Knowledge is not power. Applying knowledge is power. Learning is useless. Validated learning is everything. If there is a single skill you have to learn to be massively successful in the 21st century, it’s validated learning. It’s the only way to build a superior life strategy.
The concept of validated learning comes from the lean startup. The validated learning loop helps quickly validate or reject core business hypotheses. Instead of blindly trusting your business idea, you build a minimum viable product and then use a special set of metrics to validate the effect. You build a feature, you measure the results and so you learn what to do next – persevere or pivot.
The same process of learning can be extremely useful in personal life. I use it all the time, to learn extremely fast and to get insights into what works for me and what doesn’t.
Validated learning in personal life
Validated learning in personal life is a process of acquiring a new chunk of knowledge, immediately putting it into practice and then measuring results to validate the effects – if there is any value or not.
What you learn in the process should also lead you to the next step, to the next chunk of knowledge to acquire and test. It’s a loop that enables you extremely fast personal growth and progress towards your goals.
The process or the personal validated learning loop consists of three steps:
Acquiring knowledge chunks
Immediate implementation
Validated learning based on metrics
Here’s a table defining all three categories in more detail (with examples):
Knowledge chunks
Immediate implementation
Validated learning
Creative ideas
Self-reflection and analysis
Life metrics
Listening to lectures
Engaging discussion
Superior insights
Listening to audio books
Scenario-based thinking
Works
Reading
Changing behavior
Doesn’t work
Watching educational videos
Performing an experiment
Makes me happy
Witnessing a demonstration
Trying something new
Doesn’t make me happy
Observing
Changing values or angle
Leads me towards my goals
Doing research
Teaching others
Distracts me from my goals
Now let’s dive deeper into each of the three categories to explore why they’re important.
Acquiring knowledge chunks
The scientifically proven best way to learn is to use the chunking strategy. Chunks are small units of knowledge that go logically together and that you can easily practice, revise and remember. You break larger pieces of knowledge you want to learn into small chunks.
By mastering each chunk separately, you can effectively learn the whole body of knowledge without feeling overwhelmed or losing comprehension.
There are many ways how you can acquire knowledge chunks. I often call this “downloading” knowledge. You can listen to lectures or audio books, you can read books or articles, you might watch educational videos or even be present at a live demonstration of how to do something. You can also gain knowledge by observing, doing research and let’s add your own creative ideas into the knowledge chunks family.
Here’s the important part. If you stop at this point, you only learn. And that’s more or less useless. You have to take a step further to turn knowledge into real power. You have to implement it and measure where the new knowledge is leading you.
Immediate implementation
When you acquire a new chuck of knowledge, you want to put it to the test as quickly as possible. But you want to do implementation in a smart way. Thus the first next step after “downloading” knowledge is to process it.
You process knowledge by connecting a new chunk to whatever you already know, with self-reflection, by starting a discussion, analyzing how the new knowledge can be used or applied, and so on. The bottom line of processing knowledge is the strategy of how to best put the knowledge to practice.
Then comes the most important part – actually applying knowledge to practice. When it comes to applying knowledge to practice, there is a simple rule. If you don’t change your thoughts, words and actions or, in other words, behavior, you haven’t learned anything new.
If you don’t change your behavior, you haven’t learned anything new.
Well, I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself, because you should permanently change your behavior only after validated learning. First you have to see if the new chunk of knowledge is useful in any way.
You put new knowledge to the test by conducting controllable experiments. You try a new behavior, a way to look at things or you put knowledge to practice and then observe and measure the results. You gather internal and external feedback. Let’s look at a few examples (from my own life).
Practical examples
You read an article on how to write effective headlines. You immediately apply it to your articles and measure click-through rates.
In a psychology book, you read about an exercise on how to talk back to your inner critic. You immediately take a piece of paper and do the exercise. Then you measure how good do you feel.
You learn a new coding thing you can do in CSS or Python and you immediately try it on one of your landing pages. You brainstorm where and when you can use the same feature.
You get an idea for how to improve your relationship with your spouse with an active constrictive response and you immediately start practicing it in communication and measure the relationship index.
You read relationship advice that when meeting new people “there is no ice to break”, we’re all already connected, and so you never look at unknown people the same again. You immediately see every person like there is already an existing connection so you can easily talk to them.
You do research on intermittent fasting and how it can help you lose weight, and you immediately try it for 14 days to see the results. You measure your body fat percentage etc.
You read an idea about how to measure relationship drama and immediately develop the idea much further in a blog post. You do an immediate assessment for your key relationships.
Validated learning based on metrics
The process doesn’t yet end with applying knowledge. When you change your behavior, you have to measure if applying knowledge makes sense and if it works for you as a unique individual. Be aware that many times it doesn’t and you have to revert back to old patterns or try new things.
There’s nothing wrong if things don’t work as planned, that’s also part of validated learning. Every small failure leads you one step closer to success. Actually you never fail, you just find a way that doesn’t work. That means you’re a step closer to the right solution that will work.
The point is, if you want to do validated learning, you have to measure where applying new knowledge is leading you. Based on that, you decide whether to pivot or not. There are two types of feedback you can lean on:
External feedback
Internal feedback
Internal feedback is all the feedback that you gather with self-reflection and it comes from within, from yourself. These are metrics that show your happiness levels (happiness index, for example), your changes in competence levels, whether you’re getting closer to your personal goals, and we can also include feedback from your body and many other personal life metrics.
External feedback is all the feedback you gather from your environment; from the people you work with to how your changes are related to environmental paradigms. You want to make sure that your environment supports you and that you adjust your strategy and tactics to the point where they enable you to achieve your goals as smoothly as possible.
You measure your feedback based on different metrics. Metrics can be qualitative or quantitative, but they show you real progress and the direction you’re going to. Below are some examples of life metrics you can measure. The best way is to analyze all the feedback you gather regularly during bi-weekly self-reflection intervals.
Health
Money
Exercise frequency
Potential progress of illness
Managing your body weak points
Regular blood test
Body composition (% of fat, muscle size)
Aerobic endurance (run a mile, VO2 max)
Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test)
Muscular strength (one-rep max)
Flexibility (yoga poses)
Personal income statement
Earned income
Passive income
Portfolio income
Expenses
Taxes
Monthly plus/minus
Net-worth
Assets
Doodads
Liabilities (Debt)
Career
Relationships
Your company position (employment contract vs. organizational chart)
Public influence (number of interviews, public ratings)
Social media influence (Klout score)
Work enjoyment (from 1 to 10)
Professional connections
Your legacy (number of positive ideas that influenced local/global society)
Number of close friends you have
Time spent with the people you love
How much you do for your partner (massage, dinner, etc.)
How much you get out of a relationship (giving and receiving must be in balance)
How often you say I love you
How often you give a compliment to your partner
How often you make love
Competences
Mind/Emotions
Number of books you read
Number of seminars you visit
Domain knowledge you possess
Number of skills you master
Number of tech skills
Number of creative ideas you have
Your IQ
Your EQ
How well you are able to control your mind (your maximum meditating time)
Your daily Happiness index
Number of negative thoughts daily (with use of emotional accounting)
Dominating cognitive distortions
Number of new things you tried in life
Number of breathtaking experiences you have encountered etc.
Other metrics as part of your life strategy (countries you traveled to, number of languages you speak etc.)
How you should measure your success in life? Compare…
Your current metrics on different life areas
Your past metrics on different life areas (past month, year etc.)
Don’t compare yourself to others too much (only healthy competition is okay I guess)
Besides gaining superior insights about yourself and your environment, effective learning also has to always result in permanent changes in your behavior; of course if the new change works for you and you don’t decide to revert or pivot.
After every experiment, you have to consciously decide and draw the bottom line of validated learning in terms like: it works for me, it doesn’t work, it makes me happy, it doesn’t make me happy, it leads me towards my goals, it distracts me from my goals, it’s something I really want, it’s something that I only thought I will like but I don’t, it gives results, it doesn’t give results.
You can make these final bottom line decisions on the “knowledge chunk” retrospection when you do self-reflections. You answer a few basic, but very hard questions:
What can I do or what do I know that I didn’t know before and what was the best way to apply it?
What went well using the new chunk of knowledge?
What didn’t go as well as expected?
What is the next thing I have to learn or how should I improve my “knowledge chunk”?
Based on that, you should make three final decisions and stick to them:
What will I start doing based on the new knowledge acquired?
What will I stop doing based on the new knowledge acquired?
What will I continue doing based on the new knowledge acquired?
You can do this really fast in a few minutes, you don’t have to do a whole dissertation out of every small new thing that you learn. The whole point is to apply knowledge as quickly as possible and then measure its effect and analyze if the change works for you or not.
If we go to the cases I previously mentioned, I kept the exercise of how to talk to the inner critic and I do it on a regular basis, I always immediately use new coding knowledge (and forget what I don’t reuse), I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for months now, and I broke off all relationships with too much drama.
The “there is no ice” thing only works for me in certain situations, since I’m an introvert and mostly prefer to spend time alone or with carefully selected people. So I often prefer to shy away rather than open a conversation with a stranger.
And I still have a problem with headlines, because there are competing commitments (two contrary goals you want to achieve) behind, so I have to resolve some emotional issues before permanently implementing the knowledge.
You learn so much about yourself, the world and how to use new knowledge if you do regular reflections and commit to validated learning.
Implementing effective validated learning and a learning queue
I’ve mentioned chunking as an important learning strategy. When you do validated learning, you want to make sure you’re learning as effectively as possible.
You want to learn fast, but you also want to make sure that you really acquire knowledge and put it to the test, that you don’t lose comprehension when you are learning, and that you strategically decide what to learn next. You have to be a proactive learner with a strong attention span, not a reactive one.
Skimming articles, superficial speed reading and being anxious when learning are the opposite of what you want to achieve with validated learning.
In the same way, you don’t want to use learning as a handy excuse for failing.Oh I failed, but I learned a lot. Really, what did you learn? I don’t know. You want to be a really good strategic learner that knows how to transform knowledge into power. You want to learn from your failures and wrong assumptions. You want to be an effective validated learner.
There are many concepts that can help you with that. From employing different learning styles and challenging yourself with tests to preparing a very well prioritized learning queue, using the just-in-time learning concept, helping yourself with flash cards and much more. We’ll talk about all these different learning techniques in the following blog posts.
Until then make sure you are constantly improving and learning. Just make sure you aren’t only learning, but that you are really doing validated learning. Now you know how!
Homework
By reading this article you downloaded a new chunk of knowledge, so the next step you must take is to process it, apply it and then measure the results.
When you hear the word experiment, you probably think of a crazyscientist sitting in his laboratory and mixing some kind of chemical compounds. There also must be an explosion, I guess.
While experiments are most often linked to science, they are very useful in many other disciplines, from arts to business and sports. By following the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, experiments should also become a very important tool in your personal life.
The purpose of performing an experiment in science is very simple. You want to either see if something (an idea) works as planned and desired in a very controlled environment or you want to better understand how the world works, you want to get one step closer to the objective truth.
With experiments you want to gain new knowledge, innovate and better understand the truth.
Here’s the question: aren’t all these things also extremely useful in personal life? They absolutely are. That’s why a scientific approach to life pays big dividends. By conducting a series of experiments in personal life in the search mode, you can enjoy benefits like:
Better understanding yourself and what you want
Better understanding other people and how you can forge better relationships with them
Finding something that is really your fit and you can build massive success on
Discovering your talents and things you are good at
Exploring crazy ideas that can accelerate your massive success
Identifying trends and patterns in your environment
Setting a realistic execution strategy based on superior insights about your environment
Having fun, trying as many things as possible and living a diverse life experience
Isn’t that cool? And you don’t need a lot. A hypothesis, an idea how to perform an experiment, metrics, and some guts. No, you don’t have to be a crazy scientist. Well, maybe a little bit. By reading this article, you will learn everything you need to know about conducting experiments in your personal life in order to build yourself a superior life strategy.
From the easiest to the toughest experiments in personal life
You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is portrayed as a pyramid with six different types of needs, from the most basic and primitive ones to the cosmopolitan and higher ones. The most basic ones are physiological needs like air, water, food and sex.
Then we have safety needs like personal and financial security. The next ones are needs of love and belonging to family, friends and a spouse. Then self-esteem comes into play, giving a sense of contribution and value. The final ones, on top of the pyramid, are self-actualization needs.
Why is that important? Well, because on the lower level of the pyramid, you already conducted several experiments in your past, even if you didn’t call them experiments. Here’s what I have in mind:
You probably tried holding your breath for as long as possible underwater.
I assume you haven’t eaten only one type of food in your whole life. You probably tried many different foods and dishes until you found your favorite ones.
I know it depends on where you live and on your religion and family values, but there is a great chance you experimented a little bit in your sex life. At least with a few different positions or partners.
These were all very basic life experiments. You tried something new and then decided whether it works for you or not. Your taste, your emotions and your body were the feedback mechanism. Now, the question is why does experimenting after food and sex becomes less frequent.
Ego investments prevent experimenting
Performing experiments in personal life becomes less frequent because of the risk-reward ratio and because you’re heavily invested in specific behavioral patterns with your beliefs, emotions, money and other resources. I will give you an example of being invested in religious values, because it’s just the most obvious example and since we already talked about food and sex.
If you’re an atheist in the developed world, you can experiment with many different dishes and cuisines, with all the healthy foods known to humankind. If your religious beliefs forbid you from eating certain types of meat, you are emotionally invested in your beliefs and that limits the number of experiments you allow yourself to do. With sex and religion, everything becomes an even more delicate thing.
Now, I’m not encouraging you to start breaking your moral, religious or any other kind of view, I just want to show how you’re invested in something with your ego, beliefs, and values. What’s more important is that everybody inherited thousands of different beliefs from their primary and secondary socialization.
Some of these beliefs work and some of them don’t. Some of them make sense and some of them don’t. Some of them fit your character well, others only bring you frustration and prevent you from finding your perfect fit.
There are many different types of inherited beliefs and learned behavioral patterns that may do you good or on the other hand that may be preventing you from finding a better way to live life. Here are examples of the bad ones:
Beliefs about yourself or the so-called self-labels: I am lazy; I am hardworking; I am not that smart …
Beliefs about money: I will never be rich, money is bad, investing is not for me …
Political beliefs: Everybody is entitled to own a gun, we don’t need a social system …
Beliefs about the opposite gender and other people: All men cheat, people are bad …
All different kinds of beliefs and values, especially the things for which you are 100 % certain you’re right about
There are absolutely good beliefs, values and social norms that must be respected. Not breaking the law, respecting other people, taking care of the community etc. But all of us also have many toxic beliefs in which we are invested, and they prevent you from designing the perfect life you want and deserve and limit all the things you can try and experiment with.
With false investments, we can become our own worst enemies.
Here are a few more examples how limiting and toxic beliefs usually prevent you to experiment:
If you’ve always seen yourself as a lazy person, it may be hard for you to work hard as hell for a month as an experiment. But what if you’d enjoy it? On the other hand, if you always strongly believed that you must work hard and earn money for yourself, you may have a problem enjoying social benefits from the government when you lose a job or asking for help when needed. But what if people are willing to help and you are not on your own?
If you were taught to always go for a safe job, you might not even think about starting your own business, even if you’re a talented entrepreneur. If at home, vegetarians were always seen as weird people, you probably won’t ever experiment with a vegetarian diet. If you believe people are bad in general, how can you experiment with different levels of trust?
Believe in yourself, but doubt your beliefs. Instead try and see.
The risk-reward ratio and experimenting
The higher you move on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the worse the risk-reward factor is. At least instinctively and at the first glance. Much like you are invested in your values and beliefs, so you are also emotionally, financially and in many other different ways invested in your current life settings.
If you want to change your life settings, you have to take some risks, you have to move out of the comfort zone. You have to either change and improve yourself, or invest your energy into new things. But rewards aren’t even that certain. You may find a better position or you may not, who knows. What am I talking about?
If you stay in a relationship, you know the short-term risk-reward ratio pretty well, but what if you break the relationship and go find a person who’s a better fit for you? It’s a big risk, and rewards aren’t that certain.
If you stay at your current job, again you know the short-term risk-reward ratio. You have a contract that determines it. But what if you quit the job and start your own business or try to find work that you enjoy more? It’s quite risky and rewards aren’t that certain.
At the top of Maslow’s hierarchy is self-actualization. What does that even mean, at the end of the day, you have bills to pay.
Disinvesting yourself from one thing and investing into a new one is risky. Because there are many unknowns. You need to be bold and brave, having an explorer’s soul to experiment on the higher levels.
You must be really determined to make the most out of your life and find who you are together with what fits you perfectly. Only extremely flexible people have no problem disinvesting their resources from one thing and investing them into another.
But luckily, today the risk-reward factor is greatly improving to your advantage.
You are lucky, today experimenting is easy for the first time in history
Not everything is so dark. There’s some big good news. We live in the best times ever to experiment. At least in most parts of the world. Today you have so many options, so many ways to try new things without any huge risks and without serious investments of your resources.
You only have to be smart about it. In experiments, you can always more or less properly mitigate the risk-reward ratio. It’s not like you are risking your life, like you used to. Today you can always conduct experiments in a very controlled way. You can always take a step back if things don’t go into the right direction.
You just have to learn to manage your ego properly and you have to nurture your curious soul that desires to explore and find itself.
You can easily try dozens of sports to find the one that works best for you. You can easily try several different diets in a very controlled way to find the one that fits you best. You can try many different occupations and jobs in your free time to discover your true talents and what you’re good at.
You can easily try many different investments. You can even practice many different religions to see what gives you the best results (without getting killed). You can experience many different relationships, try many different hobbies, experiment with different cuisines and dishes, you can try several types of arts, you can easily acquire all sorts of knowledge online, there are so many ways to make the world a better place.
You can try dozens of things to find your fits that work best for you. Your fits in different areas of life should become like small mosaics in the canvas on which you design your perfect life. I follow this philosophy all the time. I tried all kinds of different things to find my fits.
I discovered my favorite sports, diet, dishes, people, industries, talents, personality characteristics, intimate preferences, thinking techniques, technology, home settings, how I work, creative endeavors, everything. And it’s awesome, you really live the life that’s meant for you, and you get to live the richest life possible.
Because in the end, you only have two options. Your life can be either a daring adventure or nothing. Your life will definitely be nothing if you don’t have the courage to get off your sofa and explore a little bit. You have to try different things and see what works best for you. Don’t assume, try.
Today, the times are too great to settle for the first job you get, for the first partner you date, for the default behavioral patterns that you inherited, for the foods you always ate at home and for everything else that comes to your life by default. There are exceptions, but in most cases it does pay off to go out and explore. It does pay off to go out and see how varied the world is. It does pay off to experiment. Now the only question left is how to do it.
How to do experiments in your personal life
It’s very easy to perform experiments in your personal life. The most important thing is that you write down all the things and insights, and that you do it in a very systematic way. You especially can’t rely only on your memory because you quickly tend to forget things, especially important details.
Here’s what you need:
A notebook: Digital or physical one to write things down.
A purpose or a goal: A short description of what you’re trying to achieve and targeted improvements.
A hypothesis: It’s an educated guess based on your prior experience and knowledge.
Data collection and methodology: A plan for how you will collect data and what kind of experiments you will perform. It’s very frequent that you conduct an experiment several times and that you also have a control group to compare the results with.
Data analysis and conclusion: You perform the experiments, you analyze the data and come to certain conclusions.
Insights:Beside the conclusions, it pays off to write down all kinds of different insights you gained while performing an experiment and all the new ideas you got along the way; especially which new experiments to perform.
The purpose or the goal of experiments in life is quite clear. You want to find a job you enjoy and are good at. You want to find a diet that will enable you to have stable weight and enjoy high levels of energy. You might want to lose weight. You might want to find your dream partner or improve your financial situation. You want to improve your life somehow.
There are many different types of goals you can achieve by experimenting in your personal life. If you aren’t sure where to begin, prepare a prioritized vision list (or you can find ideas at the end of this article). Now let’s look at the next steps after you define the goal you want to achieve.
Breaking down a big goal into small experiments
You want to break down your big goal into a series of small experiments. You should try to break down your overall goal into such small experimental pieces that you isolate your variables as much as possible and that you can really measure the things you want to measure.
The best way to show you how to do this is by example.
If you want to improve your financial situation, you might do the following breakdown: there are two general ways of experimenting for improving the money situation – one is saving more money and the other is earning more money. You can break down these two general ways into several experiments:
“For saving money, I will experiment with automatic transfer of 10 % of my money to a savings account, spreadsheet budgeting and waiting for a week before doing any big purchases in order to manage impulse buying. I will try each of these ideas for a month. And for earning more money, I will try to start an online business in my free time or get an additional job.”
Getting educated
When you’re breaking down your big goals, writing ideas for different experiments and setting your hypotheses, there is one more important step to make. You have to get educated. You have to get madly educated. Whatever you want to improve in your life, the first step is always to get educated really well.
You need to do research, read a few books, write down everything you know about yourself and others, and then decide what you expect, what you think will happen. Since you aren’t doing real scientific experiments, your subjective evaluation will play a vital role in the process. Nevertheless, you should try to design your experiment as objectively as possible. But first always get educated.
Writing down hypotheses and defining the experiments
Now you educated yourself. You’ve broken down your big goal into a set of small goals, small experiments that you can perform with variables that are as isolated as possible. While getting educated and breaking down your goals, you also have to write down the hypotheses for every experiment and define the general terms of how you will perform the experiment.
Practical examples
Here’s an actual example from my personal life (simplified in order to not make this article too long):
Hypothesis 1: I prefer individual sports over team sports. To prove the hypothesis, I will try three individual (fitness, hiking, golf) and three team sports (basketball, volleyball, hockey). I will do every sport five times for one hour. I will measure my overall satisfaction, how good I am at a specific sport, and how it helps me with my health goals, like gaining mass for example. Validated – I like individual sports more.
Hypothesis 2: The individual sports that would suit me best are fitness, running, boxing, crossfit, golf, karate, swimming and hiking. I will do every sport five times for one hour. I will measure my overall satisfaction, how good I am at a specific sport and how it helps me with my health goals, like gaining mass for example. The individual sports that I like and that meet my other goals best are fitness, hiking, swimming. These three were validated, other rejected for various reasons.
Hypothesis 3: Since I’m in bad shape, I will be too tired if I start training three times per week. I’ll train three times a week for two weeks and measure my energy levels. Rejected – I can work out three times per week without a problem. My energy levels are even higher. I will try training four times per week after 1 month.
Hypothesis 4: I will make better progress with a personal trainer in the gym. I will buy a package to work with a professional trainer for a month and compare my performance results to one month of training by myself. Validated – Personal trainers show me how to do exercises correctly and boost my motivation. My progress is also 10 % faster. After two months, I will see how well I work alone, following a new program prepared by a personal trainer.
Hypothesis 5: My motivation is better if I have a buddy to work out with. For 5 times, I will try to work out alone in the gym, and for 5 times with a training partner and compare my results. I will measure my motivation levels, the quality of the workout and other factors. Rejected – Scheduling, talking and drinks after the workout aren’t really helping me.
I suggest that after writing down a hypothesis, you go into details of how you will measure results, what kind of data you will collect, what are the terms for a hypothesis to be validated or rejected, how you will perform the experiment, and so on. It’s extremely fun to play with designing experiments and then actually doing them.
Data collection and analysis
There are several ways you can gather and analyze the data and measure results when conducting experiments in your personal life. Here are a few examples of different types of metrics:
Actionable metrics – metrics that help you make decisions and improve yourself
Vanity metrics – metrics that only stroke your ego and don’t help you at all
Qualitative metrics – insights you gather
Quantitate metrics – information that can be measured with numbers
Exploratory metrics – speculations about what could happen
Reporting metrics – comparing actual results to a plan
Leading metrics – predicting the future
Lagging metrics – describing the past
I call all qualitative, exploratory and leading metrics soft metrics, because they give you just a general sense of where you were, where you are and where you’re going. On the other hand, quantitative, reporting and lagging metrics are hardcore metrics, because they show you the truth if measured correctly.
As you will find soon, the quantitative metrics are the coldest ones, because they always show the truth. But you have to avoid vanity metrics at all costs.
Here are examples of metrics for different areas of life you can use:
Health
Money
Exercise frequency
Potential progress of illness
Managing your body weak points
Regular blood test
Body composition (% of fat, muscle size)
Aerobic endurance (run a mile, VO2 max)
Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test)
Muscular strength (one-rep max)
Flexibility (yoga poses)
Personal income statement
Earned income
Passive income
Portfolio income
Expenses
Taxes
Monthly plus/minus
Net-worth
Assets
Doodads
Liabilities (Debt)
Career
Relationships
Your company position (employment contract vs. organizational chart)
Public influence (number of interviews, public ratings)
Social media influence (Klout score)
Work enjoyment (from 1 to 10)
Professional connections
Your legacy (number of positive ideas that influenced local/global society)
Number of close friends you have
Time spent with the people you love
How much you do for your partner (massage, dinner, etc.)
How much you get out of a relationship (giving and receiving must be in balance)
How often you say I love you
How often you give a compliment to your partner
How often you make love
Competences
Mind/Emotions
Number of books you read
Number of seminars you visit
Domain knowledge you possess
Number of skills you master
Number of tech skills
Number of creative ideas you have
Your IQ
Your EQ
How well you are able to control your mind (your maximum meditating time)
Your daily Happiness index
Number of negative thoughts daily (with use of emotional accounting)
Dominating cognitive distortions
Number of new things you tried in life
Number of breathtaking experiences you have encountered etc.
Other metrics as part of your life strategy (countries you traveled to, number of languages you speak etc.)
How you should measure your success in life? Compare…
Your current metrics on different life areas
Your past metrics on different life areas (past month, year etc.)
Don’t compare yourself to others too much (only healthy competition is okay I guess)
There are many ways how you can gather data. You can make your scores on individually prepared tables like the happiness index. You can use many different apps and devices for biofeedback. You can measure and note data in a spreadsheet and then analyze it. You can perform interviews or even do online surveys and tests.
Here are a few ideas for gathering data and conducting experiments (with examples):
Try and do rating (rate how much you like a certain sport or a diet or people’s characteristics)
Conduct an interview or organize a focus group (how it’s like to work at a certain occupation)
Do an online survey (how to name your book, what kind of a service people would buy from you)
Role-playing (to understand how somebody else is feeling)
Diary analysis (analyze your diary to see with whom you feel the best)
A/B tests (writing down all the pros and cons of two computers you want to buy)
Cognitive walkthrough (imagine yourself with completely new life settings)
Competitive testing (analyze how well you are qualified for a certain job compared to the competition and where you need to improve)
Idea crowding (gather ideas for how you can improve from people you know and trust)
Historical data (analyze your weight for the past three months to see where you’re going)
There are so many ways how you can experiment in life. You just have to be a little bit creative. The more experiments you do, the more ideas you get for testing new things. As always, the first time is the hardest, but then a whole new world opens to you.
Homework
Template
Help yourself with the template and do your first experiments in personal life
To make things much easier for you, I prepared a template for you, as always. I suggest you choose one of the experiments listed below, open the template and design your first experiments. Get educated, break your big goal down into small experiments, write down hypotheses and how you will perform the experiments, and then just start playing.
In the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, you don’t just do things because you always did them in a specific way. You don’t just work and execute tasks like a robot.
Instead, you regularly reflect on why you do certain things, analyze how efficiently you are doing them and, most importantly, you constantly evaluate where your actions are leading you and if you are following your True North.
If you want to avoid being on reactive autopilot, you have to do regular reflections. The main goal of regular reflections is to ask yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding:
With regular reflections, you want to gain as many important insights as possible that can help you shape a superior life strategy, progress towards your goals faster and, in the end, live a better life. The good life.
But that’s not all. One of the biggest values of reflection is that you can change how you see yourself, how you feel about certain situations and, in the end, how you act. New thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions. That way, regular reflections really help you stay lean, agile, flexible, happy and wise.
There are several points in your life when performing a reflection is extremely valuable:
After every sprint (bi-weekly planning session) and 100-day plan (quarterly plan)
After every experiment you perform in the search mode as part of validated learning
When big or unexpected changes happen in your environment or relationships
When negative emotions pile up or you sense big negative mood swings
At the end of the day, just before you go to sleep to examine your daily life
Reflections after sprints, 100-day plans and experiments are called introspections in the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework.
Reflections before you go to sleep or when an emotional or situational trigger fires a need for analysis we call short self-reflection. We will discuss both types of reflections in this article.
But first, let’s answer the basic questions of why, how and when to do reflections.
A short daily reflection is nothing but a healthy habit
Regular daily reflections are a positive habit, like any other healthy and beneficial habit, from exercising to reading and being grateful. Every habit has three key elements.
There must be a trigger, a behavior you perform and, in the end, a reward you enjoy. If the triggers are strong enough and rewards are big, you have a greater chance of sticking to a habit. That’s what you also need if you want to stick to regular reflections – strong triggers and big rewards.
Reward – why do short daily reflections
There are so many big rewards of regular reflections. Everybody doubts it, but then after doing it a few times, they become in love with it. Many times, I had to push people a little bit to do it the first time, but then after performing it a whole new world opens to them.
They are like “wow, I didn’t know my mind works like that and that I can get so many insights by writing a few of my thoughts down. With reflections, you can finally meet the deep and rich internal world you possess. And now the benefits.
You better understand yourself and your actions,
You pay more attention to your thoughts and emotions
You become aware of your rich inner world
You become connected to yourself much better
You can more easily see all the ways of how you can properly adjust
You can plan how to do things in a better way
With all that, you gain more control over yourself and you become much more proactive.
With regular reflections, you explore your needs and wants and become very much aware of them. You explore the fears that are blocking you on your way towards your goal. You can finally understand what kind of conflicts are preventing you from being more assertive in life.
You can more easily identify all the different toxic thoughts and how they’re hurting you. You can identify competing commitments, internal frustrations and other things that are blocking you in life. Therefore, combining reflections with mindset upgrades is the perfect combination.
All this removes different inner blocks and releases emotional tensions. Not to mention that these are all the inputs for a superior life strategy.
Regular reflections help you better understand your environment and its paradigms, including people’s diverse behaviors and changes in their behaviors. You can see and understand your position in your environment exceptionally well and you can analyze how different actions can lead you towards different outcomes.
Regular reflections enable you to go from reactive behavior to proactive behavior. Regular reflections enable you to go from being miserable to being happy.
Behavior – how to do short daily reflections
Doing a short daily reflection is an extremely easy exercise. All you have to do is take a notebook and a pen and start writing down your thoughts. You provoke yourself with a few tough questions, you encourage yourself to look at things from different angles and you ask yourself why dozens of times. Then you dig deep. As deeply as possible.
Here are examples of questions you ask yourself during reflection:
How am I feeling? Why am I feeling like that? Why am I so anxious, angry etc.?
What does this situation remind me of? When did I feel the same way as I do now?
What am I trying to achieve with my behavior?
Why are others behaving towards me as they do?
What is the best way to improve my situation? Why am I blocking myself?
What am I scared of? Why am I persisting at this thing that doesn’t work?
Why does this bother me so much? Why do I really dislike that person?
What will happen if I do the complete opposite? How would my life look like if I believed the opposite from what I believe now?
After every question you ask yourself why, why, why and dig deep.
The solemn end of every reflection should always be new insights about you, about your position in the world and how your life relates to different relationships, marketing trends and other environmental elements. After you do a reflection, you should finally understand. There should be many “aha” moments.
When you do retrospections (after execution), you consciously decide how you will change your behavior and actions. You discipline yourself to follow a new behavioral pattern. On the other hand, in very well performed self-reflections it should all come naturally to you without any force. You should feel it in your bones how you can do things differently and how it makes sense to change.
Trigger – when to do short daily reflections
There are many potential triggers that can lead you to do a reflection. Some of them can be planned (after a sprint, before sleep) and some of them can be spontaneous. I suggest you combine both types.
The strongest and most useful triggers are usually emotional ones. Examples include interesting thoughts or ideas you become aware of, big negative changes in your moods, getting hurt by other people, and so on. In such situations, you go straight to the most painful things a lot more easily.
The second most common triggers are time- and location-based. You do a daily reflection before you go to sleep. You do a reflection as part of a planning meeting with your team, and so on. You should always have a few strong location and time triggers that naturally lead you towards performing a reflection.
Introspections – reflections after executions
Now let’s go a little bit deeper into the concept of introspections.
Introspections are reflections you do after different periods of execution and after performing life experiments. They are an integral part of bi-weekly sprints and quarterly planning sessions, and their main purpose is to improve your strategy, tactics and actions.
With retrospections, you want to make sure you’re progressing towards your goal in the best possible way. With regular retrospections, you want to have the smartest strategy and be one step ahead of your instincts, life itself and other people.
Introspections are otherwise also an integral part of agile software development (SCRUM), where a team reflects on how they work and where they can improve. As I mentioned, introspection is done after every sprint. The things you want to achieve with introspections (you can do it by yourself or with your team if you have one) after sprints and 100-day plans are:
Reviewing the tasks done in the previous interval
Carefully planning your next sprint
Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goals faster
Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goalswith fewer resources
Making sure you are going into the right direction (following your True North)
Brainstorming how you can do things better and how you can improve and adjust
Analyzing all the new ideas you have
Better connecting with yourself or with team members if you have a team
Measuring your real progress based on the metrics framework you set for yourself
Adjusting the strategy and plan and reflecting on new things that you learned
Sprint planning and short morning meeting with yourself (and/or your team) are great starting points for execution, and reflection is the perfect activity to end every execution interval.
The best practice is to combine planning a new execution phase with reflection on the previous one. That way you can really improve yourself on the way from one sprint to another. The simple rule is to never even leave out execution retrospection when planning your next sprint, quarterly plan or an experiment in the search mode. Never. Because that’s what successful people do.
The bottom lines of introspection are the most important part of the process. If you don’t have the bottom lines, you have a very poorly performed introspection. The mandatory thing is that after every introspection, you have answers to a few very basic, but extremely hard questions:
What went well during the last sprint that I/we will continue doing?
What could I/we do differently?
How can I/we implement the change?
Based on that, you should make three decisions and stick to them:
What should I start doing?
What should I stop doing?
What should I continue doing?
After every introspection, you have to change your behavior and your actions. You have to do things differently. You have to improve and grow. If you don’t, introspection was useless. Changes and adjustments are the whole point of it.
Before we go to short daily reflections, let me once again emphasize the important difference between introspections and self-reflections. The changes and improvements after introspection can be a little bit pushed, you can discipline yourself to do things differently.
Meanwhile changes after self-reflection must come completely from within, they must feel completely natural. You can train yourself to perform a new behavior, but you become wiser after an epiphany that changes how you see the world in every one of your cells.
Short daily reflections – do them at the end of the day or whenever you feel like doing it
Now let’s move from introspections to short daily reflections.
Explained very simply, performing self-reflection means that you take from a couple of minutes to an hour or more to reflect on your goals, beliefs, behavioral patterns, negative and positive emotions, emotional knots and everything else that’s happening in your life.
The best way is to do it daily by writing a journal. Once you try it, you will see what kind of amazing breakthroughs self-reflection can lead you to. It’s better than any thriller movie once you discover your rich inner world.
There are two perfect moments for doing a short daily reflection. One is at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you can analyze and compare your plans to what actually happened in reality.
You can write down what you’ve learned, people’s unexpected reactions and interesting changes in your relationships, how productive you were and how well you completed the three most important tasks that you had given to yourself for that day, and so on.
The second trigger is when you sense an interesting thought, observation or insight or when negative emotions pile up. When you get extremely moody, when something upsets you, when things don’t go as planned, sit down and start analyzing.
Use the D.E.A.R. concept in those cases. Drop Everything And Reflect. Or sometimes Drop Everything And Read, you know, to get wiser and more educated.
A short daily reflection is slightly different from introspection. If you have to force yourself to make a certain decision after self-analysis, you hadn’t done it right. Self-analysis is about understanding yourself and noticing, not judging and forcing yourself into anything.
There are no “stop doings”, “start doings” and “continue doings”. It’s about changing the course of your life without any force, by better understanding who you are and what you want through analytical thinking.
Here are a few additional ideas for what you want to achieve with short daily reflections:
Analyze your day
Think about how your day went compared to – (1) your daily plan and (2) your ideal day. Analyze if you executed all the planned tasks, especially the three most important tasks for the day. Analyze what went wrong and what went right, what you’ve learned throughout the day, and write down the insights you gained.
You can also write down all the cool things that happened to you, so you never forget them. In the end, you can also add all the new things you’re grateful for.
Look for errors in your subjective reality map
You see the world through your subjective lenses. I call it the subjective reality map or the frame. You operate based on this mental frame, a set of schemas defined by your beliefs, values, way of thinking and many other factors. Subjective lenses are like unique code that runs in your brain. You’re only aware of a small part of it, most of it is subconscious.
This frame or the subjective reality map is not the truth, even if it most often feels like it. But it’s not the objective reality, it’s only how you interpret the reality with your limiting senses.
That’s important, because there are many errors in your subjective reality map. From wrong assumptions and cognitive biases to all the things you don’t even know you don’t know. With reflections, you should identify as many errors in your subjective reality map as possible.
Through analysis, you should notice that you were wrong about something (but first you have to put your ego aside) and then say to yourself: “Oh gosh, I was really wrong about that” or “I can’t believe I was lying to myself so hard” or “I really operated based on toxic behavioral patterns and beliefs, now I see it”.
With regular reflections, you should come closer to the objective truth and identify all the ways you’re lying to yourself or deceiving yourself.
Make subconscious conscious
By asking yourself tough questions and digging deep, you can find many emotional knots in yourself of which you weren’t aware before. These knots are tied by all the mistakes your parents made in your upbringing. The more toxic the family environment where you were raised was, the more tension there is. Not all family environments are toxic, but many of them are.
When you identify these emotional knots, they lose some of their power and some tension gets released. On top of that, you can become aware of why you are performing some self-sabotaging behaviors.
With regular reflections, I identified all kinds of different things, like why I was always late, why I was afraid to start my own business, why knowledge is so important to me, and much more.
Brainstorm ideas
The only way to keep your creative muscle strong is to regularly brainstorm ideas. If you do it every day, the creative part of your brain will be fit and strong.
It’s hard to brainstorm ideas every day, but you can still make it a part of your shutdown routine before you go to sleep, just after making a short reflection. In such a case you will never forget to train and stretch your creative muscles.
An idea that isn’t written down is an idea quickly forgotten.
Of course you won’t have only brilliant ideas with regular brainstorming, but writing down as many ideas as possible is the only way to get to brilliant ideas. If you write down 100 ideas every day, most of them will be absolutely crappy; but every now and then, a new brilliant idea will be born among all the crap. An idea that might lead you to a new course of life.
An idea to start a business, to help your company to grow, how to improve your relationships or how to experience life more fully, and so on. One such powerful idea can change your life forever.
Giving instructions to your subconscious
Your brain works 24/7. No rest, no holidays, just work. Even when you sleep and enjoy your dreams, that’s your brain at work. One good way to use your brain better is to keep the dreaming function alive during the day as well. It helps you be more creative, stay curious and an optimist.
Very similarly, but the other way around, it also makes sense to give instructions to your brain what to work on when you are asleep. There are many different types of instructions you can give to your brain. Revealing a part of your subconscious self to you in your dreams, finding a new solution for various problems, experiencing lucid dreaming, and so on.
As the last step of your daily reflection, just after your brainstorming session and before you go to sleep, give instructions to your brain what to work on while you’re sleeping. Just say to yourself (or to your brain) what you want your cognitive power to be used for during sleep. It will absolutely raise your productivity levels and lead you to many cool new insights.
Homework
Drop everything and go buy yourself a notebook
Richard Branson, one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever, always carries a simple inexpensive notebook and a pen with him. He writes down all cool ideas, meeting minutes, observations, and so on. You can do the same just for personal purposes.
A simple notebook that you always carry with you is the best way to do regular introspections and self-reflections. Because when an interesting thought appears, you can simply sit down and start writing. Whenever and wherever you are.
You can do it digitally, of course, but there is a special connection between paper, pen, your hand and your brain. So I suggest you go to a stationery shop and buy yourself a notebook you like, a pen that feels comfortable to write with, and start with regular daily reflections.
The mantra here is to just do it. As mentioned several times, it’s hard the first few times. I have people in my life I care deeply about and it took me years to convince them to try self-reflections. It took me three years to convince somebody I love to do their first self-reflection. Three years.
The first few times, you always feel blocked somehow. There’s nothing to write down. It feels weird. But you have to be patient with yourself.
Sooner or later your heart opens and your thoughts start to flow.
After performing one really deep self-reflection I guarantee you that it will become one of your favorite parts of the day and one of your favorite personal development tools; especially because you will forge a better connection with yourself and you will be able to easily enter your rich inner world that’s hidden deeply inside you. Have courage and start exploring your inner self.
There is no way to avoid conflict in everyday life. Sonner or later, you encounter some kind of incompatibility between you and another subject or force. Conflicts always brings tension and drama, but they aren’t necessarily bad.
Actually, conflicts are mandatory for new, better and more creative ideas to arise. The main prerequisite for conflicts to be productive is to keep them under control.
There are many different ways to keep conflict under control and prevent its escalation. Show respect to all other parties involved. Don’t criticize ideas, use them as an input to be even more creative. Don’t focus on blame, instead focus on finding the best solution.
You don’t have to be always right and you should never put your ego in front of learning or trying something new. If you don’t understand something, ask for clarification and follow other guidelines of good communication. Use humor, stay kind but express your opinion, and so on.
Nevertheless, by far the best advice that doesn’t only keep tension under control, but also leads to the fastest progress possible, is putting data before rhetoric.
Superior rhetoric skills must present zero advantage
Scientific research has shown over and over again that very heterogeneous interdisciplinary teams perform by far the best in non-routine challenges. I strongly believe that this fact applies to business teams as well as to teams in personal life, for example family or a specific group of friends.
For a group of people to function, there absolutely have to be common interests, visions and goals, but the greater the diversity of members, the crazier are the ideas, solutions and suggestions that have the chance to arise.
Nevertheless, diversity brings tension. Some people handle verbal tension better than others. Even more, some people have great advantages when discussions get heated. Because some people are verbally more assertive than others, and a few people are shy introverts (like I am) who get scared to the bones in big arguments.
Usually every group of people includes one or two individuals who are very assertive communicators and have an ability to strongly fight for why their arguments make the most sense; even if they might not. They verbally overpower other team members and that kills the collective brainpower. It’s a disaster.
In any team that wants to perform well, superior rhetoric mustn’t be any advantage. Team culture must allow a shy introvert to speak as much and as passionately as the verbally strongest extrovert. Google did a big research on the best performing teams, and their data indicated that psychological safety was critical to making a team work, more than anything else.
All arguments are equal until they are put to the test.
There were two indicators of psychological safety: firstly, team members spoke in roughly the same proportion, in other words there was equality in the distribution of conversational turn-taking (introverts, extroverts, shy people and the strongest rhetoric).
Secondly, all the good teams had high social sensitivity, meaning team members were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues.
Agreeing to always put data before rhetoric is a great way to set the basic rules of teamwork, indicating that all arguments are equal until they’re put to the test. Every idea counts, and all the main ideas should get tested.
There is no need for tension to escalate when you put data before rhetoric
Humans get creative ideas. Humans have inspirations. Humans have opinions. Data and metrics do the validation. Instincts are experiments and data is proof.
The only way you can predict things with high accuracy is if you have a long and stable history. The longer and the more stable the history, the more accurately you can forecast short-term future.
And there is no way to predict long-term future. Nobody knows what will happen in 3 years. But short-term history is in many cases a good basis for predicting short-term future.
Practical examples
If you haven’t exercised for the past three months or even years, there is a high probability that you won’t exercise tomorrow. A partner who cheated on all of their exes is very likely to cheat on their next partner.
But when you’re trying new things, experimenting and brainstorming new ideas, you rarely have accurate historical data you could rely on. Thus all the ideas, arguments and convictions are nothing but untested assumptions – hypotheses. Nobody really knows what will work and what won’t. That’s why assumptions need to be tested.
Here’s an example. There is a lot of conflicting advice regarding diet online. Do calories matter or does only the type of food you eat matter? Does eating meat make you more tired or not? Should you eat before sleep to gain muscle or is it the number one way to gain fat? Should you eat five small meals or two large ones?
For every argument, you can find scientific studies, testimonials of fitness professionals, people claiming that this one piece of advice changed their life etc. At the same time you can find scientific studies and testimonials for the opposite advice to work perfectly. You can find dozens of studies why tomato is healthy and why it’s not.
So what is the best solution, to listen to the loudest message out there or to put things to the test and see what works for you as an individual?
When you decide to put everything to the test, there is no need for an argument. You can have a heated discussion to brainstorm the best ideas and inspirations, but then you just have to do experiments to find the thing that enables you the fastest progress towards your vision and goals.
There is never one single way to the goal and there is no single success recipe that would work for all people.
Instead of wasting energy in a pissing contest, direct the team’s energy into the following:
Gather all the ideas and make sure they’re as diverse and crazy as possible
Rank the ideas in the order they’ll be tested in (set a system that makes sense depending on your goals. Have a voting system or any other kind of system, don’t allow that one person with the strongest ego to tell you how things should be ranked.)
Define metrics that will measure real progress
Define with what kind of experiments you will get the data
Perform the experiments, gather the data and see what works better
Re-rank ideas and do additional experiments
Never stop experimenting, doubt and test everything
Today, technology can do a lot of measuring for you. You have so many different devices, apps and tools to measure feedback.
To determine how you are progressing, you can employ different life metrics, biofeedback metrics, you can do split tests, online experiments or even use subjective things like scales from 1 to 10 or the happiness index. You don’t need anything really complicated to measure your progress, you aren’t trying to win a Nobel prize, you’re just trying to make better decisions based on better data.
Other benefits of putting data before rhetoric
There are many other benefits of putting data before rhetoric. Not only do arguments based on opinions get reduced, you also:
Don’t get lost in a fake feeling of progress,
can only manage things that you measure,
get the answers to what really works and gives you the fastest progress, and
in the end, metrics should drive your behavior.
Metrics are what should be leading you to decide what you will start doing in life, what you will stop doing and what behavioral patterns you will continue to perform. Metrics are the ones that should tell you if you persevere at something or pivot to something else.
The painful fact is that you are forced to face reality when you put data before rhetoric, but living in a lie or in an illusion brings only short-term comfort and much bigger long-term pain. The sooner you admit to yourself where you are, the faster you can start to progress and improve.
Only metrics can show you the hard reality and only metrics can take you from dreaming and being at zero to measuring your real progress, performing and achieving massive success.
Testament to put data before rhetoric
You can’t just put data before rhetoric. People’s egos are just too strong. Even if you’re performing an experiment on your own and there are no other people involved, your ego will always block you and give you headaches. So you must consciously agree on some very basic rules.
The first rule you must become okay with is that it’s not about being right, it’s about finding the fastest way to validated learning and progress. You shouldn’t have any problem being wrong. You should expect that you’re wrong.
And then you shouldn’t have a problem accepting a different view, angle or action that works better than yours. Because you’re always wrong before you’re right. Steve Jobs had no problem being wrong, and you shouldn’t have a problem with it either.
The next rule is that almost all ideas should be put to the test. Especially the crazy ones. I know it’s a matter of resources and you can’t test truly everything, but the point is to never ditch ideas that sound crazy or for which the majority thinks they won’t work.
I did dozens of online A/B tests (ads, landing pages etc.), where I was completely sure that A will work better than B, but then the reality was a lot different. You never know what will work better.
Thirdly, you need to gather real valid data and then make decisions based on this data. You have to perform experiments scientifically, at least to some extent (that’s not as horrible as it sounds). You need to write down hypotheses, you need metrics and you need to conduct experiments.
When you get the results, the data must help you make a decision about what to do. If a metric only strokes your ego, it’s probably not a good metric. If metrics show you one thing and you do something else, you aren’t data-driven.
After performing an experiment, you need an answer to the question: what will I do differently based on this information?
Practical applications and examples
Before we look at a few examples, I have to emphasize a few more important facts regarding metrics. If you want for your metrics to make any sense, they need to be comparable and understandable.
Usually, they are a ratio or rate and are connected to the core part of your goal. Metrics set in the right way illustrate cause and effect, and lead you to what to do next. Nevertheless, they aren’t a magical solution; they just point you to the step to take next.
The big downside to putting data before rhetoric is that it takes a lot of additional effort, time and creativity to perform the experiments and gather the metrics. But s/he who progresses the fastest, succeeds the fastest. The effort pays off sooner or later. Putting data before rhetoric is part of a superior life strategy, it’s why some people are successful and others are not.
Now let’s look at a few examples for where and how you can put things to the test, instead of arguing what works and what doesn’t with other people.
Argument
Counterargument
Let’s find out
Learning to code is easy and everybody should do it.
Learning to code is extremely hard.
Dedicate 100 hours of intensive learning to coding and do an online test (solve challenges) to see how good of a programmer you’ve become.
Coffee is the best anti-oxidant with many health benefits.
Coffee makes you anxious, you can’t sleep at night and it’s bad for your stomach.
Drink a cup of coffee for one month in the morning and observe what’s happening to your body, sleep, productivity etc. You can measure how long you can work in a day, you have devices that measure the quality of your sleep …
If you eat before sleep, you will get fatter.
It doesn’t matter when you eat as long as you’re in a caloric deficit.
Eat before sleep for 4 weeks and don’t for 4 weeks, keep the same calorie levels and see what happens to your fat percentage.
Meditation will make you a calmer person.
It’s impossible to meditate in today’s busy life and you only get nervous sitting in the same place for 20 minutes.
Try to meditate for a month and mark from 1 to 10 how difficult it is to follow and how calm you are before and after.
You can’t make money out of a hobby.
There is always a way to make money out of a hobby.
List all your hobbies, for every hobby write down several business ideas, pick the best one and try to make some money in your free time. Measure how much money you make. You can even test more ideas.
Life without a mobile phone in the afternoon is much more peaceful and calm.
It’s impossible to live without a mobile phone in today’s society.
Turn off your mobile phone after you get home from your job for two weeks and measure your calmness level.
Too much attention in a relationship is not good. There always has to be a bit of distance.
You should regularly invest a certain level of attention into a relationship to develop it to the deeper levels.
Spend an additional hour with your partner without any distractions and technology, talk, touch, make love, tell each other jokes or whatever you like, and every day, mark on a scale how good your relationship is.
These are all simplified examples to illustrate the way to apply theory to practice. When you write down the hypotheses, you also need to define very well how the experiment will be performed and what kind of results will lead to what kind of conclusions.
When you’re defining metrics, note that there are metrics that are hard-core data (like body fat percentage) and there are data that are very subjective (like the happiness index). Here you can find more than 40 life metrics as additional ideas for experiments. Just make sure you aren’t using vanity metrics.
Homework
Do your first data-driven decision
Think of an argument you currently have in a team, with your friends, with your spouse or with any other person that’s part of your key relationships. Instead of continuing with the ego battles and opinions, decide for a different approach, the “data before rhetoric” approach. It will be fun.
Propose to the parties involved that you do a scientific experiment to find out which different arguments that people are having can be validated and which can’t. Think of metrics and what could be the experiment.
The moment you start talking about metrics and experiments, you will disinvest your ego, stay flexible in your thinking more easily, and more agile in angles of how you see life. On top of that, conducting an experiment will be super fun, as I mentioned.
Do experiments, gather and analyze the data, and see where it points. It’s not about who’s right, it’s about what works. In the last step, decide with all the parties involved how you will change your behavior, team culture or with what actions you will proceed.
After conducting the first few experiments, you will soon see every one of your beliefs, convictions, assumptions and ego opinions as nothing but hypotheses that need to be put to the test.
If you’re interested, here are my slides on the topic of metrics and putting data before rhetoric in startups. Maybe you’ll get some additional ideas for how to use these principles in your personal life.
It’s not easy to stay flexible when it comes to personal life; at the end of the day in your personal live, you tend to take things personally.
If you are wondering why, it’s because your ego and other resources (money, energy, time etc.) are usually heavily invested in certain scenarios, expectations, assumptions and beliefs. The more invested you are into something, the harder it is to make any changes.
But then when things don’t happen like you planned and wanted, you get shaken up, hurt and demotivated. And unfortunately in life things rarely go as planned. Everybody has a plan until reality hits them in the face.
If a plan fails it’s not the end of the world yet. It’s only one punch. Much bigger problem is that many times people spend decades persisting at things that don’t work. You need to be smarter than that, you need to be smarter than any static plan or a life strategy that doesn’t bring the desired results.
Here is what you need not to be knocked-down by reality. A very flexible, but detailed plan that you constantly update and fine-tune. You have to make sure that you stay lean and agile in the whole process. In practical terms that means constantly adjusting your strategy according to the feedback you’re getting from the environment and yourself.
Achieving your goals and visions is never a straight line, but always a path full of detours, setbacks, step backs and adjustments. If you want to achieve your goals, you need many creative ideas for how to overcome different obstacles.
You often have to innovate your way out of unexpected troubles. Doing the same things over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity and absolutely a recipe for big failures and a lot of emotional pain.
If you want to be really successful in life, you have to be able to adjust in a single second. You stay flexible by having no problem to stop investing your resources, especially energy and time into one thing and start investing them into another thing with bigger potential. But how to do that?
The best way to stay lean and agile while following your goals is to use the “branching and forking” principle. Branches and forks are two different types of pivots. One is a small pivot, and the other is a big pivot. The principle comes from software development or, more exactly, from versioning control. You can use the same strategy in personal planning to stay more flexible.
Branching and forking is a great way to strategically brainstorm alternative paths in advance and to have as many different options as possible when you hit a wall. Then you analyze all alternative paths and decide how to adjust best.
In this blog post, you will learn everything you need to know about branching and forking and how they can help you stay more flexible in life.
Nature does it, software developers do it, so why wouldn’t you do it too?
You can skip this part if you have no interest in software development whatsoever.
Branching and forking in software development
To understand very well how to use branching and forking in your personal life, let’s examine how the two concepts are used in software development. Even if you aren’t a programmer by profession, it’s very easy to grasp the main ideas of these principles.
You probably worked on a very long and complex document at least once in your life. If more people were involved in the process, you will understand the tracking issues and challenges even better. After working on such a document for a while, you probably had a text with hundreds of comments, suggestions and corrections, not to mention all the different versions of files. It’s easy to get lost in such a case, especially if you don’t use a word processing tool that has a good versioning and collaboration system.
When a team of people is developing complex software, this kind of problem is even bigger. Not only is the code in several files being constantly added and upgraded by different team members, new ideas for software features are constantly flowing in. Team members want to develop parts of the software in different ways, bugs are constantly getting detected and need to be fixed, and so on.
It’s a hard task to follow all the ideas and changes and to manage the complex development process. It can easily happen that the code gets broken, things get lost and people confused. It’s a real mess.
That’s why almost all teams in software development use some kind of a versioning system or the so-called Version Control System (VCS). The most popular VCS in the software development world today is Git together with the online service GitHub (or alternatively Bitbucket).
Git allows team members to develop code simultaneously without overwriting each other’s changes, it provides historical snapshots of code so you can return to previous versions when things go wrong, and in addition to that it’s free (open-source) and extremely fast.
GitHub further extends the power of Git. It’s a web-based Git hosting service for distributed revision control of code and source code management. It adds tons of additional functionalities to Git, like issue tracking, collaborative code review, documentation management, team management features, graphs, email notifications, and so on.
Finally, here’s the main trick. What Git and Github also allow you to do is to diverge from the main code you were writing to test new ideas. You can independently develop new features or take parts of the project to a completely new path, you can play with the project code in a new safe environment without destroying the main code, you can experiment with new technologies, and so on.
At the end, you can either merge the changes to the main code or not. It’s completely up to you. The two core ways to do that are branches and forks.
Branches in software development
Git enables you to create a new branch in any stage of the software development process. A branch is a new line of development. When you get an idea for testing a feature or developing the software in a new direction, you can create a new branch.
The main branch is called a master branch and you can name the new branch however you want. Actually, you can create as many different branches as you want, naming them as it suits you best.
When you create a new branch, you then have two branches with the same code and in the next step you can develop each part of the code in completely separate directions. Sometime in the future, you may decide to merge the new branch with the master one, and that often does happen. Other times, you get two or even more separately living projects.
The important note is that the new branch is always part of the main branch. The new branch depends on the main branch and diversions are tracked very well. A new branch always has parts of the master branch. You do branches with Git.
Forks in software development
On the other hand, forks are much bigger diversions than branches. They are more a kind of a social idea, when a group of people wants to take a project to a completely new path or a different level. Forks are a GitHub, not a Git thing.
GitHub enables you to fork a project (you copy it under your own account). It’s similar to branching a project, with the distinction that the new created fork is completely independent from the original project. It has its own users and permissions.
Technically, a fork is a completely new entity that gets stored in a separate independent folder or project. You can’t push your changes to the original project unless you have the rights to do so or the creator of the original software accepts the changes (the so called pull request).
If you fork a project, you can fork it with many branches. If the original project is deleted, you keep your forked copy together with branches, but all the branches in the original project are deleted together with the project. You connect a new fork with the Git versioning control system installed on your local machine with the cloning function. Because forking is more flexible, many developers prefer forking over branching.
I hope that wasn’t too technical. Even if you didn’t understand all the details, I’m sure you grasped the main idea. You can easily clone a project or make a new branch and take it into a whole new direction, either completely independently from the main code or not. That’s all you need to know.
Using branches and forks in your personal life
Let’s move from software development to personal life. To use forks and branches in your personal life, you must first have a very well defined and prioritized vision list. Then you develop simple life stories for 5 – 7 items on the top of your vision list to specify what exactly you want, a clear outcome and even more so why.
In the next step, you build a Goal Journey Map with a strategy for how you will achieve your goal. That’s your main branch, that’s your plan for how you want things to develop. You can read more about the whole process in the “new way to set goals” article.
The main idea of branching and forking is that you have a rough plan, but you know in advance that the plan won’t work. You know that you are wrong about how things will unfold, because the plan is based more or less on your assumptions. And wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. You have to be aware that you are always wrong before you are right.
Knowing that, you can do three things with the goal journey map:
You can brainstorm potential obstacles and risks you may encounter in different stages.
You can brainstorm alternative paths if the obstacles really appear – you build your own branches and forks in advance in your goal journey map by brainstorming potential pivots.
You can define very well when it’s time to quit, to not get misled by the sunk costs and other cognitive biases.
You absolutely can’t predict everything negative that will happen. You absolutely don’t know what will go wrong and what will go right. But you can definitely brainstorm many different scenarios that could go wrong and you can mentally prepare yourself for them.
Being a smart investor and carefully managing your resources (including your time and energy) means that you go after investments that have high upside potential and a low downside. In other words, you’re looking for low risks and high rewards. If you want to achieve that, you have to know your greatest risks and downsides, and what you will do when they appear.
You can always think of the biggest risks in advance and adjust to the smaller ones that weren’t anticipated as things go along. You can always brainstorm potential pivots and how to mitigate different risks. And with regular daily reflections, you can always adjust to small barriers that unexpectedly hit you in the face.
When you encounter an obstacle, you always have the option to:
Stop investing in a project and give up. Sometimes the hardest decision you have to make in life is when to persist and when to give up.
Pivot to something completely new based on what you’ve learned (a new fork).
Change the course a little bit so that it will still lead you to the same goal just by using a slightly different path (a new branch).
Stop doing certain small things, start doing new things, and continue doing what works without any big changes in direction (regular small changes and updates in tactics and operations).
You can always do these things, you just have to be creative enough to come up with enough potential forks, branches and updates. With such an approach, there is no way you can get stuck in life.
Maybe you’re asking yourself: why would you put so much effort into regular adjustments and into such hard-core risk management? Well, because that’s part of a superior life strategy. You want to have a small number of goals to which you are completely committed. You want to stay fully flexible about how you’ll get there.
You want to constantly pay attention to what is happening in your environment and what is happening with your emotions, and regularly adjust. You have to sense all the paradigms in your environment and you have to always pay attention to yourself, because what you think will bring you happiness and what really brings you happiness in life are two different things.
You don’t want to get stuck, you don’t want to experience big collapses or failures in a way that it will take you years to recover. You want to optimize your life for productivity and flexibility. You want to experience a series of small failures from which you can learn, and that is the only thing that can lead you to be finally right and succeed. The good news is that you have to be right only once.
Yes, if you want to be successful in life you want to stay flexible. The greatest killer of flexibility is the so-called onetis mentality. The onetis mentality means being obsessed with one single thing – one potential spouse, one job you just lost, one car you can’t afford, one scenario that failed etc.
If there is something that represents all to you, and everything else is nothing, it’s only a question of time until you are be miserable and stuck. Forks and branches are the cure for the onetis mentality.
It’s all about superior emotional management
Now you know the big value of proper risk management and staying flexible. To summarize in one sentence: the best way to do that is to have many different forks and branches and no fixed ideas.
Rather than having any fixed ideas, you should think about all the risks and potential alternative paths or pivots you can make when you encounter a problem. You should consider and analyze every possible alternative path, no matter how crazy it sounds.
The main value of preparing yourself for different scenarios (forks and branches) is in:
Keeping your mind flexible and open to different possibilities.
Staying emotionally detached when shit hits the fan, because you anticipated what could happen.
Having a list of alternative paths you can take so you can easily choose the next best thing when you have to.
If you don’t have an alternative path, you can easily get stuck in overanalyzing how unlucky you are, you can put yourself in a position of being a victim, and you can endlessly whine, bitch and complain. But when you already know your next best alternative, you can simply move on, you already have something new to look forward to. You already know your next step.
Of course you are always emotionally invested in things you care about, you absolutely need time to heal and lick your wounds, but you don’t have to get stuck forever, you don’t have to lose years of your life feeling sorry for yourself just because something didn’t work out as planned.
An even worse scenario is if you lose motivation and enthusiasm after a few failures, and turn into a zombie. That happens to many people. They try a few times, fail big and then they give up forever. Never let that happen to you.
There are absolutely types of life disasters (deaths, losses, etc.) where there is no branch or fork that can heal you or lead you forward, and in such situations you need months if not even years to recover. The only thing you can do is to accept things, grieve and wait for better times.
But problems like that are quite rare, they happen only a few times in a lifetime. For most projects, life problems, obstacles and challenges, you can always innovate your way out. There is always a step forward you can take. Thinking of potential branches and forks is one way that can help you do that.
Branches and forks are advanced brainstormed potential pivots
A list of potential branches and forks is nothing but advanced brainstormed potential pivots. You can also add new potential branches and forks when you encounter a problem or an obstacle in order to analyze and consider as many alternative paths as possible when you have to choose your next step. Let’s refresh our knowledge of what pivots in personal life are.
A pivot in personal life is a fundamental change in your life strategy or in a strategy for meeting your goal. You change your direction in life, but you still keep the same life vision and you consider all the facts you learned about yourself and your environment. You make pivots as many times as necessary until you find the perfectly right fit for you.
There are many different types of pivots you can make in personal life: a zoom-in pivot, a zoom‑out pivot, a relationship pivot, a life architecture pivot, and so on. To successfully make a pivot, you need to be passionate about the new life direction, there must be a strong and deep desire to make a change in your life, you need metrics and targets that will measure your pivot progress, and so on.
Even if you have no clue what will happen in reality, you already have a few things to rely on:
Your past knowledge and experience
Knowledge and experiences of other people (books, mentors etc.)
A list of risks and things that could go wrong (and things that could go right)
A list of potential pivots you can make (based on the 10 possible pivots)
Alternative visions of your life that work for you as well as the originally planned branch
The potential pivots in personal life:
A zoom-in pivot:Focusing yourself more in life
A zoom-out pivot: Adding new things in your life
A relationship pivot: Rearranging key relationships in your life
A personal need pivot: Rearranging your priorities
A life design/architecture pivot: Rearanging your values and beliefs
A platform pivot: Changing environment where you work
An engine of personal growth pivot: Changing your role-models and infostructure
A value-capture pivot: Changing the way you make money
A technology pivot: Changing technology you use
Other types of pivots
Considering all this data, you can brainstorm potential pivots and how you can alternatively get to your goals when you get stuck. Every potential pivot is a new branch or fork.
When you learn new things along the way, you can always add or delete forks and branches. When you encounter a problem, you can select which new branch or fork to follow. Sometimes you can activate more branches and forks at the same time.
With that kind of a strategy, you are always prepared for the next move. If a risk comes to life, you already know a few alternatives you can undertake. You can add new ones if necessary, but you will never get stuck mentally. Your mind will already be oriented towards a solution instead of the problems that occurred.
Now let’s explore the subtle difference between forks and branches.
Branches in personal life
Branches in personal life are small deviations from the main path, micro adjustments and mini new experiments you decide to perform in order to find a better way to achieve your goals. They are not-too-big diversions from the main path that don’t require any colossal changes in strategy.
You adjust, you do a small pivot, but the general way is still the same. Sooner or later you come back to the main path. You may adjust because an unexpected obstacle occurs, you may consciously decide for an adjustment just to try new things, or maybe you decide to implement a potential personal improvement. You should be constantly developing and experimenting with new branches. That’s what they’re here for.
Practical examples
Let’s go to an example.
Your goal is to get fit, so you have a detailed exercise and diet plan. After a few weeks, you unexpectedly injure yourself and you can’t follow your plan anymore. Well, feeling sorry for yourself won’t do any good.
There are many different branches you can follow:
You can adjust your workout plan
You can start doing a completely new sport
You can stretch and improve your flexibility
You can do physiotherapy
And so on
You could also decide to take a year completely off from dieting and exercising, spending that year to only madly educate yourself about health, and that would be a new fork. Here are two examples:
You can do different kinds of DNA, blood and other analyses to get to know your body better
You can read only health books while you recover
In all the life areas, you can have many different branches towards which you can unfold your life story. Your friend doesn’t have time for you; you go to a hobby meet-up and get to know new people. You don’t get a raise. You start a business in your free time.
Your trip got canceled. You decide to invest into your competences. When one door closes, another one opens. Branches, forks and pivots is what should always be on your mind when things don’t go as planned.
You should always have a list of all the different types of branches or pivots in your Goal Journey Map. Small adjustments, bigger adjustments, switching from one activity to the other, and so on. The only rule is to stay flexible and move forwards no matter what.
Staying flexible means that you’re able to disinvest your resources (ego, beliefs, values, time, energy and money) from one thing and start investing them into another that has bigger potential or works better in a certain moment. Having many branches enables you to easily regroup and reinvest your resources. No way to get stuck in life, ever.
Forks in personal life
Forks are a little bit different than branches. They are bigger pivots in your life. They are bigger changes you make in order to go forward. You take one big project or activity into a completely new direction. You take what you’ve learned, you keep the good parts, but the general direction changes a lot.
We’ve already seen an example, but here’s one more:
Practical examples
You were following a vegetarian diet, you learned a lot about your body, which foods make you feel good and which don’t, but somehow the diet doesn’t work for you. Your blood results get worse year after year. So you decide to switch to the paleo diet and see what happens to your blood. You add meat to your diet, but keep other foods that do you good in your diet plan. You keep what works, you consider what you’ve learned, but you move on to a completely new thing.
Now, if you have fixed ideas that eating meat isn’t good, you may have a hard time doing a big pivot. In such a case, you have to search for other branches that could solve your problem – adding supplements to your diet, adding more green foods and rice protein powder, and so on.
A fixed idea absolutely blocks your flexibility. It makes sense to consider all branches and forks, and then you can decide what’s acceptable to you ethically, emotionally, strategically and from other angles.
You always have many options
It’s not hard to get ideas for branches and forks. You just have to keep the abundance mentality. You can talk to other people to get new ideas, you can read, brainstorm different options and even try all kinds of crazy things. You should use the search mode to get the first insights into which branches and forks make sense and which don’t.
Put every idea to the test. Put every branch or fork to the test and see what happens. Of course you have to use common sense while doing it, but this kind of strategy will take the quality of your life to a completely new level. And your life will be much more diverse and exciting.
When you get results from your experiments based on actionable metrics, you can integrate branches that work into your life permanently, delete the branches and forks that don’t (fail and learn, in other words), and you should never stop trying new things while keeping your mind open.
When things work you persevere, when they don’t you pivot – to a new branch or fork.
Make sure that for every item on your vision list, you have a short life story (clear outcome with why), a goal journey map (strategy), and potential forks and branches. Then go out and start trying things. And when you encounter an obstacle, pivot. That’s how you will live your life to the full and sooner or later design the perfect life you want and deserve. That’s how you achieve your big goals.
Do you want to know more about goal setting?
This article is part of the series of how to successfully set goals in the 21st century. It’s part of the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework, which has the following seven steps:
Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is a very popular technique in business to better understand the purchasing process from a customer’s perspective. It’s especially popular for online businesses. It’s a technique that helps companies and organizations improve their customer experience and boost their sales.
You can use a very similar approach to develop a superior strategy for all the goals you want to achieve in your life. I call it Goal Journey Mapping (GJM) and it’s the most important and the most demanding step in the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework.
To summarize the steps in the framework, you first define your life vision, then you prioritize the list and select 5 – 7 items from the list. For the selected items, you add a strong why with short life stories, and in the final step you develop a Goal Journey Map out of the short life stories. I suggest you read the intro to the goal setting framework to understand all the steps really well.
In this article, we will focus on how to prepare a Goal Journey Map. But before that, let’s look at how Customer Journey Mapping is used in business.
Customer journey mapping and its benefits
The main idea of customer journey mapping is pretty simple. Every customer goes through a specific process, from becoming aware of a company’s product or service, to properly informing themselves about the offer and deciding to making a purchase or not.
Through this process, customer’s different emotions, questions, motives and actions arise, and a company has a chance to influence all those psychological elements through different communication channels or touch points. Through touch points, a company can lead a customer into the right direction by optimizing the buying experience.
Customer journey mapping is a rich visual representation of the purchasing process. It’s a graphic representation of different touch points made over time by a company and a customer, across different communication and distribution channels.
Customer Journey Map, Source: Adaptive Path
A very well designed Customer Journey Map should very clearly tell a story about the company’s desired interaction with a customer from the initial contact, through the process of engagement and hopefully into forging a long-term relationship, including after-sales support and assure all potential repurchases. Preparing such a Customer Journey Map has many different benefits for the company.
It helps the company’s management to better understand milestones a customer should achieve in certain stages of the process and the context from a customer’s perspective – where, when and how it’s happening.
Understanding a user’s context simply means that you have a clear picture of how the first contact was made, what the user’s expectations are and what the next step in the buying process should be. How and where should you lead a customer.
Visualisation of the process should give the management a clear picture about customer experience in every step of the sales funnel. For online businesses, the most popular funnel framework is called AARRR. Below is a list of all other benefits of creating a customer journey map – a CMJ helps management understand:
How a customer should be treated in different stages across different channels
What customers are thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing at different milestones
All the possible ways of interacting with a potential customer
Ideas of where and how you should lead a customer in every step of the process
User experience and how to improve it
Customers’ struggles, confusions and frustrations
You can define the requirements and resources you need (skills, data, outcomes etc.)
To build a customer journey map you need the following elements:
Personas – Personas are fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical character for a user segment. It’s about who enters the journey. If you have several different important customer segments, you can make more personas and customer journey maps.
Timeline with milestones and different customer stages – The second thing you need are milestones with different micro conversions (steps leading to a purchase) and macro conversions (final purchase) and other very well defined potential phases of the buying process. It’s about when it should happen and what should happen.
Communication channels and touch points – It’s a list of all the different communication channels that the company is using to deliver value to the customer. When a message is received from the customer, it comes to a touchdown. In other words, it’s about every encounter where customers and the business engage to exchange information, provide service or handle transactions. It’s about where it’s happening and what the expected customer’s behaviours are.
Emotions, questions and actions – This part of CJM is completely focused on the customer’s experience. It’s an illustration of emotions that a customer experiences in different phases of their journey and how to improve the experience to get a desired action from a customer. You write down different customer’s motivations and questions. You can use the “say-do-think-feel” model for that. The customer’s emotions and overall experience are at the end of the main thing that leads to a purchase.
Barriers – In every stage of a customer journey, there are some types of barriers, they can be structural, cost-related, psychological or any other types that need to be overcome. It’s good to know these barriers so they can be removed or managed properly.
Emapthy map to better understand customer, Source: Copyblogger
You can’t make a good customer journey map without comprehensive research. Gathering information to build a customer journey map especially includes web analytics, focus groups, talking to customers, surveys, anecdotal research, interviews and other data-gathering methods.
An especially important part of CJM is the analysis of what’s happening in a customer’s head (say-do-think-feel) in specific stages of a process or before a customer reaches a certain milestone. Every milestone is a moment of truth for the company, where customer can move into the next stage or not. Typical milestones in a customer journey are the following:
Awareness / Discovery
Interest and Desire / Query
Negotiating / Pricing / Comparison / Consider
Purchase / Commit
Post-sales support
Upgrades / Renewals / Cross-selling / Retaining
When you create a CJM, you can clearly see that in every phase, there are different touch points between a company and a customer, made through different communication channels, like a sales meeting, phone call, website, social media, e-mail, post etc.
Touchdown points are the most powerful tool a company has. The company must make sure that every touchdown leads a customer closer to making a purchase.
To summarize, the main idea of CJM is to make a clear, coherent, systematic and action-oriented communicationplan in different phases of the journey through different communication channels. When you have that kind of representation, you can start optimizing the experience.
Now that we understand how CJM is used in business, let’s look at how you can use the same approach in your personal life in the goal setting process.
Goal journey mapping
Only having a goal and writing it down is not enough. I will be fit by the end of the year, I will be rich when I turn 40, I will improve my marriage in the next two months, I will become a board member in my company etc. all sound nice and motivating, but they are nothing but wishful thoughts.
You can write them in the present tense, you can add S.M.A.R.T. characteristics or you can put the list of your goals in your wallet, nothing’s going to really help.
The only thing that really works and brings results is to build a superior strategy for how you will achieve your goal. A superior strategy is a fighting plan that you constantly adjust, update and improve. It’s a document where you gather all the data, analyze it, make adjustments and decide what your next steps will be. It’s a roadmap showing where you are and where you’re going.
Building yourself a Goal Journey Map is absolutely the first sign that shows if you’re really committed to a specific goal or not. If you aren’t prepared to take a whole weekend to prepare a master plan of how you will achieve something, I can guarantee you that the chances of you meeting your goal are very small.
A well-prepared Goal Journey Map considers setting a superior strategy, following the smart work philosophy and also putting in daily hard work. A Goal Journey Map is a system and a process. With such an approach, you never forget the bigger picture and at the same time, you also pay attention to all the details.
Goal Journey Mapping is a planning system that makes a specific goal the center of your life and even more importantly, it’s the only goal setting strategy that enables you to constantly adjust. It’s the only goal setting strategy that encourages you to stay flexible in the process of achieving your goal.
Goal Journey Map Elements
In general, a Goal Journey Map should cover 10 different elements. I call it a general GJM template. Nevertheless, you should stay very flexible about which parts of the template you use for different kinds of goals. Big goals require all ten elements, small goals maybe only an element or two. So if you decide to use the template, adjust it to your needs.
For example, if you have a goal to read 10 books on a certain topic, you need a research phase to select 10 books, a very well defined process with metrics determining how much you read per day or week, and maybe a reminder as part of the supporting environment. If you are new to reading, you can also add potential barriers, forks (switching to online courses if you don’t like reading), and so on.
On the other hand, if you decide to take care of your health, wealth or any other major area of life, you need all or almost all of the elements. You need to really consider everything, including a strategy to find your fit, the process you will follow, the resources you need and the things you will buy, very well defined metrics and a mechanism, and so on. You will most certainly also need help in terms of coaches, advisors and people who will constantly motivate you.
Yes, preparing a Goal Journey Map is not a joke. It’s serious business. Like you are serious about achieving your goals.
There are only two ways when it comes to your goals. You can be serious about achieving your goals and completely commit or you can be only joking around, wasting time and slowly turning into a zombie. I hope you decide to follow your dream life and put all the energy into preparing the Goal Journey Map(s) for your life goals.
A Goal Journey Map (potentially) consists of the following elements:
Life story – The final goal you want to achieve and why (all the rewards)
Process phases – Different phases you have to go through, like educating yourself, searching, finding your fit, executing etc.
Process with milestones – Repeating actions that lead to micro-goals and then to the final goal
Supporting environment – Key relationships, trends, motivational installations and other changes
People – All the people who are involved in you achieving your goals (influencers, blockers, mentors)
Insights and Minimum Viable Experience – Experiments for validated learning
Metrics – How you will measure your progress in different process phases
Feedback mechanism – System for gathering feedback from yourself and your environment
Risk-reward factor – Potential barriers, risks, fears and unanswered questions
Branches and forks – Potential small and big adjustments to the strategy
A short life story
A short life story is the simplest part. On top of your Goal Journey Map, you write a short life story you want to experience. It’s a short statement describing very clearly the final goal you want to achieve and especially why. By adding a powerful why, you should add a strong motivational charge as well as list all the rewards and benefits you will enjoy when you achieve the goal.
With a short life story, you should define what and why very well. But you leave out all the specifics like when, how much, and so on, because you want to stay flexible.
You need just a general idea of what you want to achieve and what you want to experience. By acquiring knowledge and insights, you can regularly update your life stories and make them more specific. Remember, nothing in your Goal Journey Map is fixed.
Process phases
In the next phase, you should define the process stages you will go through. For every single goal you want to achieve in life, you go through different process phases where you have to focus on different things and adjust your strategy. You probably have a general idea of where you are and what awaits you. The only important question is where you are in the process.
They are more or less standard phases. If you are a beginner, you start at the beginning, if you aren’t new to the thing you want to achieve, you may have already passed certain stages. The process phases are:
Acquiring general knowledge and preparing a Goal Journey Map
The search mode
Finding your fit and sticking to it
Identity shift and becoming a better version of yourself
The execution mode and very specifically defining a new set of metrics
The first three phases (called validated learning) are oriented towards learning about yourself and what your preferences are, gaining insights about the topic or life area you want to improve, learning about the environment and building yourself proper support, performing small experiments and constantly improving your strategy. You learn, you experiment, you search and you slowly build a metrics framework.
The last two phases are focused on execution. After you exit the search mode you know the process that will lead you to success very well, all you have to do is to put in all the hard work and trust the process. The first three phases usually take 3 – 12 months and the last two up to several years. But then you can finally succeed overnight.
Process with general milestones
In this section, you define the process that you will follow together with general milestones you want to achieve. It’s by far the most important part of the Goal Journey Map. The process is all about daily repeating actions that lead you to micro-goals, and the sum of these micro goals you achieve then leads to the final goal.
In the validated learning phase (knowledge, search, fit), the process includes things like:
Books you read, courses you take and seminars you visit (number, frequency, insights)
People you talk to (number, frequency, insights)
New things you try and experiment with (number, insights, ideas for new experiments)
Building yourself a new environment to support your goal (notifications, apps etc.)
Simulations, strategies, pivots and any improvements to your Goal Journey Map
In the execution phase (identity shift, execution), the process includes things like:
Daily actions and discipline to achieve your goal
Regular adjustments to your strategy based on the feedback
The process is the part of your Goal Journey Map that takes you straight to the bottom line. And the bottom line is always pretty simple.
If you want to be fit, you have to exercise (aerobic, anaerobic) regularly, and mind what and how much you eat. If you want to improve your financial situation, you have to spend less than you earn and invest the difference or build your own business. If you want to be really good at some skill, you have to invest 10,000 hours into it.
In the process section, you define daily or weekly actions you will do without any excuses to achieve your goals. You can add a calendar to it and mark the days on which you performed the action and on which you didn’t.
When you build your Goal Journey Map and define the process as part of it, you really have to make sure that nothing comes between you and performing that daily activity that gets you one step closer to your goals.
Supporting environment
Achieving a goal you’ve set for yourself is unfortunately not only up to you. It’s also up to your environment. You can’t succeed alone at anything. You need a strong supporting environment. Luckily you can influence the environment around you to some extent. And you can adjust to changes that are out of your control.
The environmental elements that greatly influence your capabilities to achieve a certain goal and how fast you’ll get there are:
Your key relationships – spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers, mentor
General market trends – financial markets, job markets etc.
Your company culture and your office space
Your family culture and your home
The right timing (timing is everything)
Other elements (religion, infrastructure, infostructure, motivational installations etc.)
It’s essential that you build yourself a motivational environment for every goal you want to achieve in life. That’s why you need to define the key relationships that will influence your behavior, and analyze all the people who are involved in you reaching your goals.
You also mustn’t forget about market trends and other PESTLE elements together with a list of all potential motivational installations and other changes in the environment that can help you achieve your goals. Examples are motivational posters, mobile apps, different reminders, and so on.
Your supporting environment matters a lot, so make sure you build yourself an environment that will support you in achieving your goals. It must be obvious in your Goal Journey Map that it’s the right timing for going after a certain goal. Because timing is everything.
People
Out of all the things that your environment consists of, people are the most important thing. People are the ones who will either encourage and support you, or block and mock you. If you don’t have the right people around you, forget about achieving any goal.
People will get jealous or support you
People will make fun of you or encourage you
People will demotivate you or motivate you
People will minimize your efforts or do it together with you
People will block you or help you
People will give you ill-minded advice or show you how to do it
Thus you need to list all the people who are involved in achieving your goals. You can segment them into supporters, blockers and mentors. Nevertheless, you will never know who is who until you start taking actions towards your goals and talking with them about your goals.
Usually the people you least expect turn into blockers and haters. Because they’re scared of losing you or that you will become better than them, and so on. Some even turn from a supporter into the hater along the way. Always pay attention to how other people are influencing your progress towards your goals.
In the end, there are five things you want to achieve:
Turn blockers and haters into supporters or neutral figures if they are close to you
Get rid of blockers and haters if they don’t want to stop with their destructive behavior
Ignore all the haters that are not close to you
Make new connections, partnerships and friends if necessary
Insights and the Minimum Viable Experience
Under Minimum Viable Experiences, you define all the small experiments you plan to perform in order to learn more about yourself and your environment. It’s a more detailed process of how you will perform the search mode.
The idea of MVEs is to not only talk or think about things (what you should try, what you think you may like etc.), but to go and try them. You don’t assume, you go out and test as soon as possible. Testing and trying is the best way to gain firsthand knowledge about yourself and the world. Testing and trying is the best way to achieve your goals.
Will eating before sleep make you fat or encourage your muscles to grow? Who knows, it depends on your genetics, so you have to test it.
An important part of the Goal Journey Map must also be how you will immediately take action. What are the easy targets, what kind of experiments you can do immediately and how you can apply theory to practice as soon as possible. You can define that under this section.
A very important part of this section are also all the insights you gather along the way. It’s a database of everything that you’ve learned about yourself, your environment, what works for you and what doesn’t, and so on. After you try many different things, you may get a little bit confused about what worked and what didn’t. A systematic overview of all the insights helps a lot.
To summarize, in this stage of planning, you should list:
Experiments you plan to perform
Early wins and low-hanging fruit you can go after
Insights you acquire along the way and things you already know
Metrics and resources
You need a set of metrics for every goal you want to achieve. Actually, you need two sets of metrics. One for the search mode and one for the execution mode. Metrics are the ones showing you if you are progressing towards your goals or not. A very important part of building your Goal Journey Map is to put data before rhetoric.
Metrics help you decide what to do next. You have no idea where you are and where you’re going if you don’t have any metrics. There are many different metrics you can follow and with time, you always improve them. Just make sure you aren’t relying on vanity metrics, but actionable metrics that show you true progress, even though seeing how much you suck might be painful at the beginning.
Here are examples of life metrics you can use:
Health
Money
Exercise frequency
Potential progress of illness
Managing your body weak points
Regular blood test
Body composition (% of fat, muscle size)
Aerobic endurance (run a mile, VO2 max)
Muscular endurance (push-up test, plank test)
Muscular strength (one-rep max)
Flexibility (yoga poses)
Personal income statement
Earned income
Passive income
Portfolio income
Expenses
Taxes
Monthly plus/minus
Net-worth
Assets
Doodads
Liabilities (Debt)
Career
Relationships
Your company position (employment contract vs. organizational chart)
Public influence (number of interviews, public ratings)
Social media influence (Klout score)
Work enjoyment (from 1 to 10)
Professional connections
Your legacy (number of positive ideas that influenced local/global society)
Number of close friends you have
Time spent with the people you love
How much you do for your partner (massage, dinner, etc.)
How much you get out of a relationship (giving and receiving must be in balance)
How often you say I love you
How often you give a compliment to your partner
How often you make love
Competences
Mind/Emotions
Number of books you read
Number of seminars you visit
Domain knowledge you possess
Number of skills you master
Number of tech skills
Number of creative ideas you have
Your IQ
Your EQ
How well you are able to control your mind (your maximum meditating time)
Your daily Happiness index
Number of negative thoughts daily (with use of emotional accounting)
Dominating cognitive distortions
Number of new things you tried in life
Number of breathtaking experiences you have encountered etc.
Other metrics as part of your life strategy (countries you traveled to, number of languages you speak etc.)
Besides metrics, you should also define all the resources you need to achieve your goal. These are different internal resources, from knowledge, competences and values, to all different outer resources like money, connections, and so on.
The more resources you have, the easier and faster you can usually achieve your goals. But if you don’t have the resources, you are forced to be more innovative and smart.
Feedback mechanism
The main idea of the Goal Journey Map is that you constantly update it based on acquiring new knowledge, getting more competent and even more based on the feedback you get from your environment and yourself. When I say “yourself”, I mean your emotions, thoughts, body metrics etc.
Achieving your goals is not only about aggressively going after what you want in life. It’s about being a healthy assertive and flexible person who can adjust and find new win-win combinations. For that, you have to listen to yourself and to other people and pay attention to what’s happening in your environment.
Your ego together with fixed ideas is the greatest enemy to staying flexible.
That’s why you need to somehow gather feedback, do regular reflections and based on that, make adjustments to your strategy of how you will meet your goals. You should also add the happiness index as part of your reflection process.
Risk reward factor
On the path to every goal, you will meet many barriers, you will have many unanswered questions and sooner or later you will have to face your deepest fears.
The fact is that if you aren’t failing at all and if you aren’t even a little bit scared, your goals aren’t ambitious enough. You don’t want to get bored in life, you want to have high goals, but you also want to be very smart about it.
You want to constantly pay attention to the risk-reward ratio. You want to make sure that you know your downsides and that they are manageable. At the same time, you want to go after realistically big upside potential. Big rewards, small risks. It’s not easy to achieve that, but it can be done.
Under risk-reward questions you should define:
What the potential risks are, how big they are and how you can manage them
All the barriers you can think of that may block you on the way towards your goals
Open questions you have or things you know that you don’t know
All the fears you’ll have to face going after your goal
When is it definitely the time to give up (not to be influenced by the sunk costs)
Other factors that influence the risk-reward ratio
Pivots, branches and forks
The final section of the Goal Journey Map are all the potential pivots you already know you can make if you get blocked somehow. Pivots, branches and forks are potential small or big adjustments to the strategy you can easily make in order to not get stuck.
They are alternative paths you can take every time you encounter a roadblock on your path towards your goals. The main idea is that when you’re preparing the Goal Journey Map, you already know that your plan won’t work, that’s why you keep it dynamic and always have alternative paths that enable you to go forward.
Today any static planning doesn’t work anymore.
A pivot in personal life is a fundamental change in your life strategy or how you plan to achieve a certain goal. You change your direction in life, but you still keep the same life vision and you consider the facts you learned about yourself and your environment.
You make pivots as many times as necessary until you find the perfectly right fit for you. You can also make a pivot later in the execution mode if it comes to any bigger changes in the environment. There are 10 typical potential pivots you can make. I call small pivots branches and bigger pivots forks.
Branches in personal life are small deviations from the main path, micro adjustments and mini new experiments you decide to perform in order to find a better way to achieve your goals. They are not too big diversions from the main path that don’t require any colossal changes in strategy.
Forks, very similarly to branches, are bigger pivots in your life. You take one big project or activity into a completely new direction. You take what you’ve learnt, you keep the good parts, but the general direction changes a lot.
The limitations of Goal Journey Mapping and putting it to work
There are a few very important things regarding the Goal Journey Map. As mentioned, for the small goals the framework is obviously an overkill and you have to simplify it. You have to use common sense to decide which parts to keep and which to delete for different types and sizes of your goals.
The second important fact is that a Goal Journey Map is a living thing. You have to constantly update it. You have to constantly improve it, add or remove things, and do upgrades. You have to make adjustments to your map and to your strategy on a weekly if not daily basis.
Even more importantly, the map must become a part of your life. You have to basically live inside it. It must become your bible. It does take quite a lot of work to set it up (maybe a weekend or so), but then you have a superior strategy that will help you achieve all the goals you always wanted to achieve.
If you have such a map and follow it, there is nothing that can stop you on the way to achieving your goals. Nothing. Because the map itself will motivate you. And that’s what you want and need. In the end, you need a new map for every one of your goals. For smaller goals you can greatly simplify it and for bigger goals you make a completely new map with all the sections.
Do you want to know more about goal setting?
This article is part of the series of how to successfully set goals in the 21st century. It’s part of the AgileLeanLife Goal Setting Framework, which has the following seven steps:
A Goal Journey Map (potentially) consists of the following elements:
