, you are forced to use your English if there is no other bridge language. That is good, except for a few problems. You only travel from time to time, so you don’t use English regularly. If you don’t travel to English-speaking countries, you will probably speak with other people who are also on the beginner or intermediate level.

    Traveling is a good way to conquer your fear (we will talk about that in a moment) and it’s also good motivation to really learn a language since you can feel hindered due to not being able to speak fluently, but your progress won’t be really fast unless you travel very often and avoid interaction with other people.

    If you don’t travel a lot and don’t have the time, energy and discipline to do it in a long-term scheduled way, there’s a nice alternative you can take. It’s about implementing as many situations as possible into your daily life that will help you improve your English skills.

    Improve your English skills

    Surround yourself with English

    There are many things you’re already doing on a daily basis and you don’t need any additional discipline, even if you switch to the English language while doing them. It may slow you down a little bit at the beginning and take more effort, but you won’t have to do any big changes to your schedule, time sacrifices and so on. What do I have in mind?

    You probably use the computer on a daily basis. Switch everything to English. Choose English as your default language for the operating system, office programs, all applications you use etc. Do the same with your mobile phone and any other device. It’s not a revolutionary idea, but it will help you be in daily touch with English and you will be forced to improve your knowledge when you won’t understand something or will search for some function you know your computer has but you can’t find.

    What you also probably do on a weekly basis is watch some movies or TV shows. If you are a total beginner, watch them in your language with English subtitles. It may be hard to find content you like, but there must be something, if you look hard enough. If you are on the intermediate level, watch as many things as possible in the English language with English subtitles.

    Subtitles will help you understand everything, especially in TV shows where they use more complex language or speak more quietly. When you master that, start watching everything in English without subtitles. You can do the same when listening to music. Don’t just listen to the melody, try to understand the lyrics.

    The next thing you probably do every day is drive a car or take public transport. Instead of listening to music or playing games, you can listen to audiobooks in English or listen to some English skills podcasts. You can now find most books in an audio format. If you don’t like books, you probably do read daily news or articles. You can find apps like Blinkist, where you can listen to current news and popular online articles. What’s really good is that you can look at the text while you listen to audio.

    When you’re sitting in front of the computer, you also definitely read some news and search for different things. Subscribe to at least one English newspaper or magazine or news site about one topic of your interest. Don’t just scan it, really read it. Slowly. If you don’t understand something, look it up in the dictionary or google it. As a matter of fact, you should google everything in English. Thus you will slowly start using English more and more.

    There is one very cute thing you can do if you are somewhere at the beginning. Somehow you have to slowly force your brain to think in English as well. You know that in an AgileLean Lifestyle, we like to visualize everything. What you can do is take post-it notes, write an English word on each one and stick them to all the things around your home.

    Even if you already know the words, it will remind your brain that there is one more language you want to master. I know it’s a little bit silly, but as I’ve said many times: if you want extraordinary results, you have to take an extraordinary approach.

    Deal with your fear and mistakes

    You do most of the things mentioned above completely alone in a very controlled environment. There is no real interaction. People won’t even bother you with questions like why are you reading a book in English etc. But if you really want to improve your English skills, you have to go a step further from your comfort zone. You have to deal with your fear of looking stupid and your fear of making mistakes.

    Every master was once a disaster. There is nothing you can do about that. If you want to progress faster, you need the self-confidence to engage with people and make mistakes. 99 % of the people, for example native speakers, won’t even make a big deal out of your mistakes. They will help you and make you feel as comfortable as possible.

    There are a few people who may find it funny when you make a mistake, for example your best friends, but you shouldn’t be bothered by that. It’s only because they’re jealous of your awesome character. ;)

    What you will find out and may frustrate you is that you will be doing the same mistakes over and over again. It takes some time to make new brain synapses, but once you do it, they’re there for almost forever. Thus you have to be patient and persistent. Anyway, an important step on the way of improving your English is getting over fear and starting to engage with people and some serious reading material.

    Learning is fun

    Getting serious about improving your English skills

    You’ve conquered your fears. You want to make real progress regarding your English skills. Here is what you should do.

    Read as much as possible in English every day. Don’t read a single sentence in your mother tongue, except for some e-mails if you have to. Forget about local news, local TV stations, local magazines etc. They’re only in your way of becoming better at English and a big waste of time anyway. Start reading everything in English.

    Equip yourself with all the modern gadgets, especially a good smartphone (I’d recommend an iPhone). Subscribe to blogs, newsletters, buy books only in the English language, on Amazon for example, and read them with your Kindle app.

    Take advantage of every moment you have to read something in English. Mix light reading material, like blogs, with some heavier English literature, like Dickens or Hemingway or Joyce or scientific articles written by native speakers. If you want to improve your English, you have to read some literature that’s one level higher from your skills.

    In addition to reading everything in English, the best way to improve your English skills, especially writing skills, is to write. Start writing in English as much as possible. Start your own blog in English or, if you don’t want to publish anything yet, start writing your own private journal. Change the language of your posts on social media.

    Make some friends from abroad and write them as many e-mail messages in English as possible. Try to become friends with people who are better at English than you are and IM with them regularly. Join online forums and do some writing there.

    One of the reasons why I’ve started this blog is to improve my English skills. I get all of my articles proofread, so I see clearly the mistakes I’m making. I get frustrated because I make a lot of the same mistakes, but they are disappearing one by one as time passes. Get your texts proofread if you have the resources.

    If you want to improve your overall English skills, you have to read in English as much as possible. If you want to improve your writing skills, you have to start writing. And if you want to improve your speaking skills, you have to speak English as much as possible.

    The best way to do the latter is to make as many foreign friends as possible. You should make new international friends and speak with them in English as much as possible.

    One thing that I’ve noticed is that if I spend time talking with people who are better at English than I am, my skills go up. If I talk to people who speak worse than I do, I subconsciously level down my language as well. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend time with people who speak worse than you. It’s your job to help them, much like others are helping you.

    A general rule in life is that you should spend one third of your time with people who are better than you, one third of your time with people who are on the same level as you and one third of the time with people who are not as good as you.

    You can take speaking practice even a step further. What you can do is to make an agreement with some of your best friends to speak and IM only in English, although you could communicate in your native language much more easily. It may be weird at the beginning, but who likes normal and easy anyway.

    You can add some grammar books, mobile or web applications and language courses on top of that. But if you aren’t reading, writing and speaking in English on a daily basis, all other effort is more or less a big waste of your time. You should try to write, read and speak in English as much as possible every day and on top of that have some fun with mobile applications that help you with your grammar, idioms, pronunciations, phrases etc.

    You should develop the following mindset: Every sentence you write, every text you read, and every word that comes from your mouth in your native language (with all due respect toward it) is a lost opportunity to improve your English.

    It’s not that I have something against native language (like it may sound), but you probably already speak it quite well. Besides that, the world is becoming completely flat with English and Mandarin as the two dominating languages. The better you are at one of them or even at both, the more opportunities you will have in life.

    And don’t forget: writing in a new language is pretty similar to fitness. It’s hard and mentally exhausting at first. It’s even harder if you aren’t very talented for languages and you’ve always been more of a numbers guy, for example.

    You just have to build up your own capacities to the point at which you think, write or speak in English as effortlessly as you do in your mother tongue. To do that, try to think about things in English before you think about them in your native tongue. It will get you thinking faster. And try to speak English in your mind as much as possible.
    Frank is my English pronunciation coach and I highly recommend him:

    TGC-Ad

    Getting to the mastery level

    Reading, speaking and writing in English will definitely get you very far, but probably not to the mastery level. The best way to get to the mastery level is, as mentioned at the beginning, to take long-term professional courses and thus build your knowledge step by step over the years.

    It’s even better if you can study English in college, but that’s not the best possible option for many people. Nevertheless, there are still some alternatives. It all just takes a lot of time and effort.

    Buy yourself a book of grammar, vocabulary, idioms or any other part of the English language and start studying. Do it by yourself, professionally, as you would if you were going to courses or classes. You also have many online courses, but traditional books can do magic as well.

    If you don’t have the discipline to do that regularly, on a weekly basis, take a whole week off and instead of going to holidays, dedicate your time to improving English. You can also go to summer camps or other intensive courses. If you decide for that, what’s really important is that you implement the new things you’ve learned into everyday use, otherwise you will forget them in the blink of an eye.

    There are three more things that will help you get to the mastery level. The first one is reading out loud. You may feel stupid while doing it, but it’s still a very effective way to progress. Before you start asking yourself how stupid you are for reading out loud, remember that Demosthenes, a Greek orator, used to speak with rocks in his mouth to improve his stuttering.

    The second thing you can do is to have a professional debate. In a professional debate, you have to shape your thoughts, you have to find the right sentences, you’re under stress and so on. Having a passionate debate with a native English speaker can be a real challenge that will level up your game.

    Having really good English speakers for friends, people who won debating contests, will also help you a lot. Surround yourself with people who will empower you and help you improve.

    You need to know around 500 words and a few grammar rules to do basic communication in English. These 500 words are also the words that are most commonly used in everyday life. But if you really want to become a master, you have to go out of this everyday circle. Here are some ideas how.

    Learn as many words as possible from one category that’s not in everyday use, like colors. Learn technical words from a certain field. Learn slang language with Urban dictionary. Regularly read literature and complex texts from different fields of interest.

    What you’ll also find out is that you pretty much use the same words over and over again. Try to constantly learn new words. One way to do it is to use Thesaurus. When you feel like you’re using the same word too frequently, look for synonyms. Soon, you will start using more and more new words.

    The last advice I have concerns improving your speaking skills. Record yourself and listen to your pronunciation. Hearing yourself speak will help you correct your accent. Listen how native speakers pronounce words.

    Last but not least, the one and only, by far the best way to really learn English, including improving your pronunciation, is to move to the English-speaking country you like the most for a few years. That’s also one thing you should consider and that may help you advance fast in life. It’s not easy, but it’s definitely worth your while.

    Learn English with Technology

    Leveraging technology

    If you have enough discipline, time and a fresh mind, you can do everything online, on your computer, tablet and mobile phone. Reading, speaking, listening etc. But only if you really want it badly enough. Since I know that you do, below is a list of the best online resources that can help you get to the mastery level in your English, step by step.

    But don’t burden yourself with too many resources. Take an hour or two, check and try a few different resources, pick the ones you like best and then stick to them. You cannot consume the whole internet and if you take too much on your shoulders, you will never really start learning.

    General online English resources

    Tools

    Tutors and speaking

    You can also join many Facebook groups, meet some new friends and practice your English.

    Mobile and tablet apps

    You can find tons of other apps in your application store. You just have to invest some energy into finding the one that suits you best.

    Podcasts

    YouTube and other videos

    Kindle books

    MOOC

    At the end, remember that it makes sense to make the process of improving your English skills more like a game than a chore. Your brains function much better if things are fun. You have to take it seriously, you have to be committed, but it should feel more like an exciting challenge and an enjoyable activity than struggle and hard work.

  • Success brings success and failure brings failure, but…

    Let’s start with the statement that life isn’t fair. I think almost everybody would agree on that. But if life isn’t fair to everybody, then it somehow is fair to everyone?

    Well, not so fast, this is just a little mind game to open your mind. Now let’s try to really analyze whether or not life isn’t fair.

    On the micro-level (everyday life) we really could say that life is fair. We all have our struggles, we all have to face obstacles, unfulfilled desires and disappointments.

    The extent of the challenges we have to face is very different for each of us, but we all lose some and win some. Nobody can live on this planet without having problems and facing obstacles.

    No matter the goals that you have in life, if you lose it hurts and if you win it feels good. Losing is a bitch but you have to face it from time to time.

    We can also say that the harder you work, the more that you invest into achieving your goals, the higher is the probability of achieving those goals. Reward comes to those who work the hardest (and smartest). And all of that is quite fair.

    The story is completely different on the macro-level. When I say “macro-level” I mean the environment you were born in (your country, your family etc.). That is the level where life isn’t as fair and you have to deal with it somehow.

    I am talking about:

    • Genetic lottery (your DNA)
    • Your parents or people who raised you
    • The country you were born in and its cultural legacy
    • The social system you are functioning in
    • Market trends and geographic trends

    The biggest advantage you can have in life is where and to whom you are born.

    On this “macro-level”, the sad general statistic is that success brings even more success and failure brings even more failure.

    There are exceptions, of course, but they’re pretty rare. It’s quite obvious where the problem lies. You have zero or very little influence on these “macro” factors but they have a great influence on your life. You can influence some of them to some extent later in life, but only with extremely strong willpower.

    We can say that all of these factors working to your advantage are simply privilege and luck. And not all people have that.

    These factors are basically the starting point in your life. The worse the starting point and the greater the goals, the smarter and harder you have to work. Let’s see why.

    Positive and negative spiral

    Very important phenomena in life are concentration, acceleration and leverage. These phenomena are the reason why success brings even more success and failure brings more failure.

    Advantage accumulates. That is to say concentration, acceleration and leverage lead to either a positive or a negative spiral in life.

    Based on your genes, markets and your primary and secondary socialization and other factors, you find yourself on either an upwards or a downwards spiral in different areas of life. Turning the course from down to up is quite hard, sometimes almost impossible.

    I don’ want this to sound so negative, since there are many things you CAN DO to change the course of your life – but sometimes it takes super human effort.

    We will look at some ideas how to do that soon but before that, let’s take a look at some practical examples, very stereotypical and extreme, just to very clearly show the point I am trying to make with the downward/upward spiral.

    If you are born in a rich family with supportive and loving parents who do sports with their kids, the following will happen. From a young age onwards your parents will encourage you to do sports, eat healthy, they will stimulate you to develop your talents, they will pay for the best schooling, help you with connections, mentor you etc.

    Even more than that, having access to funds and having a good relationship with your parents also helps you develop good self-esteem, self-image and self-worth. Parents encourage you to blossom in life, they prepare you for challenges. I know that there is no such thing as a perfect family, but generally speaking successful parents also try to raise their kids into successful individuals.

    On the other hand if you are born in a poor family, with bad health habits, a lack of knowledge and resources, and maybe even constant pressure and fighting, your starting point is very different. Bad health habits and the fighting lead to a weak immune system, poverty usually prevents you from investing into long-term skills, your access to the best education is very limited, and so on.

    You have zero guidance in life, since your parents have no experience in how it feels to be successful and how to prosper. Sooner or later you start to lag behind other people who are in a much better position. Bad environment also brings additional psychological challenges and other factors that hold you back.

    In the first case, success concentrates in all areas, there are many leverages available to the individual and the speed of achieving new goals is extremely high. In the second case, problems accumulate in all areas of life, there are no leverages available to the individual and achieving goals is slow and gradual.

    • Money accumulates
    • Attention accumulates (fame, power, etc.)
    • Love accumulates

    Also, only at much slower rates:

    • Health accumulates
    • Knowledge accumulates
    • Everything else accumulates

    Everything accumulates when you reach a certain point (the tipping point) in your life.

    How hard it is to reach that point depends on your starting point and the leverages available to you. The better the starting point and the more leverages you have at your disposal, the faster your progress and the sooner the concentration can take place.

    That’s definitely not fair. But there is also good news in all that. The world is not designed to be fair.

    The world is not designed to be fair. The world is designed to reward those who master its rules.

    Now let’s look what to do:

    • If you have a good starting point in life
    • If you have a bad starting point in life

    What to do if you have a good starting point

    A study has shown that people who are exposed to privilege and luck in life usually aren’t even aware of it. They attribute their success much more to themselves and their competences than circumstances. If the success is pretty massive, people can even become cocky and conceited.

    If you’ve had a good starting point in life, be very grateful and appreciate it. Be aware of it. If you were born in a well-developed and stable country, if you have loving and supportive parents, if you received good education, if you have a supportive environment, good genes etc. be aware of that and don’t take it for granted.

    After being aware of it and grateful for it, the second step concerns what you’re going to do about it. The reason for a good starting point is not that you can lay back and enjoy it more than others. The privileged situation was entrusted to you so you could achieve even more than others in a certain way.

    You are in a position to create much more value and while doing that, helping the world become a better place. You shouldn’t waste any of your talents or leverages.

    You should also know that resting on your laurels means nothing but slowly losing your starting position. If you only fool around and don’t take your life seriously, you will sooner or later come face to face with the proverb that wealth (or success) doesn’t last more than three generations.

    Wealth (or success or any advantage) doesn’t last more than three generations.

    No matter how many times you succeed and win, stay as humble as possible and never get cocky. In the business world, it oftentimes happens that a businessperson uses the same winning formula over and over again.

    They become so confident using this particular formula that they don’t see the changes in the environment and circumstances that occur sooner or later. At some point, the formula doesn’t work anymore.

    You can find numerous cases in which a businessperson bet everything they have on a formula even after several cases of success and consequently lost everything. Don’t let success cloud your judgment.

    That’s why you need to do regular reflections on your actions. That’s why you need to stay humble. Definitely self-confident, but humble.

    What to do if you have a bad starting point

    The story is a little bit different if you don’t have such a good starting point. The worse the starting point, the more you have to play life in the hard mode.

    The greater your goals, the smarter and harder you have to work. You somehow also have to make up for starting behind others.

    The good news is that easy times very much soften people up, while on the other hand tougher situations can build up your character.

    Tough life situations build up character.

    A tougher situation can really develop your character, if the situations aren’t too tough, like war for example, and if you keep fighting and never give up. But trust me, I have seen many people whom life killed inside with challenges that were just too much. That is topic for another post.

    I only have some ideas for what to do if you want to be really successful and your starting point was not so good: you should keep fighting and make up in the areas. Here is how:

    Excel at something

    Life gave us all talents and gifts. That’s quite fair. You have to find your talents and develop them. The talents aren’t something miraculous.

    They’re not something that you discover and soon afterwards, your life becomes a success story. There are no shortcuts.

    Talents are simply the things that you are naturally good at (numbers, words, talking, building …). After knowing where your talents lie, you have to work hard to develop them.

    Developing your talents to the point where you really excel at something is the best way to start turning a downwards spiral upwards. Because if you excel at something, two things happen.

    The first one is called the “halo effect”. The halo effect means that if you’re really good at something, people attribute you better qualities and assume that you’re good at other things as well. Thus you are exposed to more opportunities.

    The other thing that happens is that exceling at something has a good positive influence on your self-confidence and all other areas of life. Basically success starts bringing success.

    Therefore the first thing to do is to find you talents and start exceling at something. It may even take you a few years to excel at something, but it doesn’t matter.

    Focus yourself and start building up your character and skills. Level up your game. You should also very carefully consider where you will apply your talents. You want to apply them to markets that are growing and rising.

    Start with small wins

    A person who wins one challenge has a greater probability of winning the next one. A win leads to better self-confidence, better body chemistry and higher motivation as well as to better readiness for the next challenge.

    It’s better to win small ten times than to lose big one time. Thus you have to be aware of your bad starting point and not try to compete with people who have a much better starting point right at the very beginning. You have to be smarter than that and make progress step by step.

    We know three zones in life. One is called the “comfort zone”. It’s the zone where you have mastered everything and there are no challenges at all. The second one is called the “learning zone”. It’s the zone with challenges that are just big enough to allow you to make progress and grow. The more you are active in the learning zone, the more your comfort zone expands.

    The third zone is called the “panic zone”. If you go from the comfort zone straight into the panic zone, you will burn yourself out. You could easily lose, damage your self-confidence and you could subconsciously start giving a negative connotation to a specific challenge, meaning you will not try next time, even in a smaller dimension.

    Thus you have to be much smarter. You have to know you starting point, and where your learning and panic zones begin. You want to take small steps and win them one by one, slowly improving your skills.

    Your wins will start to accumulate, your comfort zone will start to broaden, and over the years you will be able to catch up to most other people who had had a better starting point.

    Measure your progress exclusively to your past self.

    The more wins that you accumulate, the bigger the risks that you can afford. You still have to be careful to not take risks that are so big they can completely ruin you. And it can happen.

    For every success story you see in the media, there are thousands of people who failed really badly. Some of them so badly that they won’t be able to rise up ever again. You don’t want to do that to yourself.

    Increase your chances of getting lucky

    You have to be very assertive when increasing your chances of getting lucky. The more targets you want to hit, the more shooting you will have to do.

    Keep developing your inner resources, learn sales, learn marketing, build up your personal brand, network as much as possible, leverage social networks, expose yourself, stand for something, integrate yourself into the community of successful people, and so on. Innovate your way out of shitty situations.

    Many studies have shown the importance of the so-called hubs, where concentration and acceleration take place. In the start-up world we call these hubs incubators, start-up accelerators and technology parks.

    These are the points where talented people, information, resources, technology, good energy and the right values are concentrated. It’s the same in all other areas of life. You have clubs, associations and institutes for nearly everything, from business to health and hobbies.

    You want to put yourself in the centre of such hubs and then start shooting for your first wins. While doing that, you have to remember that marketing is everything and that whatever you’re doing in life, whatever your goals are, good sales and marketing will always accelerate your way to success.

    Under the condition that the product you’re selling (you) is the real deal. Otherwise marketing can kill you really fast. There is no fake it ‘til you make it.

    Here’s another trick. If you want to succeed faster, you also have to fail faster. Going from failure to failure without losing motivation until you succeed is supposed to be the formula for success. But we have very clearly seen that losing doesn’t bring you anything good. That’s why you need to introduce the search mode into your life.

    If you do the search mode correctly, there is no failure, just validated learning. Consequently there are no bad influences on your self-confidence and other success factors. And as said before, the more successes that you accumulate and the better position that you are in, the bigger the risks you can take and the more you can learn.

    Spiral Stairs to Light

    Get to know yourself and get rid of negative behavioral patterns

    An important part of getting to know yourself is identifying your negative behavioral patterns. If you were not brought up in a loving, supportive environment and weren’t raised by model parents, you probably have many destructive negative behavioral patterns.

    Here are the ten most popular ones:

    • Negative thinking
    • Self-criticism and self-labeling
    • Low self-confidence and passive obedience
    • Hopelessness and helplessness (not being aware of your personal power)
    • Overwhelming yourself and burning yourself out
    • Perfectionism
    • Fear of failure and fear of success
    • Fear of criticism and disapproval (looking for outside confirmation and being spineless)
    • Low frustration tolerance
    • Guilt and self-blame
    • Scarcity mindset

    All this sh*t is dragging you down, again clearly demonstrating how bad brings more bad. The bad environment you were brought up in (I hope not) results in bad behavioral patterns which then further result in bad life situations.

    Thus you want to deal with your inner negative psychological state. In adulthood, your outer world is merely a reflection of your inner world and vice versa.

    Read personal development books, schedule a consultation with a cognitive therapist, identify your negative behavioral patterns and start working on them. Otherwise your life can become a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Now you probably understand why the greatest battles won are not those won over physical enemies but over ourselves. You can be your own worst enemy. Don’t let that happen. It’s not fair but you have to deal with it.

    Never go to war, especially with yourself.

    Start changing your environment

    At some point in life, you have to start creating an environment that supports you. What really sucks is that if you hadn’t had a supportive environment at home, you will probably subconsciously look for the same unsupportive environment in all areas of life.

    Simply because it’s the environment most familiar to you and you know how to survive it. It’s the same situation when people look for abusive relationships because they had that kind of a relationship at home. That sucks big time and again it clearly shows how bad brings more bad.

    You have to become conscious of that fact and first work hard on your personal development and your subconscious tendencies. You need to build your first mutually supportive relationship, learn how to handle that kind of positive relationships and then work further on the next one and the one after that.

    That is how you change the spiral. It may take you years to completely change your environment, but that is the only way if you want to make positive changes in your life.

    It’s the same with other elements of your surroundings. People are the most important factor but they aren’t the only important one. Find market trends that will support you. Find countries where you function best.

    Nevertheless, the world has become a global village and the internet is opening up many possibilities for you to work internationally. Decorate your home so it supports you in the process of achieving your goals. Use apps on your phone and computer that support you etc.

    Actively construct your environment step by step and make it as supportive as possible.

    Rituals Celebration

    Rituals

    There is one more thing you can do that will help you on the difficult path to a more positive course in your life. Studies have shown that nations that go through traumatic experiences heal faster if they have strong rituals that help them go through this tough situation and any others that might be coming.

    It’s not always the case, but it quite often is. You have to find out for yourself. The key point is that rituals make you calmer and more stable. If they have that kind of effect on you, practice them and it will help you a lot.

    Here are ten ideas for that sort of rituals:

    • Being grateful and thankful for what you have
    • Celebrating every small win with people who also fight challenging situations in life
    • Spending time with people you love and knowing what you are fighting for
    • Helping other, less fortunate people, since there is always someone who is in an even worse position than you are
    • Meditating
    • Reflecting on your life
    • Believing in a higher power
    • Regularly reviewing your past victories
    • Taking time off after intense periods of time
    • Saying “fuck it” and surrendering to life

    Conclusion

    Knowing and understanding are the first steps towards a better life. We have analyzed why success brings more success and inequality brings more inequality.

    The bad news is that all that is unfortunately true to some extent. The good news is that you have the personal power to change the course of your life. You can change a negative spiral into a positive one. It’s not easy, but it can be done.

    At the end of the day, you can come out of difficult situations much smarter, stronger, wiser and with a much bigger capacity for creating value and making the world a better place to live. Because you understand good as well as bad situations in life.

    For the conclusion, let me give you an example that shows a pretty similar thing:

    If you look at the list of the most economically successful countries in the world, you can see that there are two types of countries at the top. The first type are countries with many natural resources, especially oil.

    These are the countries with a head start. It’s the same if you are born extremely beautiful, smart or with many resources.

    The second type are countries with much less natural resources that had innovated their way to the top. They are more creative, more cunning, more organized, more assertive, more connected, more supportive towards talented people, more hard-working and so on.

    Their success is not based on outer resources but on inner ones. The good news is that with inner resources, you can always make more of the outer ones.

    So who do you think will be in the better position when natural resources run out? Of course those countries that have invested natural resources really smartly into other assets like knowledge, innovation, talent etc.

    And those countries without natural resources that didn’t settle for an inferior situation but rather decided to fight and come out of the situation stronger than ever. You should do the same, no matter your starting point.

    I hope these articles gave you some good ideas how you can change your life direction, enter the positive spiral of life and accelerate your way to success.

    It’s not easy, but it can be done. Success brings success and failure brings failure, but there are many things you can do to turn a failure into a success. I wish you all the luck possible.

  • The most effective way to learn new things

    The AgileLeanLife way of thinking makes you do everything as effectively and efficiently as possible. Learning is no exception, so let’s look at the most effective ways to learn new things.

    When you think of learning, you often first think of reading or even listening to lectures. But in reality, there are 7 different methods of learning, of which reading and listening to lectures are actually the least effective.

    Amongst the seven methods of learning, the first four methods encompass the so-called passive learning, while the other three fall into the category of active learning. Active learning is significantly more efficient than passive learning, which is why it’s always necessary to combine passive methods with active ones. Let’s look at these 7 methods and approximately how much of the learned content actually stays in your memory.

    Passive methods of learning

    Listening to lectures: 5 %

    You learn and remember by far the least by attending lectures where you are a passive listener. That is a well-known fact and with the fast advancement of technology, the techniques of formal education will also have to change drastically. The world’s best universities already put a lot more emphasis on discussions and other forms of learning. When attending lectures, you also lose a lot of time by being late, preparing materials etc. And you memorize less than 5 %.

    Reading: 10 %

    Reading is definitely an extremely important method of learning. If you read regularly each day, you do a lot for your competence, wisdom, rhetoric etc. Nevertheless, when it comes to the context of learning, you memorize only a very small percentage of what you read in the long term. There is also the important fact that you can read thousands of books about a certain skill, yet you won’t master it. A ton of theory cannot compare to a pinch of experience.

    Reading is important, but there’s more to it than that: it’s important that you are an active reader. This means that you connect what you are reading with other content you had already read and your own experiences in life (for example doing a mind map and connect new knowledge to your previous knowledge). You also have to be an active reader and at the same time very critical towards everything you read. You most benefit from reading if you also try out the things you read about. If the things actually work, you keep them, if they don’t, you discard them.

    The positive property of reading is that it can also be a relaxation. And on the top of relaxation you still practice your imagination and vocabulary while doing it.

    Listening to audio recordings or watching video material: 20 %

    The next method of learning concerns audio and video content. Watching television definitely doesn’t count here. The television is a multi-media ad display that’s programming you into consumeristic zombie. Besides, the ones living real life are the ones on the other side of the TV screen. This is why the only sensible thing to do is to throw the television away. An exception is definitely a good movie for relaxation.

    In fact, when we come to this method of learning, we are mostly talking about educational audio and video content. Your smartphone can quickly become an educational device, as can your car.

    Some gurus of personal development simply call cars a “university on wheels”. While it doesn’t make sense to overburden yourself, you spend hours and hours each day in queues, waiting in traffic etc. and don’t do anything productive. Audio content is more than welcome then. If you are interested in how and where to get audio content, look at Amazon’s Audible.

    Watching a documentary or an intellectual debate can also be incredibly educational.

    Demonstration: 30 %

    The next level of passive education is a demonstration. If somebody actually shows you how to do something, you will remember significantly more than if you just read about it or saw it on video. This is of course why private lessons are such a good business. If you find a mentor, a tutor or a coach who shows you how to do something, you will definitely increase your competence.

    A demonstration of how to do something is truly effective, which is why we also saw a boom in mentorship. It’s a way of helping someone improve their competence that gives significantly better results than consulting. When mentoring, you show someone how to do something and then “force” them, in a nice way, to repeat it.

    Brains at work
    You should combine all different methods of learning

    Active methods of learning

    Active methods are significantly more effective than passive methods. Each of the active methods is at least five times more effective than, for example, reading. Though active methods are a bit more demanding, the result at the end is that much better.

    Group discussion: 50 %

    How does a real group discussion look like? You have to defend your own opinion in an intellectual discussion. Before you can defend it, you have to shape it. When doing this, you have to think a lot and read a lot. Your opinions are rebutted by others who use their own arguments. You have to think about that, apply it to your own experiences and, if necessary, change your opinion. This is why discussions are an incredibly effective way of learning, especially if the group members have had completely different experiences and hold different believes in their lives and they challenge our point of view.

    Real life experience: 75 %

    At this point, we should well repeat the fact that an entire ton of theory cannot compare to a pinch of experience. Real life experience is by far the fastest way of learning and improving your competence. It’s throwing yourself into the water and starting to swim. But at the same time you combine learning in other ways. There is nothing more effective than proactively going into action.

    You cannot understand the things you haven’t experience in life.

    Teaching others after real life experience: 90 %

    However, you learn the most when you start teaching others (after real life experience). You learn and remember the most once you give lectures or write books or maybe even start a blog. You become expert at something.

    Well, this is mostly true when it comes to gaining knowledge, you can still develop skills more or less only on the basis of experience. Giving countless lectures on the topic of leadership for example doesn’t help you at all if you hadn’t ever been in the position of a leader.

    But it is true that teaching others is the fastest way to gaining knowledge, since you have to master a specific topic very well and addition to that of reprogramming your own subconscious and thus it’s the fastest way of embarking on the path of new experience. Teaching others about something forces you to experience it sooner or later.

    Combination of different methods is the real winner

    But the division of learning into individual methods, especially active and passive ones, shouldn’t lead you to learning by using a single method. When improving your competence, you achieve by far the biggest effect if you learn with a combination of several of the stated methods, passive as well as active ones. One time one method suits you more, some other time another. The most effective way to learn new things is combining all seven methods of learning.

    You learn different things in different ways. You can strongly increase your competence by connecting, repeating and finally by checking with your own experiences in reality. You are the investment with the highest potential yield in this world. So invest in yourself. And at the same time enjoy improving your abilities. The more you know, the more you’re worth.