Blaz Kos

success

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  • Don’t worry about failure, because you only have to be right once

    In almost every blog post, I emphasize that you have to search for your personal fits before you commit to or brutally focus on anything.

    The reason for that is to not set your life strategy based on naivety and wrong assumptions, but to really get to know yourself and your environment with mini experiments, which enables you to shape your life strategy based on superior insights, immediate feedback and actionable metrics.

    Consequently, you can adjust more quickly and focus on what really brings progress, success and happiness.

    It’s very well proven that agile and lean strategy works not only in the startup world, but also among big brands, non-profit organizations and other business entities as well as in personal life as this blog teaches you. And we must not forget that the agile and lean methodologies are taught at the best business schools in the World.

    There is only one huge problem with this strategy.

    You must have the guts to experiment, you must have the courage to try hundreds of different things and you must be prepared to fail. You must be prepared to learn through failure and put your ego aside. You have to admit to yourself that you’re wrong, that you don’t know anything. At least in the beginning.

    In addition to that, you also need a little bit of scientific nature. You must be curious, you need the desire to try different things, to understand the world as well as possible, and you must be eager to gain superior insights about yourself and what you want out of life. You also need a set of metrics and a framework to decide when to persevere and when to pivot.

    You almost always have to face some kind of apathy before you find your fit, which means that following the AgileLeanLife strategy requires quite a lot of resilience, persistence and faith in the process. But there is some very good news when we talk about apathy.

    Much like there’s the rule that you are always wrong before you are right, in the same way there is a rule that you only have to be right once. Once you find your fit, you definitely still face different problems and challenges, but your life gets much easier. You know why and for what to fight. Your life mission becomes more important and huge than anything else in life.

    Let’s go step by step and build the case for why you only have to be right once.

    Why does finding the right fit matter so much?

    The only way to be really successful in any area of life is first finding your own fit. Some people are lucky enough that their parents, teachers or mentors see their potential and orientate them onto the right path towards their fit, but in most cases you have to find it once you enter the adult life.

    Values, which show what’s important to you and what you value, are what determines whether you fit with something or not. And your talents and other personality traits also play a big role. Anyway, when you find the right fit, you just know it.

    When you find it, passion awakens in you. You find yourself in something. You know that you can be successful in this. You see potential. You start to flourish and consider yourself lucky.

    I’ve seen people working in companies where they fit in and where they don’t. The difference in their level of happiness, productivity, motivation etc. is like night and day. I’ve seen people struggle with a sport just because it was supposed to help them lose weight the fastest, and people who were doing a sport they’re talented for and really like. The first ones gave up very soon, the second ones made real lifestyle changes.

    I’ve seen people who settled for the first partner they dated as well as people who made up their minds about what kind of a partner they want and then started searching until they found someone close to that. The probability of long-term happiness is much higher for the latter. That’s why finding your personal fit is so important.

    So here’s the first rule of success in life and the road to living a good quality life.

    Find the right person to build an intimate relationship with. Find a person for whom all the struggle is really worth it; and it will be worth it. Find a career that really suits you best, one that you’re passionate about and where you can really deliver the value added. In the same way, find your perfect diet, a sport you like, a group of people who support you and where you fit in, and so on.

    In every single life area put in the effort to find your perfect fit, the thing that is part of your DNA and on which you can build a successful life. Successful people find their fits, unsuccessful people are trying to be something they’re not or do things that lie far away from their talents.

    Hitting target

    You find your fit through the search mode

    I hope finding your fits makes sense to you. But how do you do that? You find your fit using the search mode.

    The idea of the search mode is that you consciously prepare yourself through a series of failures that will hurt a lot, but will open to you the path to validated learning about yourself and your environment. The search mode represents a mindset and a somewhat scientific and systematic approach to finding your fit.

    • You go to a several dates that don’t work out
    • You work at a few companies that just aren’t for you
    • You try a few different occupations and suck at them
    • You buy yourself a thing in hope that will make you happy but it doesn’t
    • All these things hurt, but they enable you to learn about yourself

    The first characteristic of the search mode is a special mindset. In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work.

    In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. The key thing is to not to get too ego invested.

    The second special characteristic of the search mode is the approach. Your only job in the search mode is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things. The key is to stay 100 % flexible and open-minded and, as mentioned, not invested in anything. Because the more you get invested, the more inflexible you become.

    In practical terms, that means you should have a spreadsheet or a list of paper, where you write down:

    • What your assumption about yourself or the world is (I think the vegetarian diet would work for me)
    • How you will put your assumption to the test (I won’t eat meat for 3 months.)
    • How you will measure results (blood test, happiness index, energy levels etc.)
    • In which case you will decide to persevere and in which to pivot
    • A list of additional experiments you can make after you finish this one

    The key thing you have to do is to do regular reflections when you’re performing the experiments. That is the most valuable part of the process.

    Before marking a hypothesis as validated or rejected, you should ask yourself what you’ve learned, what you’ll test next, how you’ll change your plans, and so on. A search mode without deep and systematic reflection has very little value.

    Again, if you don’t have a piece of paper with the key findings and insights, and if you don’t write down what you’ve learnt, you’re missing the point of the search mode.

    Only after you find your fit in the search phase do you start executing. Sometimes it may take a few months to find you fit, sometimes a few years. After you find your fit, you go from the search mode to the execution mode. You set strong foundations, have laser focus, commit fully, start working hard and achieving your goals. You optimize, improve, and measure your progress with very detailed and execution type of metrics.

    There are five big problems you have to face in the search mode:

    • You can easily get stuck in the analysis-paralysis.
    • You see learning only as a good excuse and thus there is no real validated learning.
    • You have emotional problems dealing with uncertainty, because you don’t trust the process, yourself or others enough.
    • You stick to things that don’t work, because your mind is not flexible enough or you get tired.
    • You expect short-term results that are rarely achievable.

    All these five problems aren’t easy to deal with. But by far the hardest thing you have to face is the apathy before finding your fit.

    In the search mode you really have to face apathy

    The process before you find your fit is really painful and psychologically demanding. It’s called the apathy before finding your fit. Here are the main reasons that cause apathy:

    • You try a new thing and it doesn’t work. You try a new one, failure again.
    • Then you think you’ve found something good, but in the next step, you realize you haven’t.
    • From time to time, you realize how delusional and wrong you were and your ego suffers.
    • It almost always takes longer than expected and it costs more than you plan.
    • You need to sit down, analyze and be very systematic. Not to mention all the rejections you have to face.

    This search phase really is best described with the quote that success is going from failure to failure without giving up. The whole process before finding your fit sucks even more in the beginning; because in the beginning, you’re a newbie and your competences and skills aren’t that good.

    For example, you’ve just gathered the courage to start dating, but your dating skills suck, so you get rejected again and again.

    But apathy is the necessary part. It’s the life test of whether you really want something and whether you’re prepared to fight for it. It’s a test of whether you’re able to get out of the Valley of Death or not. The alternative is not good.

    If you don’t manage to get out of the Valley of Death, you turn into a zombie and your life turns to shit. On a more positive note, the apathy phase is also the part of the process where you learn and grow the most.

    One more thing you must keep in mind. The worse that your starting position is, the more time it’ll take to find your fit. The worse that your starting position is, the longer the apathy will probably last.

    A worse position simply means that you don’t yet know yourself and what you really want, that you lack resources, competences, leverages, and so on. In other words, you have to work harder for success if your starting point sucks.

    The best news and a motivational thought to deal with apathy is the fact that you only have to be right once.

    You only have to be right once

    But you only have to be right once

    You need to develop ONE competence based on your talents that is in high demand and low supply. You need to find ONE spouse who fits you perfectly and you can build a dream life together. You need to find ONE sport that you don’t dislike and have no troubles doing daily. You have to find ONE diet that enables you to maintain weight and feel energized. You need ONE business idea that works.

    When you find your fit, you have something you can build your success on, which can last for years or even a lifetime. In addition to that, when you find your perfect fit, there is more room for common human errors (well, some of them). The perfect fit is the best cure for your mistakes.

    Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once.” – Drew Houston, Dropbox founder and CEO

    But here’s the thing. The moment you’re right, all the bitter past failures turn into a winning strategy. You finally manage to climb to the top of the world.

    Other people see you as lucky, but you know that finding your fit was a very carefully orchestrated process. You know you deserve it, because you put in all the hard and smart work. You know you succeeded because you joined the club of people who are willing to go through the apathy of the search mode.

    Apathy and failure aren’t something that lasts forever. It’s something you pass by, if you learn quickly enough. You are wrong and wrong until you are right. Then you become a true winner. Luckily, you only have to be right once.

  • A place to escape everyday life and reconnect with yourself

    We humans are social animals. We need to belong, love and be loved, we need to thrive, create and grow with other human beings. Long periods of isolation lead to nothing but depression, loneliness, poor self-image and other related mental issues.

    If you want to be happy in life, you need a team of people with whom you work and create on meaningful projects, and where you feel that your contribution is respected, and you need a group of people in your personal life where you share love, affection and have fun together.

    There are six key relationships in your life (spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers and mentors) and the deeper and healthier these relationships are, the richer your life usually is. That’s why you need to choose and nurture relationships very carefully. People are the ones making your life on Earth heaven or hell.

    Since we’re all different, for someone two good friends, a coworker and family are more than enough to feel socially satisfied, while others thrive only in interaction with many people. You need to know yourself very well and discover what works best for you in different periods of life. There is no wrong or right answer when it comes to designing your life.

    Much like socializing is important, so is regular temporary (active) isolation. If you’re an introvert, temporary isolation is probably something that feels very natural to you. You need it to refill your energy and you have no problem blossoming when you’re alone with books, your thoughts or something else you love and doesn’t involve other people.

    But even if you’re an extrovert, you can benefit from short-term isolation a lot. It may be a little bit harder to do it in the beginning, but once you see all the benefits, I’m sure you’ll have no problem sticking to it. Let’s look at the main benefits of temporary (active) isolation and how you can easily do it.

    A place to escape

    When you feel the urge to be alone, it’s already too late

    The main problem with short-term social isolation is the following. When you feel that you need to isolate yourself, it’s usually already a little bit late. In the same way like thirst is a sign that you should have drunk water way before you got thirsty.

    As you can easily forget to drink enough water throughout the day, so you can very easily loose the connection with yourself, without even being aware of it. You get a little bit too busy for a week or so and the connection with yourself gone.

    Unfortunately, the majority of people live like zombies and have zero connection with their core self. Life is a very busy thing and so you can easily forget about yourself.

    Regular isolation is the only way to keep the connection alive. Like you satisfy your thirst by drinking water, so you can only keep your core burning alive with regular active isolation during which you pay full attention to yourself.

    Isolating yourself with the goal of devoting full attention to yourself is nothing but a habit. And as every habit, it needs a trigger and a reward to be performed. Potential rewards are colossal.

    The benefits and triggers of active isolation

    After performing active isolation, you understand yourself better, you personally grow and become just a slightly better version of yourself.

    In addition to that, there is nobody there to bother you so you can create without any interruptions, and if you don’t feel like creating you can improve your competence level (with reading for example), get familiar with a new topic and much more. It all depends on your goal.

    As for the trigger, there are three best triggers that can take you into active isolation:

    • Time trigger – you timebox time in your calendar for when and where you do active isolation.
    • Thought trigger – you get a thought that leads you into a rich internal world of thinking, analyzing, brainstorming and thus you completely lose your sense of time and your environment.
    • Location trigger – you have a specially dedicated place where you go work in solitude. I call it a place to escape life.

    The time trigger is the most common one. You save a block of time in your calendar for active isolation. It can be time dedicated to planning, working on a meaningful project, reading or whatever.

    You can be in your office or at home, it doesn’t matter. When the time comes, you close the door behind you and don’t want to be disturbed. The key is that you’re really alone and that you’re performing a mentally active task that’s connected to your core self.

    As an interesting note, I’ve noticed that my time alone is not that quality and deep if there is another person in the room or in a room next to mine. I need to be really alone, knowing that there is nobody who can disturb me. So test if there is any difference for you if you actively isolate yourself when people are present in the room next to yours or when you’re really completely alone.

    A thought trigger is when you get completely lost in your own world. I think you know exactly what I mean by that, but let me still give you an example. Here is what Maye Musk, Elon’s mother said about him: ‘

    He goes into his brain, and then you just see he is in another world. He still does that. Now I just leave him be because I know he is designing a new rocket or something.’ Maye Musk (he = Elon)

    You can get yourself isolated, even if you aren’t alone. But you need a vivid internal world and strong inner focus, to not get disturbed easily and to block all other stimuli.

    The third thing that has the ability to lead you to active solitude is location – a place to escape. Many successful people have a place where they go alone in order to think, create and reconnect with their true core.

    Sometimes they go to such a place based on a plan, a timeboxed time, in other cases spontaneously when they feel like it. They just drop everything and go to the place where they can pay full attention to themselves. A place like that can really do wonders for you.

    The main reason for having a place specifically dedicated to active isolation is that you don’t want to run away from yourself and life with drugs, overworking, daydreaming and other addictions, you want to do the opposite.

    You want to run towards life and your true self by closely examining who you truly are and what meaningful things you can do with your life. Active isolation is a tool exactly for that. And it’s also the perfect tool to create.

    “My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. Creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones.” — Isaac Asimov

    Always have a place to escape life and listen to your thoughts

    Albert Einstein took long walks on the beach so he could listen to thoughts in his head. Nikola Tesla discovered very soon that being alone is the secret to invention. Pablo Picasso stated that without great solitude, no serious work is possible.

    Many successful people had or have a place where they devote complete attention to their true self. Then they use their pure essence to create new masterpieces the world has never seen before.

    Knowing that you have a place where you can always go to regroup, reconnect with yourself or analyze and create brings a special feeling of meaning and power into your life.

    You know there is a place you can “escape” to, a place where you can be only with yourself and bring your true core to life. It’s a place that belongs only to you and you belong to that place. There are so many different options of how a location can be a trigger for active solitude.

    Practical examples
    • You can have a “man cave” or a “she shed” where you work with no distractions
    • You can go to your favorite coffee shop or restaurant where it feels like the perfect place to create
    • You can take long walks on the beach or in the forest to listen to your thoughts
    • There might be a place you rent for an extended weekend to have alone time
    • The road or, to be more exact, driving in a car can also be a great place to reflect
    • Another way to do active isolation is to travel alone
    • Or maybe you can have a creative corner where you sit when you need time for yourself

    Options for where to do active isolation are endless. You can have several of them.

    I have an office called the “man cave” where I work without any distractions. No phone, no email, no visitors.

    I have no problem getting lost in my mind in a single second no matter where I am, thinking about the outline of my next article or a new idea I want to play with.

    I climb mountains to completely lose myself and relax. I take almost daily long walks to listen to my thoughts.

    Now I’m even thinking about having extended weekends only for myself. I’m just searching for the perfect place I could rent every quarter. I want to always be in the same place to anchor the location to active isolation.

    In my case, I’m an interesting mixture of an introvert and an extrovert. I need the time alone to think and create, but I also have a strong urge to be connected with other people. I thrive in a funny mixture of solitude and teamwork. So I do both, strategically and planned.

    Consistency is the key to not losing connection with yourself

    Much like you have to drink water daily to stay healthy and avoid thirst, in the same way you need to take regular time in active isolation if you don’t want to lose the connection with yourself.

    Consistency is the key to many things, and the connection with yourself is no exception. There are several patterns for assuring regularity:

    Homework
    • Take an hour of power every day, existing in active solitude.
    • Turn one day of the weekend or at least a few hours to be completely with yourself.
    • Have a place where you go alone for several days in regular intervals, like every quarter.
    • Devote 6 – 12 months of your life at some point to be in monk mode and create like never before
    • Use all the options or a few of them to construct an active isolation pattern that works best for you.

    If you’re a complete extrovert and being alone is something alien to you, you might be asking yourself what can you even do when you’re alone.

    Here are only a few ideas for what to do in a place that’s devoted only to you (as you’ve probably figured out, I call it active isolation):

    • Think
    • Read
    • Reflect
    • Create
    • Write a journal
    • Plan
    • Analyze

    Alone time

    It’s not easy, but it’s definitely worth it – here is why

    For an introvert, it may be easy to be alone and recharge, reading a book or doing any similar activity. For many extroverts, it’s already hard to take time to be alone.

    But for both types it’s usually extremely hard to be in active and creative isolation, if you aren’t a naturally born artist. At least at first. With time, it gets easier and when you realize how rich your internal world is, you become kind of addicted to it. You need it like you need the air to breathe.

    You are here on this planet to grow, enjoy, connect and create. For the creating part, to really put your talents to work, I think there are two mayor approaches that work by far the best. Almost every great artist, engineer or thinker used these two approaches.

    Testing thousands of ideas and creating in solitude, that’s what great minds master.

    The first approach is to regularly create and create a lot, I mean really a lot. (1) You have to write down thousands of ideas, outlines, concepts and creative thoughts. You must have no problem with failure, with the fact that the majority of them are nothing but crappy ideas.

    But in the flood of thousands and thousands of ideas, one of them is a very original and brilliant one from time to time. And that’s enough. Many times, you only need to be originally creative once.

    (2) The second approach is to work and create in solitude as we’ve discussed. Active isolation gives a special edge to understanding yourself, being connected to yourself and expressing yourself in the most genius and unique ways possible.

    Both concepts are hard to follow and implement, but they’re the one thing that distinguishes great minds from the rest of the world. You also have a great mind and now you know how to put it to use.

  • Hour of power – take one hour daily to invest into your future

    You rockThere is one single investment with the highest potential yield ever. It’s an extremely profitable investment you simply can’t miss out on. The best news in the whole story is that this investment is also reachable to you. Immediately.

    Because this investment is you. You, together with your talents and potentials, should always be your number one investment priority. That’s where the potential for really big profits lies. Unless you think you’re a bad investment opportunity, which I hope is not the case.

    There is no easy money, at least not legally. And there are no extremely profitable investments if you don’t put in all the hard effort and smart work – gaining control, analyzing competition, innovating, delivering surpluses of added value, being in an unfair position of high demand and low supply, and so on.

    In the same way, you have to put the effort in if you want to become an extremely profitable investment.

    You become a profitable investment only in one single way – you take at least one hour daily to do something for yourself, for your future. One hour, every single day. Every working day, every weekend, every super busy day, no matter what, you just have to do it.

    On an average work day, after deducting worktime, sleep, commuting, eating, bathroom time etc. you are left with approximately 4 – 5 hours of free time. So there is more than enough time to take one single hour for yourself. More than enough. The only thing preventing you from it is laziness.

    If you think you don’t have enough time, measure for one week how much time you spend watching TV, browsing social networks, reading news, and we can also add the time spent on different apps on your mobile phone, out for coffees and meetings.

    In an average person’s life, that sums up to 30+ hours per week being wasted. You can very simply make a little bit of room to invest in yourself with a few time management tricks. If nothing else, you can listen to audio books when you commute.

    Hour of power

    Why would you do it?

    There is always a way, if there’s a will. If you want to really commit to the daily hour of power, you must have a strong why. But that’s a really simple one.

    I think you don’t want to have a shitty job, crappy relationships, a bank account in red, poor health, crappy fitness, and so on. I assume you don’t want your potentials to be wasted and your life thrown away. Then you need to grow.

    Not only does everything get harder with years if you don’t invest in yourself, you’re going to die someday. It’s not as far away as it may seem. That should be big enough motivation by itself.

    You only have one life and if you want to live a good life, you have to invest in yourself. There is no other way, at least not one that would work in the long-term. On top of that, it feels good.

    It feels good to see your potentials realized. It feels good to have a healthy and fit body full of energy. It feels good to have a sharp mind that can solve many intellectual challenges.

    It feels good to have many competences you can offer on the market, and a full bank account. It feels good to be happy in life, being able to manage negative emotions and destructive thoughts and to have deep fulfilling relationships.

    One of the best feelings in the world is being a resourceful person of value. You feel good in your own skin, people love to spend time with you, you have no problem finding the dream partner, you have many job opportunities, you name it.

    But you can only become a resourceful person of value if you regularly invest in yourself. Don’t be lazy, don’t be scared, believe in yourself and just do it. If none of these reasons are strong enough for you, find one for yourself that will be. I can find thousands of them.

    You want to leave a legacy behind. You want to be a good role-model to your kids. You want to test your limits. You want to live a diverse life experience. You want to feed your curiosity. You want to become the best at something.

    You want to prove your parents wrong. You want to contribute to the world. You want to have enough money to travel the world. You want to free yourself from your negative past.

    There are hundreds of different reasons why you should invest in yourself. Find one so strong that nothing will come between you and your daily hour of power.

    You can only become a resourceful person of value if you regularly invest in yourself.

    Nothing will come between me and my hour of power attitude

    You eat every day for your energy levels to stay high. You sleep daily to recharge your batteries. You go to the toilet (hopefully) every day so your body doesn’t drown in its own dirt. These are all physical needs you have to satisfy or you won’t survive. Your hour of power should become one of these needs.

    You should feel like you’re going to die if you don’t invest one hour per day into yourself; or at least you should feel as uncomfortable as when you don’t go to the toilet for a long time because you’re constipated. The closer you are to the end of the day, the sicker you should feel if you haven’t invested in yourself yet.

    You have to wire it into your brain, feel it in your bones and beat it in your heart. When it comes to investing in yourself, you need a no-matter-what attitude. You have to make sure that nothing comes between you and investing in your future.

    Here are a few additional ideas of how you can achieve that:

    • Timebox an hour of power into your calendar
    • Make it a part of your morning kick-off routine or evening shut-down routine
    • Use the D.E.A.R. concept – one hour before you go to sleep? Drop Everything And Read.
    • Stay flexible about where and how you do it, life is somehow unpredictable

    There are so many things you can do

    There are so many different ways you can invest into yourself. Basically they break down to four levels – taking care of your body (physician dimension), mind (mental dimension), heart (emotional dimension) and soul (spiritual dimension). People also often call these things sharpening the saw.

    • Body: Exercise, lift weights, stretch, do yoga or tai chi, get a massage etc.
    • Mind: Read, take an online course, play chess, write, learn a new skill, do brain games, meditate, learn to breathe properly, etc.
    • Heart: Write a self-reflective journal, examine your past, have a deep talk, volunteer
    • Soul: Pray, learn to forgive, be grateful, write down your life mission, forgive somebody

    You can use 60 minutes to do one thing or you can divide it into 2 or 3 blocks. One day, you may read for 60 minutes, another day may be perfect for 20 minutes of reading, 20 minutes of exercise and 20 minutes of meditation. You can do all three at once or with breaks. It doesn’t matter, stay flexible, just make sure you do it.

    The only important thing is that you aren’t doing 100 different things. You want to be making 10 steps in one direction, not 1 step in 10 different directions.

    Consistently repeating the same thing leads to accumulation. It leads to the success spiral – you get better and better at something, you see the results, you become more self-confident and thus you want to invest even more. So search for a few things that fit you best as ways to invest into yourself in a certain period of your life, and then stick to them.

    Invest in yourself

    Your investment in yourself will start to accumulate

    The basic principles of life are pretty simple. One of them is this: it’s hard to start with something, but with time things get easier and after a while, results start to accumulate.

    The first few hours are the hardest, but then in a few weeks you start seeing the first results and after a few months, real accumulation begins. Just make sure you don’t overestimate what you can achieve in a few weeks and underestimate what you can achieve in a few years.

    Do pushups every day and in few months, you’ll be able to do more pushups than 90 % of people. Learn to code every day (or a new language) for an hour and you’ll gain a new competence in a year or so. Read every day and in a few years, you’ll see a vast improvement in your knowledge. Run every day and soon you will be able to run a marathon.

    By far the best advantage you can have in life is to develop the ability to consistently practice one thing every day. Consistency and repetition are the key. You need a focused attention span for one single hour, not more. Most people are too lazy to do that and the average person has an attention span of 8 seconds.

    So if you’re wondering what will take you far above the average, now you have the answer – consistently invest into yourself. Everyone knows the benefits, but most people just aren’t hungry enough. Don’t be one of them. Don’t become a zombie.

    The main idea of the daily hour of power is to help you keep consistency and repetition.

    Eight hours for survival, four hours for success

    If you’re really committed to extracting the highest possible yields from yourself, in other words if you want to be massively successful, there is a way to take everything even a step further. Don’t invest one hour per day into yourself, invest more. As much as possible.

    Many successful people follow the “eight hours for survival, four hours for success rule”. They work for 8 – 9 hours at their job or in their business to earn enough money, but then they invest almost all of their free time into their future.

    They exercise for an hour, read for an hour and then they plan, brainstorm ideas or do other things that will lead to a brighter future and will make them even more successful. Eight hour for survival, four hours for success. I suggest you start with one hour and then you can scale up from there.

    Homework

    Enough theory, it’s time to put things to practice. Drop everything and immediately take one hour completely for yourself with the goal of investing into your brighter future. It’s definitely something you will never regret.

  • Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups

    One day, I was hiking in the mountains with my girlfriend. On the way back, we got a little bit lost and I decided to put my survival skills to work. It didn’t take long for me to find the trail. I assumed that this was the trail we followed to get up to the summit. I was sure of it. I remembered. I saw the same trees. Of course the trail wasn’t the right one and we got even more lost. It took us hours to get back on the right track.

    Almost a decade ago, I spent a few months in California. I saw that every elite university has an alumni club and graduates are its proud members. When I returned home, I decided to found an alumni club of my high school, since it was an elite one. I strongly assumed that the school will see the benefits, people will love it and everybody will be happy. The school blocked it, people ignored it and it became one of my failed projects.

    A few years back, I decided to get fit. I never did any sports, and healthy living was something alien to me. On top of that I was super fat. It made complete logical sense to me that to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, you only have to go to the gym a few times and mind your food a little bit. Maybe you eat a cup of protein powder from time to time. Now more than three years have passed and I still don’t look anywhere near like Schwarzenegger.

    In all three stories, I was operating based on wrong assumptions. I was 100 % sure that I knew what I was doing, but I was wrong. Meeting reality wasn’t easy. And you have to meet it sooner or later in one way or another.

    Life works in a way that in many cases, you have no other choice but to rely on your assumptions. But it helps a lot if you know that they are nothing but assumptions that need to be tested as quickly as possible. Because wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.

    Don’t doubt yourself, but absolutely doubt everything you assume.

    Subjective objective reality

    Two realities

    We know two types of reality – the objective and subjective one. The objective reality isn’t accessible to any living being. The objective reality is how things really are in the world. We try to come as close to it as possible, especially with science.

    Nevertheless, complete objective reality will probably still be inaccessible for a long period of time, because there are always things for which we don’t know that we don’t know them. Artificial intelligence may be the first one to come as close to objective reality as possible.

    Here is an example of how complicated it may be to get to the bottom of objective truth:

    • People used to believe that you got ill because you became possessed by evil spirits.
    • Then doctors believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of the four humors.
    • Now we “know” that viruses and bacteria cause a big portion of diseases, but the question is if maybe there even exists something else that we don’t know yet and that causes real illness? In hundred years, will a pill be seen as a primitive solution, like a herbal potion mixture is seen today?
    • And many times, the placebo effect can help you get better, so it’s not only about drugs.

    The second type of reality is your subjective reality. The subjective reality is your own interpretation of the world. It’s the lens through which you see the world, the frame in which you operate.

    The lenses of how you interpret the world are created by your beliefs, values, past experiences, upbringing, environment and other similar factors, including your assumptions. These lenses are the primary source of how you make your decisions in life.

    As we’ve learnt, there are many errors in your subjective reality. Your senses have a limited capacity for capturing information, your brains have a limited ability for processing information, there are many things you don’t know or lack experience, everyone has many cognitive distortions and there are numerous other sources of errors in the subjective reality map.

    One big family of errors in the subjective map of reality are cognitive biases. It’s something you can’t avoid, but you can become aware that they’re part of your thinking. From stereotyping, conformation bias and anchoring to projection, transference and the halo effect. The list of cognitive biases is very long.

    Ironically, many of the cognitive biases exist to support your survival. They serve to help you protect your self-image, to deal with optimization, to help you make complex decisions, judge probabilities and avoid danger.

    They may often provide you with psychological safety and protection, but they also often help you hide behind lies or drive you to make stupid decisions.

    The other big family of errors in the subjective map of reality are wrong assumptions. You assume something will happen, but it doesn’t. You assume you know something, but you don’t. You take action, but you get a different reaction than you expected.

    That’s because the objective world is always different from your subjective representations and unique interpretations. Because of this gap, expecting anything leads to a very high probability of disappointment.

    Wrong assumptions

    The world of wrong assumptions

    You make assumptions all the time, you can’t avoid this phenomenon. It’s the way we humans operate, it’s how our brains function. Therefore, it’s impossible not to make any assumptions. The problem arises when you believe that your assumptions are the truth. But they are not, they’re only assumptions.

    It’s impossible not to make assumptions, but you can become aware that they are only assumptions, not the truth.

    There are so many different types of assumptions you make. Let’s look at just a few of them.

    Practical examples

    You assume you communicated something clearly, but maybe you haven’t. You assume other people know what you want or that they have the same values as you. But they probably don’t. You make different assumptions about what might work and what might not. In reality, you never know.

    You make assumptions about what other people think and what will they probably do. You even make assumptions about what other people think of you. You make assumptions about which ideas will work and which ones won’t, how it would be like to live in another country and so on, you make assumptions practically about everything.

    The key question is: if you can’t avoid making assumptions, what can you do about it? First of all, as we said, don’t mistake assumptions for the truth.

    Be aware that you are making nothing but assumptions. Then put assumptions to the test as soon as possible. Do a series of actions and experiments that will get you closer to the objective truth.

    Put your assumptions to the test

    The best cure for those errors in your subjective map of reality that you make because you assume things is to put assumptions to the test. You conduct a series of small actions and experiments that slowly lead you to a better understanding of the objective reality.

    You will never completely reach the objective truth, but you don’t have to. All you need is a superior understanding and key insights on which you can set your actions.

    There are many ways how you can do that. Before we dive into different approaches to testing assumptions, or hypotheses to sound more scientific, you must make sure that you become aware of the assumptions you’re making. You do that in two simple steps:

    • You say to yourself: I am only making an assumption, I don’t know the truth.
    • Then you ask yourself: how can I validate or reject my assumptions, how can I put them to the test?

    After becoming aware of the assumptions you’re making, there are several ways how you can test them. Here are a few most common approaches:

    1. Ask questions and get educated
    2. Get out and gain experience
    3. Search before you execute
    4. Actionable metrics
    5. Random experiences
    6. Research techniques

    Ask questions and get educated

    The first thing you can do to put certain types of assumptions to the test is to ask questions. Don’t be shy, just ask.

    You assume s/he doesn’t feel the way you feel? Ask. You assume a person doesn’t like you? Ask if that’s true and why. You don’t understand something? Ask. When you’re in a dilemma and you can ask a person to give a clarification, do it, don’t hesitate.

    A quick important note, when you ask people about clarifications make sure you also observe their behavior, not only listen to what they have to say. What people do is often more important than what they say. Because everyone lives in their own subjective reality, where we don’t even know the truth about ourselves.

    The second thing you can do is to get educated. Read books on the topic. Talk to people who have already achieved what you want to achieve. Subscribe to an online course. Model other people.

    Knowledge is not as valuable as real-life experience, but it absolutely makes sense to get very well-educated first and then you immediately apply knowledge to practice.

    There are always “aha” moments when you start educating yourself. You say to yourself many times, oh I didn’t know that is so, I imagined it (assumed) a lot differently. Ask questions, get educated, doubt every statement; but believe in yourself.

    Go out and gain first-hand experience

    First-hand experience acquired by small carefully set experiments is definitely a very good way to test the majority of assumptions. There is no better teacher than reality.

    Meeting reality can be harsh, but it really enables you to understand the world and yourself better. That’s why you have to do small manageable experiments. In other words, you have to be constantly in the learning, not the panic zone.

    There is a saying that you make good decisions based on experience and you gain experience based on bad decisions. That saying exposes very well how gaining real-life experience works. You’re always wrong before you’re right. You take a small step, you fail, you learn, you stand up again and then you continue in a new direction; you go from failure to failure until you succeed.

    You assume you have a good business idea? Build a landing page and send some traffic to it. It costs you a weekend of work and a few hundred dollars. You assume you don’t like to travel? Try it. You assume you’re a bad lecturer? Give it a shot. Today, you can luckily test almost everything, quickly and inexpensively.

    Experiments in life

    The search mode

    The search mode is nothing but a systematical series of experiments for finding your perfect fit in a specific area of life. You consciously decide that you will search for a thing that works for you and you don’t stop until you find it.

    In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, your expectations are definitely completely wrong. In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world.

    The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. Your only job is to test the assumptions you’ve written down, correct them, and try different things in order to find out what suits you best.

    This phase is only about learning, nothing else. No goals. Just learning and playing. After every experiment you conduct, you decide whether to persevere or pivot.

    If you want to be in the search mode, you have to meet the following criteria:

    • You consciously decide that you will enter the search mode
    • You write down what kind of experiments you will make
    • You set “search mode” metrics and define very well how you will measure your progress
    • Every experiment needs to be validated or rejected based on the set metrics
    • You write down what you’ve learnt after every experiment
    • You make a decision whether you will pivot or preserve
    • Everything needs to be written down, otherwise you can quickly forget what you’ve learnt

    Use actionable metrics

    Science conducts a carefully orchestrated set of experiments to better understand how the world works. In order for the experiments to be as accurate as possible, there are many different rules to follow – deduction, induction, hypotheses, variables, control groups etc.

    In most cases, some kind of metrics are involved – you have to measure to either validate or reject your assumptions.

    That’s why metrics go hand in hand with experiments. Metrics, at the end of the day, are the best indicator of how accurate your assumptions are. Thus you have to base most of your agency and learning on life metrics.

    You have to measure when you’re right and when you’re wrong. You have to measure when you’re progressing and when you’re lying to yourself with the fake feeling of progress.

    There are many ways how you can measure things. From your physical responses and emotions, to the feedback you get from your environment and the monetary value you create.

    So first become aware when you’re making assumptions, then brainstorm what would be the most appropriate experiment to put assumptions to the test and in the end, have a set of metrics that will guide you into the right direction.

    Examples of actionable metrics in a personal life:

    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)

    Random experiences

    From time to time, it makes sense to go for a random experience, especially for things where you assume you’ve found the fit that work best for you. Because sometimes a completely new experience opens a whole new world to you, a world you didn’t know even existed.

    What you think you like and what you actually like are two different things. That’s why it always makes sense to go for a rich life experience and try new things when you get the opportunity to do so.

    An example would be considering your favorite dish. You’ve tried many different foods in the past and now you know that you like pasta Bolognese the most. Then you travel to a completely new place and they have your favorite dish on the menu and a dish you’ve never eaten before, but it’s their bestseller.

    In the same way, I encourage you to try different sports, investments, get to know different cultures, life settings, read things you never read before, try new hobbies, and so on. Sometimes do it strategically by employing the search mode, other times do it when the opportunity pops up, and sometimes just go proactively for a random experience.

    You will never know until you try and you will never know if you always stick to the same things.

    Research techniques

    For some of your assumptions, especially in business, you may need a professional scientific approach to testing assumptions and employing different research techniques like interviews, surveys, split testing, card sorting, contextual inquiry, mental models, different types of analysis and many other similar research techniques.

    Scientists use these techniques in their daily work to better understand the world, and there is no reason why you wouldn’t use them in your personal life while keeping the same goal in mind.

    You can use these techniques to test your (business) ideas, assess different investment opportunities, when you analyze your environment and its paradigms, when you study people’s behavior and in many other cases. Keep your mind open and use different tools at your disposal when an assumption needs to be tested.

    Tech changes

    Life changes and so testing assumptions never ends

    No matter how experienced you get, there are always errors in your subjective interpretation of reality. The fast-changing world contributes to that even more. Even if you could reach objective reality in a certain moment, an error would occur the next second. Because the world is constantly changing. And it’s changing faster and faster.

    Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

    That’s why you constantly need to keep testing your assumptions. You have to see life as a playground, where you have to test what works and what doesn’t. Based on your findings, you have to constantly adjust your life strategy and actions.

    That’s why the search mode is so important. That’s why regular reflections are mandatory. That’s why you have to adjust your course of action and how you will get to your goal on a bi-weekly basis, if not even more frequently. That’s how you stay lean and agile.

    Don’t just assume. Experiment and validate. Only then take action.

  • Optimize your life for productivity and flexibility

    For decades, individuals and organizations aimed to optimize their agency for the highest productivity levels possible. Superior organization and disruptive innovation were the front-runners of any success. And it all makes sense.

    Both concepts greatly contribute to being different, better, faster, more efficient, or can lead to adding more value, solving problems that were not yet solved or solving them better, and so on. Empires were built on superior organization, disruptive innovation and enterprising.

    Nevertheless, the contemporary environment is becoming so complex, turbulent and fast-changing that a third element needs to be added to the superior organization and disruptive innovation of superior entities.

    Startup world, as the part of the business world that’s most exposed to the unstable environment, is already adding this new third element – with agile and lean techniques. The sooner you add this third element to your life or the organization you’re running, the better off you’ll be.

    I’m talking about flexibility of course, and in this article I will focus on how to develop and keep flexibility in personal life as the ultimate competitive advantage. If you aren’t flexible by nature, this article is a must read. Think about what happened to the dinosaurs only because they weren’t flexible enough.

    Flexibility

    What does flexibility even mean?

    If we want to understand what being flexible really means, let’s first ask ourselves how not being flexible looks like, let’s analyze the opposite. In fact, it’s really easy to notice when you or anybody else is inflexible.

    You’re usually doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results, but there are none. So you whine, bitch and complain, but don’t do the only thing that would really help – change your actions. Being inflexible means that you stubbornly persist at something that doesn’t work at all.

    Staying flexible on the other hand means nothing but easily being able to dis-invest your resources (ego, beliefs, values, time, energy and money) from one thing and start investing into another that has bigger potential or works better. Being flexible means you have no problem to stop doing one thing, and start doing another.

    Being flexible signifies the ability to stop doing an activity that doesn’t work (anymore) and finding a new better way to do something or a completely new opportunity or path that leads to the same goal.

    “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water, my friend.” Bruce Lee

    Let’s look at some practical examples. If you’re a flexible person you have no problem (an example):

    • Changing from one diet that doesn’t work anymore to a new one (from vegan to paleo)
    • Doing a completely different type of exercise after you injure yourself (from weightlifting to yoga)
    • Reprogramming yourself to have a more positive approach towards life (going from constantly frowning to constantly smiling)
    • Learning how to respond more wisely in tough situations (responding calmly instead of losing your temper)
    • Developing a new set of competences and your talents (the ones that are currently in a much higher demand compared to what your job is at the moment)
    • Switching to beliefs that are more appropriate in contemporary times (from acting out of dominance to acting out of prestige)
    • Changing a job, the place where you live or the team of people you work with
    • Learning a new language or adjusting to cultural differences if you change your environment
    • Accepting weather as it is and not complaining about it
    • Using new devices and technology
    • And so on

    I’m very inflexible by nature, so I have to work hard on keeping my mind flexible. That’s why I can also write about it, because I know the difference in the approach and the quality of life if you can keep things flexible or not.

    Here’s the story of the last time in my life when I had to remind myself to stay flexible. I spent my summer vacation in Sri Lanka. I had a great time there with my girlfriend, but only after I decided to stay flexible. I couldn’t follow my carb-cycling and intermittent fasting there.

    I had the goal that I will read at least three books during my holiday, but I read none, since there were so many other things to do and see. I had a plan to write a few article drafts and I wrote zero, since I didn’t have any energy left after travelling for the whole day.

    Bitching, complaining and punishing myself because I wasn’t able to follow my goals there could have easily destroyed my holidays. But only if I stayed inflexible, like many times before.

    This time, I decided to stay fully flexible and to maximize other things on my vision list and other opportunities presented by the new temporary environment – I enjoyed the local food and tasted completely new dishes. I embraced and learned about the new culture. I met many interesting new people. I did many exciting activities like safari, diving with sharks, rock climbing, going on a pilgrimage, and so on.

    I decided to enjoy my vacation, even if I didn’t read a single page, write a single word, and even if I gained a pound or two and ate too many carbs. That’s what I did and I had a phenomenal time. The day after I got home, I started to following my original commitments again.

    It’s a very simple and plastic example, but that’s the way of how you should approach to life in general – in the most flexible way possible. And if you’re a flexible person by nature that may seem funny to you, but yes, if you’re inflexible, rigid, then you have almost zero capacity to adjust to new circumstances. That’s why you go extinct.

    Sri Lanka Trip
    I had to completely adjust my goals while travelling.

    Now let’s look at a few approaches that will help you stay flexible.

    Have many options and alternative paths

    If you want to stay flexible, you need many options and alternative paths. Only if you have many alternatives can you switch to following new goals or can easily decide to either persevere or pivot when you encounter a roadblock on the path towards your goal.

    Having many options is what brings real safety today, having many options is what keeps you away from being stuck in life. But you must be strong enough to need get burdened by the tyranny of choice.

    There are a few general ways of keeping many options in your personal life:

    • Be a person of value. Develop competences that have a high demand and low supply. Acquire people skills and know how to provide value in key relationships. Maximize your sexual market value and other types of values. The better version of yourself you become, more options you will have.
    • Be innovative and curious. If you’re interested in many things, if you’re comfortable with many different alternatives of how to potentially design your life, if you’re always prepared to innovate your way out of hard situations, there is always a step you can take forward, there is always a way to maximize your quality of life, based on factors that you control and the ones you don’t. Always stay curious, always stay hungry, always stay foolish.
    • Avoid the onetis mentality. The number one killer of flexibility is the onetis mentality. The onetis mentality means being obsessed with one single thing – one girl or boy, one job, one car, one investment etc. If there is something that represents all to you and everything else is nothing, it’s only a question of time when you will be miserable and stuck.

    In practice, that means you have many items on your vision list and you prioritize them based on your current needs and desires, up-to-date paradigms in your environment, new opportunities you’re exposed to, and so on. You constantly adjust your life strategy based on the feedback you’re getting from the environment.

    But be careful, with many choices you can easily catch yourself into the trap of the tyranny of choice. You can get overwhelmed by all the possible options and encounter decision fatigue.

    For that to not happen, you have to combine both concepts, keep alternative paths open, but simplify your life in current settings to the point that you aren’t hindered by constantly thinking about the other options you have.

    In practice, that means that you know what plan B, C … Z could be, but you don’t overthink it and you act as if they don’t exist at all while you’re following your plan A. When you get stuck, you decide to either persevere or pivot.

    When to persist and when to move on is often one of the hardest decisions you have to make. That’s why being flexible isn’t easy.

    path_to_success3

    Don’t have any fixed ideas

    If you want to stay flexible, you shouldn’t have any fixed ideas about how things should be, how they will happen and what will be the exact path that will lead you towards your goal.

    You should definitely have a life vision, strong mission, superior strategy, but you must be prepared to adjust them at any second based on the instant feedback you get – from yourself (body, mind, emotions, spirit) or your environment (trends, relationships etc.).

    Make a small step forward, analyze the feedback and adjust immediately.

    Things never go as planned. You set your strategy based on many untested assumptions. The environment is changing so fast, and people are completely unpredictable.So having fixed ideas about how something will happen and when it should happen is nothing but a recipe for misery. Remember, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face by reality.

    No matter if you want to get fit, rich or married, accept the following very basic facts of planning and going after your goals:

    1. You will never get to your goal in exactly the same way as you think you will
    2. There will always be an unexpected problems on the path towards your goal
    3. Everything will take much longer than expected
    4. The cost for everything is usually much higher than planned (in effort, money or any other resource)
    5. Your ego will get hurt when you realize how many wrong assumptions you had, but that’s how you learn

    If you learn to accept these simple yet harsh facts of life, you will save yourself many grey hairs. You aren’t the only one who has to deal with that kind of harsh reality, everybody does.

    Nevertheless, the ones who learn to play the cards of life better under these circumstances are the ones who thrive, especially because they’re staying flexible and aren’t overly optimistic.

    Agile mind

    Keep your mind agile

    It’s very beneficial to have no fixed ideas, but it’s also quite hard to accomplish. There are many exercises that can help you keep your mind flexible. Here are a few of them:

    • Ask yourself how your life would look like if you believed the opposite, or what would be the result if you would do the opposite? Practice defending the opposite view than you have.
    • Always try new things. Learn new skills, use new routes on your commute home, constantly meet new people, travel, be open to new life experiences.
    • Daily brainstorm new ideas, at least 50 of them. Don’t be critical at all when you brainstorm, just make sure you list as many ideas as possible. Keep your mind open.
    • Practice cognitive reframing, meaning that you put the same situation into a different context and you try to find the context that works best for you to move forward.
    • Change your environment to encourage new thoughts. You can go for a walk or a run. You can get a cup of coffee or go work in a coffee shop. Many times, changing the environment leads to new creative thoughts.
    • Imagine life being just a dream, where you can be easily flexible.

    “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” ― Albert Einstein

    Don’t have a problem with being wrong

    Your strategy and all of your actions are based more or less on your assumptions; and many of your assumptions are wrong. Now read this carefully: wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.

    That’s why you’re always wrong before you are right; or in other words, you can make good decisions solely based on real-life experience, but you gain real-life experience based on bad decisions.

    So don’t mind being wrong. Expect to be wrong. Expect to fail. Be able to fail and move on to the next experiment in a second. That’s real flexibility. I tried x, it doesn’t work, so let’s try y. And you keep trying until you find one variation that works.

    That’s also how nature operates. Nature doesn’t make a better version of an organism with every offspring. Nature encourages as many different variations as possible and then lets the best variations survive and thrive.

    “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison

    Having no problem failing, being wrong or changing their mind is an important characteristic of many successful people. It’s not easy to develop such a characteristic, but it brings you an enormous competitive advantage.

    It’s a personality characteristic that helped Tomas Edison go through 10,000 failed experiments and persist until he found a way for a lightbulb to work. Steve Jobs had the same mentality, here is a segment from an interview with him that emphasizes exactly that:

    I’m one of this people that… I don’t really care about being right. I just care about success. You will find lots of people who will tell you I had a very strong opinion and they presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later I completely changed my mind.

    Because I’m like that. I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing. Steve Jobs

    Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Don’t put your ego in front of learning something new. Don’t put your ego in front of success. Don’t be too ego invested in anything. Instead stay flexible and look for solutions that work and bring success into your life and make you happy.

    Steve Jobs Quote

    Search before you execute

    The best way to stay flexible is to consciously decide to put yourself in the search mode before you really commit to anything. You consciously decide to be in a phase where you will fail, test your assumptions and learn.

    You decide with full awareness that you won’t get yourself ego invested or committed, but just put your assumptions to the test.

    So in the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t make any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. In the search phase, you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world.

    The most important thing in this phase is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all. The key thing is to not get ego invested too much. Commitments lead to heavy energy investments, and you shouldn’t be investing before you know what you’re truly investing into and whether the investment really fits your character.

    Hard work should always also be smart work, but you can’t work smartly if you don’t have the right map and coordinates.

    Your only job in the search mode is to test the assumptions you wrote down, correct them, and try different things in order to find out what suits you best – your personal fit. This phase is only for learning about yourself and the world. N

    o goals. No measurement of progress. Just learning and playing. And staying 100 % flexible. Because the more you invest yourself, the more inflexible you become.

    The sunk costs mentality makes you inflexible

    Sunk costs are all the costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. The sunk costs fallacy encourages loss aversion, meaning that you have an irrational tendency to follow through with an activity even if it’s not meeting your expectations, only because you’ve already invested some resources into it.

    To simplify, when you start investing into something, you find that you have a strong tendency to keep going, even if the investment doesn’t make rational sense.

    The sunk costs fallacy makes you inflexible. The sunk costs fallacy encourages you to make even more bad decisions. That’s why you have to be aware of this cognitive bias very well and manage it properly. The less you’re influenced by the sunk cost fallacy, the more flexible you can stay.

    Let’s look at a few examples of when the sunk costs make you very inflexible:

    • You bought a ticket to see a movie in cinema, but now the movie is boring. What do you do?
    • You ordered and paid for too much food, should you eat it or not, even if you aren’t hungry?
    • You bought an expensive MOOC that you find useless and there is no money-back guarantee. Should you watch it until the end or not?
    • You already invested so much into a relationship, so does it even make sense to switch to a new relationship and start everything from scratch?
    • You already invested x EUR into your project, house or anything else, and now much more money is needed, but if you already invested so much, why not invest a little more?

    What is the best way to turn this into an advantage?

    On your way toward your goals, you will encounter small roadblocks as well as complete dead-ends. You can usually go around the small roadblocks with small adjustments.

    Dead-ends, on the other hand, require bigger changes in strategy and action plan. Big obstacles usually make you emotionally upset and thus that more inflexible.

    When you meet greater obstacles on your way, you can easily start feeling sorry for yourself and put yourself in a position of a victim, thinking how everybody is against you. Of course that doesn’t bring you any good, only additional negative energy and delays in achieving the finish line.

    Every time you receive a setback, immediately ask yourself how you can turn this into your advantage.

    Therefore, there is one question that can help you a lot in staying flexible in your thinking when you encounter big problems. It’s a simple question based on optimal thinking – what’s the best way to turn this situation to my advantage?

    There is always a way how you can do that, if you’re flexible. You can always reframe it, regroup your resources, refocus, adjust, pivot or change settings in any other way. Just don’t get stuck in your mind.

    Always stay flexible

    Optimize your life for flexibility in every possible way

    Staying flexible will help you not get stuck in difficult life situations and find a way towards your life vision and goals no matter how different the path is from your initial plan.

    In addition to that, flexibility will save you many gray hairs and emotional pain. But remember, if you aren’t flexible by nature, you have to constantly practice it.

    At first, being flexible may feel alien to you, like you’re betraying your values, beliefs and principles, but it’s not about that – it’s about finding a way that works.

    You definitely have to make sure that when you’re looking for alternative paths, you keep your moral standards and integrity high. Nevertheless, you’re looking for long-term wins. But there is no sense in persisting at things that don’t work, only because you already invested so much in them or because you’re simply stubborn. Be flexible instead.

    It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. – Megginson’s interpretation of the central idea outlined in Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”

    Here are a few other ideas how you can make sure to keep your life as flexible as possible:

    • Drop any 5-year plans about anything
    • List all potential pivots you can do if you encounter a big obstacle
    • Be tolerant and open-minded so you can work or be friends with all kinds of different people
    • Have no problem moving to a country or a town with more opportunities if necessary
    • Be a minimalist and own as little as possible so that you are mobile and can easily move around
    • Don’t be overly attached to anything, because nothing lasts forever
    • Rent or share, don’t own things
    • Keep your digital life and work in the cloud
    • Manage your energy, not your time
    • Keep your body flexible with stretching, much like you have to keep your mind flexible

    In the future, flexibility will be an even more important personality characteristic than it already is today. In a complex, volatile and unpredictable environment, only the most flexible will survive.

    Luckily, flexibility is nothing but a skill you can learn. Once you learn to stay flexible, nothing can stop you in life, because you always find the next smart move to make. Be super organized, constantly innovate and stay flexible.

  • If you are a perfectionist, learn to be satisfied with good enough

    I am a big perfectionist, often caught in all-or-nothing thinking. They are both (perfectionism as well as black & white thinking) severe cognitive distortions, probably the most frequent ones in the general population, and they hinder the quality of life to a great extent.

    A thinking and mindset upgrade to properly manage these two distortions is mandatory, especially for unlocking a whole new productivity and happiness level in your professional and personal life. In this article, you will find the answer to how to successfully fight with your chronic perfectionism.

    An illuminating concept that helped me deal with perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking is called “good enough”. This model of thinking emphasizes that it doesn’t have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough. It completely changed my life.

    Now I never go for perfect, I always rather settle for good enough, even if I still aim high.

    The idea behind the concept of good enough is that it’s completely acceptable to be reasonably consistent with your goals and not following them 100 % of time to complete perfection; because the latter is simply impossible and only makes you unhappy and miserable.

    • You don’t need a perfect job, you need a good enough job
    • You don’t need a perfect spouse, you need a good enough spouse
    • You don’t need to be filthy rich, you need a good enough financial situation
    • You don’t have to eat perfectly healthy, your diet must only be good enough
    • You don’t have to be a perfect parent, you have to be a good enough parent
    • You don’t need a perfect life, you need to fight for a good enough life

    Good enough

    Perfectionist’s greed

    The main driving force behind perfectionism is usually a desire to be loved and accepted. You think you can achieve that by being flawless. Perfectionism usually develops if you’re raised by overly critical parents or parents who have low capabilities for emotional care and loving support. To simplify, with perfectionism you usually want to show other people that you are good enough to be loved.

    But perfectionism is a very bad surrogate for love. The main problem is that you strive for perfectionism in your achievements to show other people how good you are, but new achievements don’t equal a greater capacity for loving yourself and others. That’s why you always want more and more.

    No matter how good the achievements you have, you never feel loved enough. Additionally, there is always somebody better than you and that can quickly humiliate you for not being good enough – ever. Thus you become extremely greedy.

    No matter how much you earn, you want more. No matter how good your partner is, you are more focused on their flaws and you want better. No matter how successful your career is, there is so much more you could do.

    One cheat meal and your otherwise good enough diet seems like nothing. Even though you just bought a laptop, you know that in 6 months there will be a new model, and the one you have won’t be good enough anymore. A greedy soul that’s never ever satisfied.

    If you’re a perfectionist, you’re an obsessive “maximizer”. You want the best in everything. That may lead to greater achievements, but it may also lead to a miserable life (achievements ≠ happiness). Wanting the best all the time is impossible, and that kind of a distortion can only lead to being clinically depressed.

    The characteristics of perfectionists and maximizers when it comes to choice-making are the following. According to Barry Swartz and his book The Paradox of Choice, they:

    • Have a big fear of missing out on things
    • Always compare their decisions with those of other people
    • Spend too much time and energy even on small decisions
    • Are generally unhappy with their outcomes and constantly want something new

    Rather than a maximizer, be a satisfier. Absolutely aim high and have big goals, but also learn to be satisfied with good enough. Learn to recognize and be aware of your greed, and curb it with the new better mindset and by developing a greater capacity for self-love. Learn the difference between happiness and achievements. Become aware when things are good enough for you.

    Here are the characteristics of satisfiers, they:

    • Have fear of missing out on enjoying high quality of life, in other words being happy
    • Accept the good enough concept
    • Don’t obsess too much about their options
    • Can easily move on after making a decision
    • Are generally happy with their choices and outcomes

    Don’t constantly beat yourself up with perfect. It’s good enough, now move on.

    Slipping from time to time will make you more disciplined

    Life is not meant to be perfect. You need imperfection in your life. If everything were perfect, there would be no room for improvement, there would be no room for effort and for the capacity to grow. Without flaws, life would be boring as f*ck.

    You need some level of stress so that you’re stimulated to go forward and your brain synapses can grow. You need a little bit of imperfection that drives you towards your new accomplishments. That’s all good and necessary until it’s too much and it becomes toxic.

    A benevolent man should always allow a few faults in himself.

    And you can’t be constantly 100 % disciplined. You need to slip from time to time. You need a cheat day. You need to reset yourself. Like you take a break during the day, so you need to take a break from your consistent effort from time to time. Progress is always achieved in the form of one step back, two steps forward.

    There are no straight lines in nature, and there is surely no straight line on the path to success. So don’t strive for perfection, but see everything together with flaws as perfect. Imperfections enable progress and help you on the way towards your goal by enabling you to not be too tough on yourself and go crazy.

    When you slip, just remember that tomorrow is a new beginning. Don’t beat yourself up for your slips and mistakes, but calculate them into your doing and decision-making. They are part of the equation. What matters in the end is that you make many more good than bad decisions.

    Don’t beat yourself up for your slips and mistakes, but calculate them into your doing and decision-making.

    Don’t make good enough be an excuse for not giving your best

    The good enough concept is a potential cure for a perfectionist, not a handy excuse for a lazy person. If you aren’t as motivated as you should be, if you are underachieving in your life, the new better mindset might be going from good to great rather than settling with the good enough. The good enough concept in such a case may even further hinder your ambitions and the will to act. You need to use the right tool for the situation you are in.

    It’s not hard to know which tool to use – good enough or from okay to great. Deep down you always know if you are miserable because you aren’t giving your 100 % or because you’re greedy. What you should do is assess where you are based on the life success metrics, measure how fast your progress is, assess how much you trust the process and especially how realistic your expectations are.

    Looking at life metrics immediately tells you what is the source of unhappiness.

    Find a progress pace that is respectful and realistic – not perfect, but good enough. Make sure you are constantly improving and growing (the kaizen mindset), but also that you aren’t caught in a greedy perfectionist’s mindset that’s never satisfied with anything, where nothing is good enough. Find the middle path that works for you.

    Good enough like

    Aim high, but define good enough very clearly

    It’s not enough to just know the good enough concept. You have to define what an ideal situation is for you and what is a good enough situation. You must have a clear definition of good enough to shut up your inner critic when you’re unrealistically assessing your current situation and your progress.

    Defining how much money would be an ideal situation for you and going after the number is great, but also define how much money is a good enough situation. Being rich is probably ideal, but what about owning a house without debt and having savings for 6 months of expenses, would that be good enough for you?

    You can make a persona of your ideal partner, the perfect partner, but you also ask yourself what flaws your spouse can have and still be good enough? Cheating is probably unacceptable, but what about them having a bad day from time to time?

    Having a magazine cover body, being able to run a marathon, deadlifting 200 kg (400lbs) and no health problems would definitely be the ideal health situation. But what is a realistic good enough health situation for you? Realistically, there are body weaknesses you have to accept, you have to be okay with being ill from time to time, there are sports you are good at and bad at, and so on. Considering all that, what is a good enough health situation for you?

    Homework

    Please sit down, take a piece of paper or open a notepad on your computer, and define what is currently good enough for you in different areas of life – health, key relationships, money, career, competences, enjoying life etc. Really do the exercise, no excuses. Not doing the exercise is definitely not good enough. ;)

    Emotional accounting combined with the good enough concept

    I trust that you’ve done your homework above and defined the good enough situation you can happily live with. You have your minimum that should bring pure happiness and satisfaction in your life. Good.

    Unfortunately, that’s not enough to fully employ the good enough concept. That’s because your perfectionist mind is like a crazy monkey that tries to attack you at every single opportunity.

    So regularly talking back to your perfectionist inner critic is the key. You do that with emotional accounting. To perform emotional accounting, all you need a simple table (you can download the template below). The table for doing the emotional accounting has a few columns. Here they are:

    • Toxic thought going through your head (automatic thought, self-criticism and perfectionism)
    • Type of negative feeling it’s causing and the intensity of it (emotions)
    • Performing a rational response to the toxic thought (self-defense with using the good enough concept)
    • New intensity of the negative feeling (outcome)

    You simply go from column to column. First you learn to identify toxic negative thoughts and cognitive distortions (I’m not good enough, I don’t earn enough, the Joneses have a better car etc.). Then you try to identify what kind of negative feelings the negative thoughts are causing you (anger, sadness, self-hate etc.).

    In the next step, your greatest tool is self-defense, talking back to your inner critic with a rational response and a more realistic situation. That should lead to a big release of negative emotions. The good enough concept can help you with the rational response.

    Here’s an example:

    • I make so many grammar mistakes. I guess I am a poor writer. (pure perfectionism)
    • Negative feelings: Anger, frustration (intensity: 8 out of 10)
    • Rational response: Even if I still make quite a lot of grammar mistakes, I have great ideas for articles, my style is improving and so is my grammar, and I get a lot of positive feedback on my articles. I already am a good enough writer and I’m becoming better and better. I am proud of my progress.
    • Negative feelings after the rational response: Anger, frustration (2 out of 10), feeling proud

    As the first step, I suggest you use the template you can download below. You will soon become such an expert in identifying negative thoughts and performing emotional accounting that you will easily do the exercise in your head, like I do it now all the time.

    Template

    Here you can download the template:

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    How much is just good enough to be happy in life and successfully move forward?

    It may be hard to perform emotional accounting the first few times, but I promise you that it can completely change your life. Combining emotional accounting with the good enough concept can really help you successfully fight your perfectionist nature.

    The best battles are the ones you win over yourself, and now you have the tools to fight your inner perfectionist critic. Good luck with your fight.