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  • How to automate good decisions

    In some way, living a good quality life is not rocket science. With time, good decisions lead you to a good life and poor decisions lead you to a crappy, stressful low quality life. The better decisions you make, big or small, the better off you are. Good decisions accumulate, and with time they bring great yields.

    Examples of good decisions are saving money, not overeating, exercising a few times per day, investing into your knowledge, brainstorming ideas, finding and doing a job you love, and so on. Examples of bad decisions are smoking, drinking excessively, eating too much sugar, getting uncontrollably into debt, buying things you don’t need and staying in an abusive relationship, just to name a few.

    On a logical level, it’s pretty simple to understand that but in real life, it’s quite hard to follow good smart decisions; simply because you weren’t programmed to make smart long-term decisions.

    You were initially programmed for life in a jungle, which means instant gratification (life was short), laziness (energy needed to be saved), overeating (food was rare) and any kind of domination – material, physical, intellectual (the alpha male/female got it all).

    That’s why it’s hard to make smart decisions.

    The intellectual, conscious, creative and planning part of you has to override the animal instinct that ruled decision-making for millions of years in our ancestors. And it has to do it over and over again, it never stops.

    That’s an extremely hard thing to do. It takes a lot of cognitive power and severe self-control, together with constant curbing of primal needs, and never letting the benefits of reinvesting into your tomorrow out of your sight.

    Rare are the people who are mentally so strong that they can follow smart decisions in all different areas of life all the time. That’s why I wouldn’t count on self-discipline too much. In reality, counting solely on your self-discipline is not a superior life strategy.

    Sooner or later, you kneel down in front of the laws of nature and genes. That’s why you have to be much smarter than relying on your self-discipline. You always have to be one step ahead of life.

    Automate good decisions

    Don’t use cognitive power for good decisions if you don’t have to

    One way to be smarter than life is to automate good decisions. The idea behind this is pretty simple. No matter if a decision or a habit is hard or easy to follow, automate it if possible.

    If you can’t completely automate it, semi-automate it. Make sure it takes zero cognitive effort, or almost zero, to do something smart. Take transaction costs all the way down, as low as possible. Let it happen automatically.

    Make sure you don’t have to think about it, make sure that it takes zero discipline and that smart decisions just happen by themselves. Put good decisions on autopilot. You have to be a little bit creative, but let’s look at few examples of how you can do that.

    Money

    The easiest way to automate good decisions is with money management. That’s because nowadays, money is nothing but some numbers in an online app, and you can do all kinds of transactions and functions simply by using your computer.

    Practical examples

    Here are examples of good decisions you can automate:

    • Automate transactions to your savings account every time you get a paycheck.
    • Make sure you need to get an approval for all costs higher than a certain amount (from your spouse or CFO), especially if you like to overspend.
    • As an alternative, you may have a rule that you aren’t allowed to make any big purchases if you don’t sleep it over (for 14 days).
    • Don’t have a credit card with you, but only enough money to buy yourself lunch and a healthy snack.

    That way, you don’t have to struggle with decision-making, good decisions are already made for you. Every week, money gets transferred to the savings account and you live with the rest. You can’t do impulse purchases, because you need approval or wait long enough for your emotions to stabilize. If you only have enough money for lunch with you, you can’t do small unnecessary purchases that sum up in high amounts of wasted money with time.

    Here’s an article that gives a lot of detail about how to make good automatic money decisions. With money, you can really automate being smart. All other areas can be more or less only semi-automated, still following the basic rules of positive automation – meaning that something good happens with the least effort possible.

    Health

    You can (semi-)automate good decisions in all three areas of health – diet, exercise and lifestyle. Now let’s not pretend and exaggerate: doing one hour of exercise as part of your morning routine is extremely good for you, but it takes effort and years before the habit becomes such a strong part of you that we could call it automation.

    Practical examples

    Nevertheless, there are many small things you can do for your health that are pretty much semi-automated and easy to follow:

    • Subscribe to a weekly fresh delivery of organic vegetables and fruits to your home, and then put it in a visible place. You can also standardize the typical daily meals you like the most.
    • Eat a salad for one of your main meals. Don’t think about it, don’t decide about anything, for one of your main meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), just order or make yourself a salad. All the effort it takes is for you to say: “And one salad please” to the waiter. You can do the same with one piece of fruit.
    • Have a strict deadline for the hour after which you don’t eat anymore. “You don’t have to decide about anything, you simply don’t eat anymore. (after 6pm, for example). It’s how intermittent fasting works and it can really do wonders for your health. You can do the same by not eating dessert at all. If you don’t eat dessert at all, there is nothing to decide about.
    • Every night, prepare your sports bag and take it with you. Just put it in your car. Now, the training bag won’t force you to go to the gym, but it will put additional pressure on you. It’s simple and easy to pack your exercising clothes every night and take them with you. You can automate that. Let’s hope that the rest will follow.
    • You can automate for all electronic devices to go into sleep mode at a certain hour, let’s say 9pm. Then you can take a book, read for a while and go to bed early.

    There are many decisions regarding your health that you can automate. Yes, they are called healthy habits, but the idea is to take transaction costs as low as possible, so that it takes almost zero effort to follow. At the end of the day, the best habits are the ones with which you can follow through in the long term.

    Relationships

    An important part of quality relationships is putting in all the necessary effort. You have to water a relationship like a flower, otherwise it starts to wither.

    You water relationships with attention, love, affection, understanding, care, good communication, by providing value, mutual support and with many other contributions on a physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, material and social level.

    It’s not easy to be consistent in relationships and make sure that your investment levels stay the same all the time or even get stronger. You get drained, you have bad days, and your affection may fluctuate.

    That’s why you should try to automate some good relationship decisions. Not to make the relationship mechanic, but to protect yourself from your own weaknesses.

    Practical examples

    Examples of automating good decisions:

    • If you get upset with something, you tell it to the other person immediately and start looking for a solution.
    • You never go to sleep on bad terms with your spouse. You always work things out before going to bed. You don’t even think about whether to talk or not, you don’t hold a grudge, you automatically solve the problem before going to sleep.
    • Every day when your spouse comes from work, you put away all electronic devices, you stop doing whatever you were doing (no matter how important it is), and you talk for a while about your day – fully present.
    • You book a date with your spouse every first Wednesday of the month. It’s in the calendar, it’s automated, there is no rescheduling and you go someplace nice, just the two of you, without any distractions. In the same way, you can automate lunch with your best friend in regular terms.
    • You send a creative love message every day to your spouse. Every day, one message, with no exceptions. Get a reminder or alarm saying it’s time to get romantic and creative.
    • If you get a message from somebody, you reply immediately in an active constructive way.

    There are many ways how you can automate good gestures in a relationship. Yes, you have to make sure things don’t get mechanic and that you really do it because you want to. It’s good to keep a creative component or some kind of effort, even if you automate part of a decision. And at the end of a day, if you don’t want to do it, you can stop at any moment. You have to stay agile.

    But the idea is to free yourself from cognitive burden and not to rely solely on your self-discipline. Even more, you don’t want to get indulgent and sloppy in relationships with time, when you settle. You want to invest more and more in quality relationships not less, and automation and semi-automaton can help you with that.

    IFTTT Recipes
    Examples of IFTTT Recipes for automating good decisions

    Endless options for smart decision automation

    Much like we’ve seen for the core life areas (health, wealth and relationships), you can use the same principle in other life areas. There are numerous ways how you can automate and semi-automate good decisions, not only to make sure that you’re going in the right direction and to save your cognitive capabilities for other life matters, but also to simplify your life and make more room for being relaxed and happy.

    Practical examples

    Here are some additional examples for automating good decisions:

    • Read every day before you go to sleep, and make sure you don’t fall asleep if you haven’t read at least one page of a book.
    • Have a few standard outfits for different occasions and put them in a queue. You pick the one that’s waiting first in the queue. Or you can wear the same outfit every day, like Mark Zuckerberg does.
    • You check email 30 minutes before your work ends and you reply or delete all emails in these 30 minutes. You don’t check your email otherwise.
    • You simply don’t do meetings. When something needs to be communicated, you use your phone or go for lunch with that person, and when something needs to be solved, you organize a workshop with a strict deadline and a goal to be met.
    • Every 14 days, you have a planning sprint for the next two weeks. It’s in your calendar, it’s fixed and nothing can get between you and strategic planning of your future.
    • Put a web nanny to stop you after an hour on social networks and make sure your computer won’t even start before you watch an online course for 30 minutes.
    • Automatically get the things you regularly buy in the same intervals from Amazon Subscribe

    Your plan to automate good decisions

    The easiest way to automate parts of your life (smart decisions) is to start with money. Log into your bank account and simply set a weekly transaction to a savings account on the day you receive a paycheck.

    Then make sure you don’t spend that money, and watch your savings account grow. Doing automation with money is the easiest because it’s purely based on technology. Starting to automate good money decisions should motivate you to do automation in other areas of life as well.

    In fact, you can easily do 100 % automation with all other tech stuff. There are two very popular web apps called IFTTT and Zappier that can automate many of your computer tasks and save you tons of time. With one app or the other you can automate things like:

    • Save any email attachment I receive to Dropbox or Google Drive
    • If I star an email, remind me to take care of it
    • When I’m in a meeting for more than 60 minutes, schedule a phone call to myself and run
    • Log my working hours automatically in a Google Spreadsheet
    • Back up Facebook photos I’m tagged in to Dropbox

    IFFT has something called individual automation functions recipes. If you check their site, you can find hundreds of them. I really like that name. An automation recipe. It’s time for you to get creative and cook up a few good automation recipes, besides tech and money stuff.

    I encourage you to take a piece of paper and outline a few automation recipes you can do in your life. Start with the easy things and ideas you can do immediately. You can use the IF – THEN model and sketch out your ideas for automation.

    Homework

    Make your fist recipe, and then add new recipes as quickly as you feel comfortable following through with them. The lower the transaction costs and the more you can really automate, the less willpower and discipline you need. If complete automation is possible, it takes almost zero effort to introduce a new habit in life. Look for such opportunities. Be smart and automate good decisions.

  • Imagine Sisyphus happy

    Sisyphus is a figure in Greek Mythology, a wise and cunning king who committed crimes against Gods, and was thus condemned to eternal hard labor. His everlasting punishment was to roll a big rock uphill, only to watch it roll back down for the sake of doing the job again and again. Hard, frustrating, exhausting and meaningless labor without end.

    From the story, we know Sisyphean tasks as the ones that are hard and futile, the type of tasks that different philosophers found everywhere – from an endless thirst for power, being too attracted and attached to things you can’t have in life or that you will certainly lose someday, to a desire for perfectionism and not to mention general hardship together with absurdity of life.

    The absurdity of life and Sisyphus’ condemnation were inspiration for Albert Camus to write The Myth of Sisyphus, where he deliberates over the path to potential salvation. In the world of chaos, disorder and a lack of meaning, a man must become a rebel, the struggle itself must be enough to fulfill a person’s heart, he argues. His concluding thoughts are that the salvation to absurdity is in imagining Sisyphus happy.

    Imagining Sisyphus happy – that can be really illuminating.

    Imagine Sisyphus Happy

    Accept the absurdity and struggles of life

    There isn’t a single person alive who has the privilege of not dealing with a constant flow of problems. Problem after problem. Rock after rock. A big part of life is solving problems. Small ones, big ones, old ones and new ones. In life, you have to be a problem solver, a fixer. Most often the best approach to problem solving is to start with the task immediately.

    You pick that rock and start climbing uphill. Because the longer you wait, the heavier the rock becomes, even if it’s only in your mind. You can, for example, easily add weight by feeling sorry for yourself. Sisyphus picks up the rock as soon as they meet at the foot of the hill, and you should do the same with your problems. Rare are the problems that need time to pass in order to be solved. And rare are the problems that go away by themselves with time. Even rarer are rocks other people are prepared to pick up for us.

    You should enjoy problem solving, you should enjoy challenges. Problems are nevertheless nothing but challenges. You are born to deal with problems. In TV shows and movies, you watch heroes fighting in tough situations. Sports competitions, video games, board games and crosswords are nothing but challenges.

    The only difference is that you see some kinds of challenges as very exciting, and other ones as painful. The ones you don’t choose and that contain your emotional engagement are usually the painful ones. But instead see all kinds of problems, even the toughest challenges of life – like job loss, breakups and so on – only as an opportunity to grow, improve, become better; find meaning in solving the hardest problems of life.

    In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. – Albert Camus

    In the same way, you have to accept the absurdity of life. Death is inevitable, no person knows what happens after we draw the last breath, the true meaning of life is a matter of personal interpretation, it’s impossible to determine which God is the right one and how come we haven’t made contact with aliens yet if there are billions of stars in the galaxy similar to the sun (it’s called Fermi paradox).

    Sisyphus’ pain begins when he becomes aware of his condemnation. Because it’s easy to live in a lie, at least for a while. It’s painful to become aware of the absurdity of life and harsh facts. But really happy and wise becomes the one who learns to accept the punishments of life and sees meaning in them, an opportunity to grow, create, contribute and connect with life.

    There is no way to escape the absurdity, neither with lies nor with naivety, the only way to confront it is by fighting, you have to be a rebel. Because once you accept the absurdity of life, you realize that any absurdity of life is nothing but an opportunity to design the life you want.

    For example, you can create meaning for your life as it suits you best. You can decide what you’ll believe in and what will bring you the highest level of happiness day by day. If it was all known and set, we would all live life on the same terms. Now you can freely decide on what terms you will live your life. You are free to make out of the absurd whatever you want. That is a part of your life strategy – giving meaning to the life absurds.

    You can freely decide what benefit you will see in carrying the rock. Does it represent training your body, mind or practicing discipline? Maybe contributing to the world with hard work, learning to love yourself no matter how heavy the rock is or developing resilience? It’s completely up to you. No matter what situation you’re put in, you can always find a way out of the absurdity of life. You can always innovate your way out. Only by looking at things differently.

    There is nothing in life but dealing with struggle. You can find happiness in that.

    Sisyphus is successful, imagine Sisyphus happy

    At the end of the day, Sisyphus manages to push the rock all the way to the summit, again and again. Without any failure. In a way we could say that Sisyphus is successful. Bruce Lee was definitely a Sisyphus, that’s why he said he’s not afraid of a man who practiced 10,000 kicks one time, but of a man who practiced one single kick 10,000 times. I bet Sisyphus became the best mountain rock carrier.

    Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken. – Albert Camus

    If you want any real achievements in life, you have to be Sisyphus in a way. You have to repeat daily hard actions, even if you know that the output you get purely with your effort will be lost. You have to find comfort and meaning in the effort itself, even if it’s futile at the end.

    • If you want to be fit and have a great body, you have to do something for your body daily, while minding your diet and rebelling against gluttony and laziness. Even though dust you are and to dust you will return. But every exercise can be so much fun and every healthy meal can fill you with so much gratefulness and energy.
    • If you want to be rich, you have to discipline yourself to save every penny and develop your competence levels high, so you can provide as much value to the markets as possible. But in the end, you will leave everything behind. There is no form of money you can take with you to the other side. But you can really find happiness in developing your talents and providing value to the world.
    • If you want deep relationships, you have to water them daily like a flower, pull out all the weeds that are trying to stifle your love, but still everything comes to an end and relationships are nothing but broken glass. But relationships are meant for enjoying the present moment, not controlling what will happen with them in the future.

    Consistency and daily struggle are the hard road that slowly leads to success. But even if struggle doesn’t make you massively successful, you should find satisfaction in the fact that you revolted and that you fought. It’s the path that matters, not the end goal. The fact that you are rebelling against the absurdity of life is what counts.

    Sisyphus smilingAlbert Camus suggests three aspects as part of the revolt and fight against the absurd life: Revolt as never settling and accepting any reconciliation in your struggle, freedom as the fact that you are completely free to believe, think, behave and do with your life as you want, and passion as a way out of an absurd life, initiated by the question: if there is no single meaning and one sure direction in life, why not follow a diverse and rich life experience?

    Now imagine Sisyphus happy. Be happy.

  • Attention span – the ultimate advantage today

    A big disadvantage of today’s time is the so-called “fast food” characteristic of the society. You can see it in almost every aspect of life. Not only are fast food restaurant chains thriving, people want to get rich overnight, relationships that last years are a weird thing, and the average person unlocks their mobile phone around 200 times per day and locks it back the next second.

    We could describe the elements of the “fast food” disease that people suffer from as the following:

    • I’m a special snowflake; things should come to me easily without any real effort
    • I want things now and I definitely don’t want to wait
    • I want to experience everything very quickly and move on to the next thing as soon as possible
    • I easily get bored or irritated, that’s why I constantly need new stimuli
    • Everything that distracts me helps me keep busy and feel alive

    Fast to get, easy to consume and constantly providing something new together with aggressive distracting notifications is what people are addicted to today. Severely addicted. That’s why reality shows, get-rich-quick schemes and mental masturbation articles are thriving.

    The “fast food” society brings many problems – from overspending and overeating to shallow relationships and high anxiety levels. But the mother of those problems is absolutely the shortened attention span.

    The vicious circle behind it is quite simple. People consume products or do activities that require almost zero effort, including only a short attention span. Not training the discipline muscle and attention span leads to even shorter attention and general low cognitive performance capabilities. Soon you aren’t capable of reading 5 pages of a book without wanting to go to the toilet or checking the fridge.

    Attention span is the length of time during which a person is able to concentrate or remain interested in a task or an activity.

    Without proactively directed attention for a longer period of time, you can’t do a single thing that really matters in life. You can’t learn new things, you can’t create in the flow, you can’t form deep relationships, you can’t grow and improve, you can’t choose what to focus on, you can’t complete complex projects and you can’t even follow your own goals, nothing.

    You can only react to what’s happening in your environment. You can’t be really proactive. That’s why you should go into the opposite direction of the fast food society.

    Attention span

    Producers have an extremely long attention span

    In today’s society, we know two types of people – consumers and producers. Consumers only consume, nothing else. They do the easy things. They spend (borrowed) money, play lottery, entertain themselves on social networks and in clubs, go to a job they hate and hope for better times. They do all the tasks and activities that require a short attention span (or a passive attention span, as we will see).

    Consumers and short attention span people have no problem:

    • Talking to a friend over coffee and constantly checking their mobile phone
    • Working for 15 minutes and then starting to gossip
    • Visiting a nice tourist destination, but first taking a selfie
    • Reading an interesting article on the internet and already browsing photos of funny cats
    • Changing partners faster than underwear
    • Buying more and more new products (clothes, cars etc.) because they get bored by the old ones
    • Eating too expensively, daintily, too much or too soon

    The average attention span of a human today is 8 seconds. A goldfish has the attention span of 9 seconds.

    Producers, on the other hand, are building products, providing services, creating things, forging relationships, innovating, thinking, strategizing, growing, learning, putting together new concepts and providing value to different markets. Producers do all the things that require a long attention span and strong focus. That’s why consumers are getting (mentally) poor and producers are getting rich.

    Not to get confused, you have to understand the word producer in a broader sense. Producing is every task that leads to a positive outcome of creating something valuable or beautiful. Producers with a long attention span have no problem:

    • Talking to a person for hours without checking their mobile phone to forge a multidimensional relationship and to really understand the person they’re talking to.
    • Working straight for hours or even days in a flow to create a product, service, piece of art or any other valuable thing.
    • Reading for hours and learning new things and developing their competences.
    • Building strong and everlasting key personal relationships that get deeper and deeper with years.
    • Resisting compulsive buying or emotional eating and instead following their own health, wealth and other goals they have in life.

    Producers usually live a happy, fulfilling and rich life. Because they put in the effort. They don’t go for the average and they don’t want to become passive zombies with the attention span of a goldfish.

    That’s why you have to become a producer and you have to make sure that you can hold your attention on a single thing for a very long period of time. An extremely strong, focused and long attention span will bring miracles into your life. So let’s look at how to do that.

    Passive and active attention span

    Have you ever wondered how come you can watch TV, browse the Internet or lie on a beach for hours, but you can’t do the same when you’re working, reading or learning something new? How you can focus all your attention with ease when it’s time to binge watch a TV show, but when you are reading a book you get lost on the second page?

    Why is it easy to spend hours in front of the TV, completely focused? It’s because we know two kinds of attention – a passive and an active one. Your attention is always directed onto something, except when you’re sleeping (and even that can be discussed). And you’re always doing something when you’re awake, merely by existing.

    Depending on the task you do, you can be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually or socially actively or passively involved in a task. Being passively involved means that you are only witnessing something, you don’t play a very active role. Your effort in the activity, your contribution is low. You are either hibernating while things are happening around you or you are repeating something that is very familiar to you.

    Active attention, on the other hand, requires a lot of effort. It requires focus, presence, involvement, discipline, consistency, activation of all senses, engaging your mental capabilities, and so on. Active attention takes place when you consciously put effort into achieving something meaningful.

    Something meaningful means everything that’s connected to why we are here on this planet – to grow (personal improvement), to contribute (create value) and to enjoy life and connect with other people. To grow takes effort, to create takes effort, to connect with people takes effort and to be really happy with yourself and enjoy life takes effort; not only effort, but also a long attention span.

    Passive attention – Low effort Active attention – High effort
    Low physical, analytical, creative or communicational effort High physical, analytical, creative or communicational effort
    • Procrastinating
    • Repeating routine tasks
    • Small talk
    • Watching TV
    • Reading news
    • Playing video games (not all of them)
    • Participating in a low-quality meeting
    • Feeling sorry for yourself
    • Complaining
    • Being indecisive
    • Checking social media
    • Listening to music
    • Gossiping
    • Small talk
    • Eating quickly prepared low-quality food
    • Browsing the internet
    • Playing email ping pong
    • Instant messaging
    • Playing lotto
    • Spending money
    • Going on a miracle diet
    • Setting and following your own goals
    • Brainstorming and analyzing ideas
    • Creating in the flow
    • Learning new things
    • Developing competences
    • Writing, drawing, programming
    • Organizing & leading a productive meeting
    • Upgrading your mindset
    • Thinking of a solution & following through
    • Making a proactive decision
    • Sharing quality ideas on social media
    • Listening to online courses
    • Really getting to know a person
    • Building a deep and quality relationship
    • Cooking a healthy meal
    • Using the internet to learn new things
    • Replying to an email in the shortest way
    • Meeting new people in real life
    • Starting your own business
    • Saving money
    • Changing your health lifestyle
    Consumers Producers

    Doing things that require a short attention span is the easy road. Doing things that require a long attention span means undertaking the hard road. And with time, the hard road becomes easy and the easy road becomes hard. That’s why you have to take the hard road and strengthen your attention span.

    It may be true that it’s in our genes to do all the things with the short attention span. Nonetheless, easy cognitive activities often bring instant gratification. For example, easy cognitive activities can bring you short-term benefits like:

    • Constant happening that’s driving you away from yourself and the pain of life (constantly checking the mobile phone, gossiping etc.)
    • Instant excess of calories (eating a bag of chips in front of TV)
    • Saving energy – physical, mental (with zero body or brain exercise)
    • Fake feeling of connectedness (having 1000 Facebook friends but no real friends)
    • Getting something for nothing (playing lotto, going on a “miracle” diet)
    • Zero effort fun (playing video games instead of doing sports etc.)

    That may all sound like a good deal. But it’s not. It may have been a good deal back in the jungle (where food, people and distractions were rare), but today it’s nothing but a series of bad decisions that lead to a poor quality of life in the long term.

    Doing only activities that require a short attention span leads to being broke, fat, doing a job you hate and spending time with people you don’t like. It may be bearable as long as you have enough distractions, but it’s far from the good life you deserve.

    The zombie life is bearable as long as you have enough distractions that help you forget about it. That’s why with time, you need more and more activities that require a short attention span.

    That’s why you need to slowly move away from activities that require a passive and short attention span to the ones that require a long active attention span. You need to start building up your focusing capabilities. It may be hard at the beginning, but in the long term it will bring you a whole new level of quality of life.

    Training your attention span will slowly lead you to easily do things like:

    • Not giving up easily and becoming more resilient
    • Saying no and avoiding any kind of distractions
    • Strategically planning and setting goals with the long-term view
    • Increasing your competence level
    • Brainstorming hundreds of ideas
    • Creating different kinds of products and art
    • Working in a flow for hours day by day, even for weeks on a single task
    • Slicing, managing and finishing complex tasks
    • Better observing what is happening with you (body, mind, emotions, spirit)
    • Better observing what is happening in your environment (trends, people etc.)
    • Making better decisions about your wealth and health
    • Many other benefits

    Building up your attention span and doing activities that matter is a good deal today. The best deal you can go for. That’s the deal you should go after. So let’s look at some practical advice on how to build up your attention span.

    There is no person in the world with a short attention span who can successfully deal with life challenges that await us all on the life path.

    Training focus

    How to build your attention span

    Now that we know how important attention span is, let’s look at a few core techniques for how to improve it. As long as you’re at least a bit motivated to improve your concentration, it’s not hard to do it. The techniques to build up your attention span fall into one of the following categories:

    1. Get the experience of how awesome it is to be focused and how good results it brings
    2. Make room in your life and get rid of things that are corrupting your attention span
    3. Deliberately practice your concentration abilities with different exercises
    4. Use things that help with concentration

    The best advice is to build up attention span naturally with small additions to your life. Start a new hobby you’re obsessed with. Turn off all notifications on your mobile phone. Try to meditate for a few minutes or challenge yourself with a brain game. Add almonds to your snacks.

    By doing small activities like these and consequently building up your attention span bit by bit every day, results will accumulate and you will soon become scary focused superhuman. Now let’s dive deeper into these ideas.

    1. Find one productive thing you are obsessed with

    If you don’t have the experience (or you had it long time ago) of being concentrated and focused and you’re not aware of what magical results an unbreakable attention span can bring, you won’t see any sense in it. You have to feel it in your bones and see concrete results that come with the ability to focus.

    That’s why the number one thing I recommend if you suffer from a short attention span in general is to enter the search mode. Try dozens and dozens of different things (that require active attention), including sports, arts, hobbies etc., and find that one thing (the so-called fit) that will ignite a spark in you. Find that one thing that will awaken passion and utter obsession in you.

    Because when you find that one thing, your fit, something magical happens. You become more focused and concentrated without even trying to be focused. You just don’t think about it. You want to do it over and over again. Like a video game or watching TV, only that you are actively present.

    For example, if you find a hobby you like, you can devote hours and hours of your free time in the afternoons and weekends to it. You don’t have to struggle. You just do it and get lost in the flow. And as you have probably figure it out, watching TV doesn’t count.

    Try as many things as possible and don’t give up until you find that one thing that will change your life forever and naturally teach you how to be more focused. Here are some ideas for what to try:

    • Try 10 different sports and find the one that fits you best and you want to do it every day
    • Find a list online of all the hobbies and try a few of them
    • Create something – an article, a poem, a computer program, anything you like and then do it over and over again, day by day
    • Go to a public library and scan all the sections and books until something really draws your attention (it must feel like a magnet) and then read everything on that topic
    • Start an online course on something that has always interested you

    The catch is that when you have an experience of being utterly focused on something, you will not only train your attention span, your brain will get a model and an experience that can be transferred to other areas of life. You won’t struggle to focus anymore, but will have an easy time devoting your attention to things for as long as you want.

    2. Unplug yourself and simplify your life

    A very sad truth is that mobile phones are the number one attention span killers, together with other electronic devices. Technology is like fire. You can cook yourself dinner with it or burn yourself. You want to use technology to your advantage. You have to be smarter than the average user.

    How to be smarter than a person with an 8-second attention span?

    • Turn on “do not disturb” when creating in the flow or spending time with other people
    • Turn off notifications on your mobile phone
    • Don’t look at your mobile phone the first and last 60 minutes of your day
    • Delete all mental masturbation apps
    • Check email and social networks only twice a day in bulk
    • Get rid of the mobile phone, like I did
    • Go to regular technology detox sessions

    The second biggest executioners of attention span are stress, anxiety and overload. You need to do fewer things and do them in higher quality. No matter how much you train your attention span, it’s still limited. That’s why you have to treat it as a very precious resource. You have to simplify your life and focus on only a few important goals that will really make you successful and happy.

    Here are a few ideas for what to do, all leading to increasing your margin in life:

    • Commit to fewer projects and obligations
    • Get rid of toxic people in your life and have a few really quality relationships
    • Cancel unproductive meetings and send fewer emails
    • Use fewer apps, watch fewer TV shows
    • Sell things you don’t use, spend less and disinvest

    Build up your attention span

    3. Deliberately build up your cognitive endurance and attention span

    It’s very easy to deliberately build up your cognitive endurance. You do it with gradual progress. Pick an active attention task you like. If you don’t know which one to do, use the search mode as we discussed. Perform it every day. Make sure you do it for 1 – 10 minutes longer every day. Repeat, and in a few weeks you will be impressed with your progress.

    Your attention span is like a muscle. You train it and it gets stronger with time. In the beginning, progress is fast, then it slows down and at some point you reach a plateau.

    The good news is that the plateau can be doing a thing from the moment you wake up until late hours for weeks or even months in a row. But you don’t need that. If you learn to concentrate for a few hours daily, you are already 10 – 30 times more capable than the average person.

    There are so many ways how you can train attention span muscle. Here are only the most popular ones, you can try to:

    • Read or listen to books
    • Play brain games or chess
    • Perform a new cognitive demanding skill (programming, writing, designing etc.)
    • Meditate
    • Play an instrument
    • Practice yoga
    • Practice observing or mindfulness skills
    • Cook healthy meals

    4. Other things that will help you with your attention span

    Things that hinder your cognitive abilities also hinder your attention span. Not taking good care of your body and brain hinders your cognitive abilities and consequently your attention span. So take good care of your body and mind, and you will be rewarded with a better ability to focus.

    • Learn to manage your emotions better
    • Use a timer for starting and stopping a certain task
    • Get enough sleep
    • Regularly exercise
    • Drink enough water, at least 2 – 3 liters per day
    • Make sure you don’t get sugar crashes (by overeating sugar or not eating food at all too long)
    • Eat brain foods like nuts, berries, eggs, spinach, salmon and oatmeal
    • Research supplements like Omega 3 Fatty Acid, Ginkgo Biloba and others
    • Have no-interruption days in your calendar

    Now, these things are only aids, they won’t do miracles for you, but they absolutely help. They are like food supplements in general, they can’t save a poor diet, but they are a valuable addition to a healthy diet. The good news is that not only your attention span will get better if you follow these suggestions, your overall health and productivity levels will improve as well.

    Homework

    Commit to building the longest attention span in the world

    Go into a different direction than everyone else. When people are getting more and more lost in distractions and can’t read or create for 8 minutes straight, do the opposite. Be smarter, work smarter and don’t get seduced by the “fast food” paradigm. It doesn’t do any good with years.

    • Train your attention span so you can easily read a book in a day. And do that several days in a row if necessary. Make sure you have no problem reading a 20-minute article on the internet, like this.
    • Train your attention span so you can work in the flow on a complex task for days or even weeks from early morning until you go to sleep.
    • Train your attention span so you can easily put effort into learning a new skill, even if it takes months of daily hard work and practice.
    • Train your attention span to the point of meditating as long as you want, being completely focused on your body when training and being aware of your emotions all the time.
    • Train your attention span to the point where you can easily talk with a person for hours, completely aware of their words, feelings, movements, actions and other body language responses. Communicate with people not to respond, but to understand.

    Commit to building the longest and the strongest attention span of all humans in the world. Regularly train your discipline and regularly train your attention span. Constantly improve. Make sure you can focus proactively on different tasks and activities for as long as you want; all the way until you earn some rest and you can go into a passive mode for a while. But not for too long.

    You aren’t a special snowflake. Work hard if you want results in life. And it all starts with the ability to focus.

  • To thrive, build yourself a motivational environment

    There are two variables that lead to different outcomes and results in life, positive and negative ones. The first one is your character, together with your personality traits, behavioral patterns, level of awareness, quality of decision-making, and so on.

    The second one is your environment. To a big extent, you are a product of your environment. Different types of environments bring different parts of your character to life. So an important part of personal development is also dealing with your environment.

    Where you currently are = Your starting point + Your character + Your environment

    I’ve seen it over and over again. A weak character in a strong environment, with lots of support and positive role models, starts to flourish. On the other hand, the strongest and brightest character in a bad environment gets corrupted and shady.

    I experienced both options. I was a really bad student in high school. A real rebel. But I attended an elite high school dedicated exclusively to nerds. So even if I was a bad pupil, I was still a good one compared to the national average. Small deviancies were already really bad behavior in such a positive environment.

    The outcome would have been completely different if I hadn’t been in such a healthy environment. Maybe I even would have ended up in prison, because I was a really pissed-off teenager.

    On the other hand, I worked for companies with really bad culture, years after I built a strong character and high competence levels. No matter how good and efficient manager I am, it took me an enormous amount of energy to not get involved in gossiping, malicious politics and other deconstructive behaviors.

    When everybody is doing it, you’re naturally drawn to do it too. At the end of the day, we are also monkeys trying to fit into our social circles.

    The environment around you is leading you to a certain kind of outcomes, because it influences your decisions and which part of your character gets emphasized. So it makes sense to deal a lot with the environment you operate in as part of continuous improvement and personal growth. Especially because you also have the power to change it to a certain extent. Much like you are a product of your environment, so is the environment a product of you.

    Your environment can bring out the best or the worst in you.

    When I talk about the environment you operate in, I especially have the following elements in mind (you can find a more extensive list here):

    • Your key relationships – spouse, family, friends, boss, coworkers, mentor
    • PESTLE factors – political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental factors
    • General market trends – financial markets, job markets etc.
    • Your company culture and your office space
    • Your family culture and your home
    • Other elements (religion, infrastructure, infostructure)

    These are all the things that extensively influence your spirit, your behavior, your potential, what you can achieve in life, how happy you are and the general quality of life.

    You become who you spend the most time with. You always internalize some of the culture around you. You move together with markets. You are only a wheel in a greater system that’s called your environment.

    The bad news is that you don’t have an influence on many of those factors. You didn’t choose the country you were born in. It’s not that easy to move to a foreign county, not psychologically and sometimes not even legally. You didn’t choose your family and your family heritage or how wealthy your family is. You didn’t choose your genes and talents. You often end up in certain jobs or markets based on the randomness factor or based on pure (un)luck.

    For example, you may not have the talent for becoming a coder, so you will probably have a hard time finding a job in the IT sector, even if it’s growing fast and there are plenty of jobs. Maybe you had to go study something you never wanted because your parents pushed you.

    The good news is that at some point in life, you do have an influence on many of the environmental factors. The more you understand yourself and your talents, the more aware you are of your personal power and the more you know what kind of an environment is the best positive fit for you, the more you can shape your own destiny. The more capable you are at influencing your environment, the more free will you have, if any.

    Many times, we contribute too many success reasons to personality traits and too few to positive environmental factors, even if the latter can be pure luck.

    Motivational environment

    How to build yourself a motivational environment

    If your environment really influences your behavior to a great extent, you logically want to have strong support from your environment in a way that will help you achieve your goals. You need an environment that supports your life vision, mission, specific goals, desired lifestyle and high quality of life.

    Even more, you want to build yourself an environment that brings out the best in you and leads you to the best possible outcomes. To achieve that, we have to get familiar with a few concepts related to environmental elements.

    The scale

    There are elements of the environment you can easily influence and others that are much harder to change or it’s even impossible to do so. Here is a very general scale from the easiest to the hardest elements of your environment to be influenced:

    1. Your possessions
    2. Your home decorations
    3. Your office decorations, if there is no company policy that’s preventing you from doing it
    4. Your mentor
    5. Your friends
    6. Your spouse – depending if you are married or not, and how long you’ve been in a relationship
    7. The company you work for, your coworkers and your boss
    8. Your primary family culture
    9. Market trends
    10. PESTLE factors – if you don’t decide to change the country

    This is no rocket science. You can easily sell the things you possess or buy new ones (that you can afford), you can decorate your home more or less as you want. On the other hand, your vote for changing the political or economic system doesn’t have a really big influence. If you don’t start a revolution, there is not much you can do. In the same way, it’s easier to switch to a new car than to change your friends or family members.

    The point is that there is a scale of how hard it is to change specific elements of your environment. That leads to a simple conclusion. Start with the easy ones and then build up slowly. It’s the number one rule of changing your environment.

    Your options

    After understanding the scale, it’s time to analyze all the options you have. In reality, you only have two options when it comes to reorganizing your environment, and they are based on the level of control you have over a specific environmental element. The two options are:

    • Change: Organize your environment differently. Reorganizing your environment will lead you to more positive behavior. We can say that changing your environment will change you.
    • Adjust: Some environmental elements you can’t change. You can only change yourself and your environment will change because you’ll see it differently.

    Behind the two options is the level of control you have. There are elements you have control of and there are elements way out of your control. For the elements that fall into your control zone, you have the ability to proactively organize them so that they work in your favor.

    For the elements that are out of your control, you can only adjust and look at them from a different angle. The elements you don’t have control over, you can only reframe in your mind so that they somehow work in your favor.

    When it comes to your environment and life in general, there is an important quote that goes something like this: “Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

    The harsh reality is that some things you can’t change in life, you can only change how you see them and how you react to them. You can only change your mindset about them. You can decide to see or interpret things differently. And in some cases, that’s your greatest power.

    Know when to redesign your environment and when to redesign your way of thinking.

    Creative environment

    It’s time to start designing

    Now you know the basic principles. You are a product of your environment to a certain extent and you can only achieve your dream life and your goals in the right environment.

    You need an environment that supports you, that brings out the best in you and accelerates your way to success. Much of your environment was determined when you were born, but when you become an adult you can change many of its elements. So let’s start redesigning.

    Before we start redesigning, please also keep in mind that as we discussed, there are many elements of your environment that you can change easily, but some you can’t change at all, you can only change the way you look at them. It makes sense to start with environmental elements that are the easiest to change and then tackle tougher ones.

    Examples of the easiest ways to positively change your environment:

    • Change your desktop wallpaper to a motivational one (on your phone and computer)
    • Stick post-it notes to your mirror, car etc. as a cue to perform a specific habit
    • Set alarms and notifications to follow your habits
    • Decorate your home or office with motivational photos
    • Declutter your home
    • Install an app to better manage your health or wealth
    • Sell things that annoy you
    • Put fresh fruit on the kitchen counter instead of chips
    • Buy yourself a faster computer

    Every single small thing in your environment serves as a trigger for certain behaviors and moods, and that’s how habits are formed and executed. So pay very close attention to every small thing that’s part of your environment and to what kind of behavior it contributes. If it’s not a positive one, change it.

    Now let’s go to slightly more challenging ways to change your environment:

    • You can get rid of your TV, for example, to read more
    • You can find one positive person who will support you at your goals or find yourself a mentor
    • You can delete a social network or a time-wasting app
    • You can find a new more ambitious friend or stop spending time with somebody who’s an energy vampire
    • You can switch from owning a car to a bike (it’s good for your health and wallet)

    If small things influence your behavior in small ways, big things do it in big ways. Big environmental things are especially your key relationships and market trends. You especially want to carefully choose these two environmental forces and make sure they have a positive influence on you.

    To achieve that, you have to sometimes make more radical and thorough changes in your environment. Examples of more demanding changes for building yourself a more motivational environment are:

    • Joining a new social circle (business club, hobby meet-up etc.)
    • Introducing a new location to your life (gym, co-working space etc.)
    • Finding a new spouse who’s a better fit for you
    • Switching to a job where your talents can really shine
    • Changing a career and finding more perspective markets
    • Moving to a different country

    The final question is what to do with the environmental forces you can’t change but can only look at differently. In such cases, the best thing to do is to focus yourself on better managing your thoughts, feelings and behavior.

    You can do that by using many different mental tools like cognitive reframing, focusing on the positive etc. By changing yourself, you then also change your environment.

    Examples of changing yourself in order to change your environment:

    • You stop fighting with a family member and consequently they also have to stop fighting with you
    • You stop resisting market trends and accept them by adjusting your actions accordingly
    • You focus on the positives in an economical system you don’t like (capitalism, socialism etc.) and build a superior strategy to work well in the system, even if you dislike it

    The more successful you want to be, the more support you need from your environment. The more successful you want to be, the more people you need who support you and believe in you (success is teamwork), you need better support from market trends and you need a general motivational environment that drives you through the times when your spirits are dampened.

    Sometimes if you can’t beat them, you have to join them.

    Things to look for in your environment

    At the bottom line, you want to have an environment that will:

    1. Make you feel good; that includes everything from bringing out the best in you to knowing that you fit in and can shine brightly with all your talents and efforts. It’s not hard to sense which environment you feel good in and where you don’t.
    2. Encourage you to make small right and smart choices every day, which will accumulate into success over time. Examples are riding a bike instead of going by car, eating an apple instead of chips, saving money etc.
    3. You want to have elements in your environment that will drive you towards making good big decisions in life. For example, starting your own business if it makes sense, moving to a new better location or country etc.
    4. And in the end, you want to make sure that environmental forces are accelerating your success. For example, if you are working for a company that’s growing fast, there are usually many more opportunities to get a promotion.

    Many times, good environments are characterized by the so-called 5T – talent, technology, tolerance, transparency, transcendence.

    An encouraging positive environment usually has many talented people who work together, it’s very well developed in terms of technology and other PESTLE elements, there is a high level of tolerance towards differences and failure, everything is very transparent and people work based on intrinsic motivation with a strong sense of purpose. We can also add solid market growth and an absence of bozos and zombies.

    Homework

    Express your power by changing your environment

    It’s time for homework. It’s time for you to become aware of the power you have by changing your environment to just a slightly more positive note. Do one small thing that will make your environment more supportive of your goals. Be a little bit rebellious, show who’s the boss – in a positive way. And do it now.

    • Hang a motivational poster
    • Stick a post-it note on your bathroom mirror
    • Clean your home
    • Write to a person you respect and ask if they would mentor you
    • Delete an app

    First do one small thing so you can start feeling the power you have and how you can sometimes easily change your environment to a more positive one. Then follow the next steps:

    1. Analyze which parts of your environment are positively influencing you and which aren’t
    2. Brainstorm how you can reinforce all the positive influences of your environment
    3. Rank all negative environmental influences from the easiest one to change to the hardest one
    4. Start redesigning your environment and redesigning your life settings in a way that you will have all the support needed to achieve your goals and dreams.

    Your environment already had a big enough influence on you. Now it’s time for you to start shaping your environment. May the force be with you.

  • The domino strategy

    You probably know what dominoes are. A very interesting fact about dominoes is that a domino can knock down a domino of about 150 % its size. The compounding effect in this phenomenon is enormous. If the first domino is just two inches tall with every domino being 1.5x bigger, the 57th one is almost as big as the distance to the moon. But in order to knock down a really big domino, you have to start with a small one.

    You could knock down the entire Empire State Building with just 29 dominoes.

    If we apply this concept to real life, we can describe it with the mantra “Think big, but start small”. That’s how overnight success is build. You make the first step and then you constantly improve yourself until with the compounding effect, you finally achieve your big goals and dreams.

    Why does the domino strategy work?

    The domino strategy works because of the carefully orchestrated process (strategy or sequence, in other words) and huge momentum. Momentum gives the process special speed and acceleration. To achieve the domino effect in real life, you have to meet a special set of criteria. Here’s the formula:

    1. Start with the smallest possible action. You have to start with small steps.
    2. Add just a little bit more effort every single time you perform the action.
    3. Make sure you put actions in the right sequence so each action enables a bigger one. As we said, the sequence (the right strategy) is very important.
    4. Gain momentum with regular intervals and discipline. Plan sprints and make sure nothing gets between you and your planned action. There must be the right distance between the dominoes – in real life, that means the right frequency of iterations.
    5. Make actions part of your new lifestyle and life design so you keep momentum.
    6. You have to stay patient and follow the process. The big success usually comes after several years. Many people unfortunately give up just before the compounding effect gets serious. So never give up and enjoy the compounding effects.

    The importance of a sequence

    Let’s first focus on the sequence. The sequence is your strategy. As I mentioned, you have to start small and every small action must be an enabler for a bigger one. That’s how you should orchestrate the process that leads you to your desired final outcome step by step. With the first small steps, you start building strong foundations and then you level up your game based on that.

    By building the right sequence, you are just the right distance away from your comfort zone in the learning zone. You don’t enter the panic zone. By undertaking just the right amount of challenges, you can also create in the flow without being anxious or bored. You can really learn and progress at the fastest speed possible.

    The right sequence enables you to improve your competence level and your abilities bit by bit. By setting the right sequence, you also have to make sure that you’re performing the right actions at the right time.

    You have to set the sequence smartly. It must be part of your superior life strategy. You should know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. Feedback from life metrics and your environment can be a great source of information on how to regularly adjust your strategy. An example would be strategically developing T-shaped skills in combination with the right market trends.

    The importance of momentum

    The second important force in the domino strategy is momentum. Nobody has really succeeded massively in anything in life without momentum. Momentum leads to a positive spiral. Momentum is accumulated positive energy, determination and support from the environment and key relationships. In momentum, people can see and feel your decisiveness, persistence and single-minded actions, and want to support it and join it. People are drawn to success.

    Momentum also gives your self-confidence a boost. A small success gives you additional self-esteem and zeal to go after the next, bigger challenge. Succeeding at a bigger challenge leads to another. You absolutely fail from time to time, but momentum gives additional strength to your life mission, so nothing can dampen your spirits. No failure can stop you.

    The right sequence is a superior strategy and smart work. Momentum gives additional power to your mission and to go through small failures.

    The only thing you have to be careful is to not become cocky and lose yourself in momentum. You might start thinking that you can’t fail at anything, and if you’re too sure of yourself you may not see the changes in your environment that also require changes in your strategy. That happens to many people and then they fail big.

    So always stay humble and never lose your sharpness, no matter how successful you are.

    The domino strategy

    Practical applications of the domino strategy

    You can apply the domino strategy to basically any area of life. You can use it to increase your wealth, build up your competence level or your shiny career, you can use it to improve your fitness performance or your happiness levels.

    Here’s an example. If you save only 360 $ per month since you are 20, you can become a millionaire at 65, if you achieve 8 % annual yield on your investments. Good returns are the right strategy, saving money each month and computing effects are your momentum. Does a million dollars sound good? Well, exploit the domino effect.

    The key is to start early. The earlier you start the better, because the compounding effect is so much bigger in the long term. The best moment to start was when you were yet small, the second best moment to do it is now.

    The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. – Chinese proverb

    Homework

    Pick one life area and do one small thing right now. Go for a run. Read one page of a book. Transfer some money to your savings account. Just do one small thing. Every journey starts with a single step. If you can’t do it right now, timebox the first step in your calendar. But it’s better to do it now.

    Then do it again tomorrow with a mild progression or whatever the ideal frequency is (there must be the right distance between the dominoes). Then do it again and again. Then madly educate yourself and outline the right strategy, the right sequence of events and actions you do. In the last step, gain momentum and don’t let go of it with the philosophy “never retreat, never surrender”.

    Now knock down your first domino in a sequence and let the games begin.

  • The only solution on the table if you are feeling stuck

    Many times, we feel stuck in life. You may feel like you are stuck in a relationship, in a job or in life in general. It happens to all of us. It’s a shitty mixture of feeling paralyzed, depressed, overwhelmed, hopeless, being in doubt about the future and many other similar negative feelings.

    You may not have suicidal thoughts, but feeling stuck can often go even so far that you may just want things to be over (with your life). It’s definitely not a pleasant feeling.

    You usually get stuck after making a series of bad decisions. It can be a few major bad decisions like getting into business with the wrong person, making a big bad investment etc. or several small bad decisions like not taking care of your body daily, drinking too much alcohol, not following your True North, ignoring your feelings etc.

    No wonder that people most often feel stuck in their:

    The most important question is: what should you do when you are feeling stuck?

    Feeling stuck

    You are not really stuck, there is something else

    Here’s the good news. If you are feeling stuck, you aren’t really stuck. You are only spending your time, energy and other resources wrong. There is nothing else. It’s more than obvious that doing the same things and expecting a different result is crazy. It’s actually the official definition of craziness.

    You aren’t stuck, you’re only spending your precious time, energy and other resources wrong. You aren’t following your True North.

    In reality, you can’t be really stuck, because life always goes on. Your seconds of being alive are passing by. Everything is moving and going forward, and so are you. You can’t stop time, so you can’t be stuck. You can only be making wrong decisions about spending your resources. You can only be committed to the ill life strategy.

    If you are asking yourself why you’re doing that, there is a very simple answer. Because in comparison, the pain of being stuck is smaller than the pain of freeing yourself and doing something about it. There are certain benefits to being stuck you are enjoying. They can be enjoying the comfort zone, emotional security, financial security, being used to people and things, and so on. Deep down, you know very well what it is.

    You feel stuck because things are too bad to stay and too good to leave.

    Most people wait until the pain of being stuck becomes much bigger than doing something, just anything. And by then it’s usually far too late to constructively solve a problem without severe damage. People wait until they get a serious disease, go bankrupt, the relationship becomes extremely abusive, they burn out or experience a psychological collapse because of work pressure.

    Yes, at some point the pain of not acting becomes too strong. But there’s a rule. Kill the monster when it’s still small. Well, don’t kill anything, but you get the point.

    The more you ignore the monster, the bigger and stronger it becomes, and it’s going to eat you sooner or later. If you don’t act as soon as possible, a collapse is inevitable, and waiting until the collapse is a sure way to completely destroy your life.

    Stuck Quote

    Homework

    So the first exercise you should do is to list all the benefits you are enjoying while being stuck. They are usually deep psychological and emotional reasons that drive you to cling to a certain situation. What’s so good about it? What are you really afraid of?

    You may feel like you don’t deserve to be happy, that you aren’t good enough, you may be afraid of financial insecurities, that you won’t meet a new person who can treat you better etc. There is always a deep psychological reason why you cling to where you are and you must become aware why you’re doing that. Usually you also lack self-confidence in that area big time.

    Stuck in life

    When you are feeling stuck, solution is in craziness

    The solution for freeing yourself when you feel stuck lies in craziness. What do I mean by that? If being crazy means doing the same things and expecting a different result, then starting to do different things will bring you a new result. Yes, it’s that simple – you aren’t stuck, you’re just spending your resources wrong. That means you have to start directing your resources (time, energy, money, creativity etc.) into a new direction.

    You must start doing different things and you must start doing things differently. That’s all.

    When we talk about starting to do different things, there are two ways you can go. You can start making even worse decisions like start drinking alcohol, blaming other people, start gambling etc. or you can start making better decisions. The latter is what we are looking for, but I hope that is obvious.

    What’s really important is that there is a simple solution for feeling stuck that I have seen over and over again. When somebody feels stuck, the moment they start doing a small new task they haven’t been doing before to change their situation, a big burden lifts off their shoulders.

    The first step is the hardest but when you do it, a whole new world opens up to you. You can start feeling the energy flowing again. It usually takes only a small kick and the soul boat starts drifting again on the river of life.

    Kick yourself a little bit in the butt and life will start flowing again.

    If you want to live the life you want, you have to put yourself first, be a little bit rebellious and stand up for yourself. You’re feeling stuck because you are putting yourself in a position of a victim. It’s the worst kind of mindset you can operate from. So push yourself out of the victim mindset.

    Nobody gets the quality life they want handed to them on a silver platter; we must all fight for it. Life owes you nothing, it was here first. The important fact is that life rewards those who master its rules. And one of the important rules of life is acting or, according to the Nike slogan, “Just do it”.

    But when you act, you have to observe the feedback you are getting from the environment and from your inner self, and if it’s not working, you have to act differently. It’s that simple.

    Answer three simple questions and do one small thing

    Homework

    So if you’re feeling stuck, gather all the energy, motivation, will and determination that’s left in you and make three simple choices, answer three very simple questions:

    • What are you willing to stop doing?
    • What are you willing to start doing?
    • What is the smallest single step you can take into a new direction?

    This one single step is really important. It can be getting a massage as a signal to life that you are putting yourself first, it may be updating your CV and then sending it to a few companies, it may be showing with your behavior that you have enough of being abused, or it might simply be reading a book.

    It may be getting up a little bit earlier and meditating, it can be deciding to let it go or anything else that will serve as a signal that you aren’t stuck anymore.

    One small act is usually the tipping point that gets you going again. You have to do one single thing you haven’t ever done since feeling stuck, and then piggy-back further positive changes on that one epiphany moment.

    One single act is often the only thing you need to start feeling unstuck. So do it now!

    Why does it work? Because it’s a simple reminder that you possess all the power necessary to change your life situation. At any time and in any place. Nobody can take that away from you. You are the one who chooses who to spend time with, where to focus your energy and what you will do with your life.

    You are the one who can take action, innovate your way out of shit and take a step towards a better life. You already possess all the power needed.

    If you are deep in shit, stop digging.

    Understanding global and local maximum when feeling stuck

    Local maximum
    Achieving local maximum. But is there a higher hill to climb?

    In mathematics, there is a concept known as local and global maximum. It’s an important concept that can also be applied to a personal life.

    A global maximum is the point where you would enjoy life the most, achieve your true peak performance and maximize all the potentials you have.

    Honestly, it’s pretty hard to achieve that point and it takes a special kind of character. It takes an enormous amount of experimentation through the search mode, and you often have to change many diets, partners, careers and behavioral patterns.

    Then there is the local maximum. The local maximum means maximizing your quality of life and success levels in different areas with your current life settings. You search for a position and behavior for yourself that gives you the most out of your current life situation.

    • Global maximum: Completely changing your life settings – you make one or several new big decisions (like changing a job, getting a divorce, saving all the money possible etc.)
    • Local maximum: Maximizing your quality of life in current life settings – you start making small better decisions (like letting go, getting a new hobby, changing your behavior towards a person, slowly paying off your loan according to a plan etc.).

    Now, why are those two concepts important? Many times, it’s obvious what the best thing to do is when people are feeling stuck. You don’t like your job, change it. Your partner is abusive, leave them.

    But the problem is that things rarely get so bad that the pain of staying would be greater than the pain of doing something and leaving. The benefits of staying (either emotional, material or whichever security) are bigger than the effort necessary to act in a big way.

    It’s kind of a “too good to leave, too bad to stay” situation, but most people decide to stay. Because things aren’t painful enough, even though they are getting worse. So acting is absolutely better than doing nothing.

    If you know that going after a new maximum is just too much for you (changing a job, getting a divorce etc.), do something small that will maximize your current situation. There is always something you can do to be in a better position.

    • You can change yourself
    • You can negotiate
    • You can communicate differently
    • You can start treating yourself better
    • You can set strict boundaries
    • You can strategically protect yourself

    It’s a no-brainer that you are feeling stuck if you see your only option as leaving or giving up on something that is dear to you, but at the same time you know you can’t do that, it’s just too hard. Well, admit that to yourself and do something to maximize your quality of life in current life settings.

    If you can go after completely new life settings and draw the line in the sand, do it. But if you know you can’t undertake a different road to get unstuck, do something new and small that will get you to feel unstuck in current life settings.

    To find out whether you should go (if you are ready to go) for a new maximum or stay at the local maximum, simply employ optimal thinking. Ask yourself: What is the best thing I can do in my current situation to get back on track? Your intuition will tell you what to do.

    “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Will Rogers

    Nevertheless, if you decide to stay at your current life settings, make sure you protect yourself. Things will probably get worse and you must be ready for it. Make sure you’re building options for yourself in current life settings. If things get much worse at some point, the transition will be smoother. If not, learn to enjoy life under current settings, but be prepared. Play your cards smart.

    Free yourself

    Homework

    If you’re feeling stuck, start playing and free yourself

    To get unstuck, you have to be more assertive, there is no other way. An important truth of life is that if you want to function well, you have to be a healthy assertive person.

    A healthy assertive person is a person who likes themselves as they are, has a strong sense of self and their autonomy, has no problems with their needs being met, knows how to express feelings, knows where they’re going in life and what they want, is not afraid of conflict, knows how to set boundaries, takes initiative and contributes creative ideas.

    There is no stuck in the definition of an assertive person.

    So you have to start treating and listening to yourself better. You have to stop abusing yourself or letting yourself be abused. When feeling stuck, there is nothing but a lot of abuse.

    Instead start loving yourself, build up your self-confidence, become assertive and start playing again, like a kid. A kid who plays, can’t be stuck. If you are really so stuck that you have zero ideas on what to do, here’s a few of them:

    1. Challenge your fears, just a little bit
    2. Break your routine with something new
    3. Change the way you think and look at things
    4. Start communicating with a new behavior
    5. Do something extremely fun or take a trip
    6. Start exercising
    7. Volunteer for charity
    8. Get a pet
    9. Get yourself a small garden
    10. Write a novel about your being stuck situation
    11. Draw a picture about your being stuck situation
    12. Make new friends
    13. Analyze yourself and get to know yourself better
    14. Figure out if you are maybe a chronic procrastinator
    15. Try doing the opposite just to see what happens
    16. List all the possibilities you have, and keep an abundance mindset while doing it
    17. Take an online course or read a book about your life problem
    18. Do one thing that you really enjoyed as a child
    19. Write down 50 ideas on how you can help your company to perform better
    20. Find a mentor
    21. Increase your margins and disinvest yourself
    22. Do all the mind exercises to think better

    Now go out and play, do something new. You only have one life. And remember, you aren’t stuck, you’re just spending your time, energy and other resources wrong. So shape a better life strategy. You only live once.