Blaz Kos

validated learning

agile methodology business ideas cognitive distortions communication core values creativity & innovation detox diet ego emotional accounting emotional intelligence empathy environment you operate in fitness habits health tips homework interpersonal skills kaizen & growth mindset leadership lean life experiment ideas life skills life strategies life vision love mindfulness nutrition perfect match or fit personal talent management pivot positive thinking practical examples relationship advice retrospective & self-reflection self-discipline sharpen the saw start with why success the execution mode the search mode time management validated learning waste in life zombie life

  • Apathy before finding your fit

    Finding your best personal fit in different areas of life is probably the most important thing to do if you want to prosper and be happy. When you find something that you know is right for you, you get motivated, you’re willing to accept all challenges, your outlook becomes positive, and so on. You know you’ve put the ladder against the right wall and you’re ready to start climbing.

    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 day and night. 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 sports they are 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.

    Same goes for all other areas of your life. The prerequisite for being successful in life, no matter in which area, is finding your own fit. Values (what you find important) are those that determine whether you fit with something or not. When you find the right fit, passion awakens in you. You find yourself in something. You know that you can be successful in this. You see potential. It makes you happy.

    Few people are so lucky in life that they just find the right fit by chance, without going through a long and hard process. Even rarer are people who understand that they’re persisting at something that isn’t their fit, and that’s one of the main reasons why they’re miserable and unhappy. Unfortunately, the fake feeling of security and clinging to certainty usually prevail over going on an adventure to find a better fit. People lock themselves in a safe to feel safe. But who was ever happy and successful while locked in a safe?

    Process versus event

    The fact that people usually prefer to stay miserable in a company, a relationship etc. than to find a better fit for themselves shows that the process of finding a new better fit is not that easy. It takes a lot of courage, a really good strategy, knowing yourself, being prepared to learn from failure and much more. It forces you to stand up again and again after life knocks you down.

    Finding the perfect fit is the first important milestone towards a final event, an outcome you want. But a process always comes before every event that you want to achieve in life. Just remember the saying that the only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. Most events that people achieve (getting rich, marrying the right person, working for an awesome company…) are usually the result of a carefully orchestrated process. It’s easier to see an event as luck for other people, but in most cases it’s not.

    Getting rich is an event. Working hard on developing your business idea, finding the product/market fit, building a dream team, raising funds and then solidly executing for years is a process that leads to that final event; if you do it smartly enough.

    The process is painful and takes time. Most people aren’t willing to invest into the process, because it just takes too much will, stamina and hard work. But if you settle for the average, if you take what life hands you on a platter, you usually get an average life; and average is not good. Average isn’t even close to good and even less close to great.

    Process versus fit

    As we’ve figured out, the process of coming to an event, the final outcome you desire, isn’t that easy. If you want to get rich, there’s so much to learn, you have to be really good with money, you won’t get rich only by having a job (except for rare occupations), and so on. If you want to get really fit, you have to invest an enormous amount of your time and energy into diet and exercise. Before every great outcome, there is a long and vigorous process.

    The process of getting to your desired event (final outcome) has two phases (and more sub-phases but more about that in another post):

    • The first phase is before you find your fit (search mode)
    • The second phase is after you find your fit (execution mode)

    The search mode is the hardest. After finding your fit, things get a little easier. You still have a long way to go, but you feel a little bit safer. Managing execution and growth isn’t easy, but things get much less painful emotionally and psychologically. It’s simply because you know that you’re fighting for the right thing. You’re motivated to fight. You see the first results and every early win motivates you to do more.

    It’s much easier to go through all the daily challenges and tasks if you love the company you work for or own. It’s much easier to fight for a relationship if you know that you really fit well together with the person. It’s much easier to keep on working on your weight loss schedule, if you see changes on your body and feel much better, while doing sports and eating things you love at the same time.

    The process before you find your fit is the really painful part of it. We can call it the apathy before finding your fit. You try new things, they don’t work. You think you’ve found something good, and in the next step, you realize you haven’t. This starting phase really is best described with the quote that success is going from failure to failure without giving up.

    The process before you find your fit really sucks. It sucks even more because at the beginning, you’re a newbie and your character and skills aren’t that good. You’re a beginner and you have to face the toughest challenges. For example, you’ve just gathered the courage to start dating, but your dating skills suck, so you get rejected again and again. But it’s 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 the part of the process where you learn and develop the most.

    Before you find your fit, a part of the process enables you to learn a lot about yourself and the world; if you do it systematically and scientifically. “At least I’ve learned something new” can often be an excuse for failure, but validated learning is pure gold. If you get to know yourself better, if you better understand what you really want in life, the limitations the world has for you etc., they will all enable you to perform better in the long term. First, you have to understand.

    Time perspective

    The worse that your starting position is, the more time it’ll take to find your fit. The worse your starting position is, the longer the apathy will probably last. Just to clarify, the worse position simply means that you don’t yet know yourself and what you really want, but even more so a lack of resources (inner and outer), an absence of leverages (market trends, social capital etc.) and being in an environment that doesn’t support your goals (going against the flow).

    Nevertheless, let’s look at some averages that most people need to get through the process and achieve the final event in different areas of life:

    • In the start-up world, it usually takes one to three years to find the product/market fit (search mode) and then around five to seven years to build a stable company (execution mode). In total, up to ten years.
    • In business life, it usually takes changing three to five companies (search mode) to find the right one and then around three to six years (execution mode) to achieve the career plateau. When reaching the plateau, it’s time to do some changes, of course. Before even really starting out in business, it usually takes trying three to five different positions to find one thing you’re really good at.
    • In personal life, it usually takes dating seven to ten people to find one to really commit to. After a few months of dating, you know each other well enough to know how well you fit together (the search mode ends). If you decide to stay together, decades of different execution phases wait for you (decorating home, having kids, raising kids, retiring…). You may find out that you don’t fit together anymore, especially between different execution phases, and you’ll have to go back into the search mode. Not fitting together simply means that there is no more real love or that you don’t function well together in everyday life.
    • It usually takes testing three to four different diets to figure out what works best for your body. For every diet, you need between three and six months to see how you feel and how your body is responding. It usually takes trying from five to seven different sports to find the one that fits you best. In the execution phase, you need the discipline to stick to the optimal diet and the best-fitted sport. You can see the first results in around four to six months (losing weight, feeling better etc.), but to become really fit, for example fit enough to be on a magazine cover, it takes around two to five years of exercising five times per week and counting calories daily. It’s not easy.
    • On average, we need around one to two years to learn how the monetary system works and to really understand different saving and investment opportunities, assuming we read about it for a few hours per week. We have to be prepared to lose around $10,000 on different products before figuring out our investment strategy and investment opportunities that best fit our character.
    • It takes around two to three years to develop a new skill. If you want to learn how to program, how to lead people, speak a new language or any other skill, it will take you a few years of focus to develop an average level. But if you really want to master something and be amongst the best in the world, it’ll take you around 10,000 hours (eight to ten years).

    As you can see, it usually takes years of searching and then years of execution to achieve the desired outcome. It’s not easy, but once you do it, you open a whole new possibility for living a really quality life and achieving your maximum potential.

    Surviving apathy

    Surviving apathy is no easy job, especially if your starting point sucks. There aren’t many people who can do it and don’t give up too fast. That’s why we have so few people who can pose for a magazine cover, so few people who own successful businesses, so few rich people and so few people who are happily married. If it were easy, everyone would do it.

    Some people are lucky and born in families with many resources (inner, outer), some people are lucky and find their fit very naturally, for example by winning the lottery, but for most of us, life wants us to fight. The fair part of today’s world is that if you want it badly enough, you have the chance to fight and really achieve it. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. That’s also how you develop your character, that’s how you grow, that’s how you really deserve what you have.

    Since it’s not that easy to do it, you have to be smart about it. You need an environment that’ll help you achieve your goals and keep you disciplined. So let’s look at some techniques to help you survive the apathy before finding your fit, without giving up.

    Don’t be naïve

    First of all, you shouldn’t be naïve. You have to be aware that it’ll probably take a few years of searching and a few years of execution to achieve your big final outcome. There are no shortcuts. Don’t be soft and naïve. Manage your expectations. Master the rules of life.

    Long-term view

    You have to see all the rewards that will come in the long term. You have to see all the inner resources you’ll acquire (skills, psychological capital etc.) as well as the outer resources (renown, wealth…), and you will deserve both based on your own work. It’s what’s worth living for. The harder road will become easy.

    Validated learning

    In the search mode, you have to reflect and write down what you’ve learned about yourself and your environment. You have to see your progress when systematically and scientifically learning about yourself and the world. You haven’t failed, you’ve just found one way that doesn’t work for you.

    Supporting environment

    Have visual aids for your desired outcome (pictures, wallpapers…). Have people around you who understand and support you. Build your personal mastermind group. Cut off all people who drag you down. Talk with other people who are going through the same process and support each other. Read biographies.

    See it as an adventure

    You do only live once. You want to experience as many things as possible. You don’t want to do anything really stupid, but you also don’t want to live a boring life. By searching for new things, you should feel a little bit like an explorer on an adventure. And never forget: with time, the harder road becomes easy and the easier road becomes hard.

  • Fears & traps when trying new things in life – the challenges of the search mode

    I call the systematic testing and experimenting with new things in life in order to find better ways to perform and achieve higher quality of life the search mode.

    Introducing the search mode into your life is a totally new concept. Rare are the people to whom the search mode (constantly experimenting with new things) comes naturally and for whom it is easy to do it.

    The reason for that is because you have to go regularly out of your comfort zone, experiment with new things that bring uncertainty and accept little failure you can learn from along the way.

    Trying new things in life is hard for most people.

    The “free spirit” explorers who always want something new are probably the closest to the character needed in the search mode. Nevertheless this type of people usually lack the abilities to switch from the search to the execution mode.

    Well, the good news is that being in the search mode (trying new things in life) is nothing but a skill and everybody can learn it.

    First, a few words about the search mode

    One of the best ways to learn about yourself and the world is the so-called “search mode”. The better you know yourself and your environment, the better you can execute, and consequently achieve your true goals much faster.

    The search mode is a phase and a process that helps you to get to know yourself and your environment better, as well as build up an adequate life strategy based on tested facts, instead of only assumptions.

    The main idea is that before committing yourself to anything you have to first do enough searching, experimenting and trying, to make sure you are committing to the right thing – your fit.

    In the search phase, you just try many different things, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. In the search mode, you make and test different assumptions (beliefs, convictions, facts etc.) you have.

    Search mode is about going out of the comfort zone and experimenting with completely new things with the goal to improve your life.

    After you find your fit, you enter the execution mode. In the execution mode, you execute and optimize what you preserve from the search mode.

    And now all the traps you must avoid when trying new things in life.

    All the fears and traps when trying new things in life

    There are five major fears and traps when trying new things in life:

    1. Analysis paralysis
    2. No presence of validated learning (learning as an excuse)
    3. Dealing with uncertainty
    4. Sticking to NEW things that don’t work
    5. Unrealistic expectations and other irrational fears

    Analysis paralysis

    1. Analysis paralysis – if you never do anything, all that analyzing time was wasted

    The most obvious challenge of the search mode is the analysis paralysis. There are two types of analysis paralysis scenarios.

    The first scenario is quite well-known everywhere in life. You read about it, you talk about it, you think about it, but you never start doing it.

    Well, if you never do anything, all that time was wasted. It shouldn’t take you more than a few days to do research and then set and conduct the first experiments. After that you can continue researching and thus improving your further experiments.

    A ton of theory can’t compare to a single gram of solid real-life experience.. You can read all about swimming but until you set foot in water, your knowledge is very limited. The solution is very simple.

    After everything you read while doing the research, you should write down the bottom lines and make a few hypotheses out of it. These are the hypotheses that you are going to test and see whether they work for you personally.

    The second analysis paralysis trap is not switching from the search mode to the execution mode. There are many reasons for why that can be in case, but whatever it is, make sure you move to the execution phase when you find your fit.

    The secret is to move really fast in the search mode in order to find your perfect fit and get to the execution mode as quickly as possible. In today’s turbulent and complex world, extreme speed is the main ingredient of success.

    That is why you need focus, that is why you need to learn and progress systematically and quickly, that is why you need a superior strategy. You have to find out what works for you as soon as possible.

    The solution is simple. Your goal should be to get to the execution phase as quickly as possible. It usually takes a few months to get there. The goal of the search mode is to find your perfect fit and then do a perfect execution. You don’t want to stay a “startup” forever.

    Executing perfectly means setting execution intervals, doing sprints, measuring your progress really closely and meeting your goals as quickly as possible.

    Even in the execution mode you are still conducting experiments and trying new things to some extent, but what’s more important is that you do regular sprints and measure your progress in a more traditional way (KPIs). After the search mode you know what you want, so in the execution mode you make sure you get it.

    • The search mode = Find what you really want, what’s really your fit
    • The execution mode = Make sure you get what you want
    Validated learning
    Validated learning cycle

    2. No validated learning – don’t use learning as an excuse

    Besides analysis paralysis there is another big trap you can fall into in the search mode. The goal of the search mode is to learn about yourself and the world around you, to find your perfect fit and then build a superior life strategy, and after that to move into the execution mode as quickly as possible.

    The goal of the search mode is to lean the ladder against the right wall, while getting to know which material the ladder is built of, how long it is, what the traps of climbing it are, how the top looks like etc.

    To learn about all that, you have to fail a lot. Success is nothing but going from failure to failure until you succeed without losing motivation. But the key point is that you learn something every time you fail – it’s called validated learning. And you should take that as progress.

    There are two possible outcomes to failing in the search mode.

    Learning as an excuse

    Well, I tried a new thing, it didn’t work out, but I have learned something. That sounds nice, but it clearly shows that you haven’t learned anything. It clearly shows that learning is just an excuse for you to feel better while failing. But that is the real failure.

    An example of validated learning

    My hypothesis was that introducing a no-interruptions day once a week to my calendar would dramatically increase my productivity (you can even set the measures for how much). I did my first no-interruptions day and my hypothesis was rejected. After a self-reflection, I had learned the following:

    • I don’t have enough concentration to work the whole day
    • It’s really hard to get rid of all interruptions, especially on the computer
    • I need a task that motivates me enough to work several hours straight

    Based on what I’ve learned, I will conduct a new experiment. (1) I will try a half-day (4 hours) no-interruptions day to test and train my focusing abilities. (2) I will try three different big tasks for the next three no-interruption days – one document analysis, writing one article and one brainstorming session. I will see what will engage me the most.

    (3) I will test two locations – my balcony and my local cafe, with my laptop that has no games installed and is without an internet connection.

    The idea is to find your perfect location and your perfect setting so you can have one no-interruption day per week at some point. Imagine what such a day could do to your productivity once you find the right setting.

    That’s 50 completely productive days per year. It may be the difference between you being average or really successful. Of course it’s worth it to test several different settings to find the best one and to train your focus while conducting experiments.

    If you have learned something new, you haven’t failed in the search mode. That should be your motivation and perspective for overcoming failure.

    If you haven’t learned anything new, you have failed big time and wasted resources on top of that. To learn something new, you have to keep setting and testing hypotheses all the time. That is called “validated learning”. Here are the steps how to do it:

    • Do research first if needed
    • Write down the first set of hypotheses
    • Conduct experiments
    • Validate or reject hypotheses
    • Reflect
    • Write down a new set of hypotheses
    • Make your execution plan

    Facing uncertainty

    3. Dealing with uncertainty – to live an extraordinary life, you must do extraordinary things

    It’s quite easy to understand why we love certainty and are scared to death of uncertainty. We like certainty because it makes us feel safe and secure. Even though change is the only real constant in life (besides taxes), we hate it.

    This hate towards change has been written into our genes as a mechanism for survival in a dangerous world. Not that long ago, you could very easily have gotten killed and to be frank, you still can in some parts of the world.

    An unknown and unstable environment brings threats to us and to our lives. That is why we don’t like uncertainty and why it’s so hard for us to try new things.

    The really big problem is that testing is not your natural state, because of the lack of security, because of the unknown. Trying something new can be scary from time to time. But you know, you need guts in order to live an amazing life. Nothing worthwhile in life comes easily.

    Here are some tricks for how to deal with uncertainty:

    The gain has to be bigger than the pain

    Write down all the rewards that experimenting and finding a new lifestyle will bring to you. All the rewards. All of them. The rewards must be so big that they strongly outweigh your pain and the trouble of trying out new things.

    If you don’t see the final reward clearly, you won’t be motivated enough to try anything new. You must have a strong why that is more powerful that uncertainty.

    Build your safety nets and take calculated risks

    A big plus of today’s world is that you can experiment without risking your life or lives of others, at least in most cases, and where such a danger exists, you should avoid it.

    You should carefully define the downsides, build some safety nets and not do anything stupid. Testing, experimenting and trying new things should not sound like a risk at all.

    If you do too big steps at a time, you go from the learning zone into the panic zone. The panic zone doesn’t bring anything good at all, as it means that you have lost control.

    Entering the panic zone means awakening negative feelings and you will consequently develop hate towards trying new things. Therefore you should always take small steps and master one step at a time. But move quickly while doing that.

    Just make the first step

    Making the first step is the biggest pain in the ass. But you have to do it as soon as possible. The second step is much easier and the third one is even easier, if you do it the right way. But you always need the motivation to kick yourself in the ass and take the first step.

    There is a trick to doing it. Timebox your first step. Open your calendar. Schedule an hour or two for the first step and when the time comes, just do it. Don’t think, don’t overanalyze, no matter how you feel, just do it. After the first few minutes you will start feeling proud of yourself.

    Make it fun, consider it play

    See yourself as an explorer and adventurist. See the whole search mode as a tool to not waste your life and live it to the full. Surround yourself with people who support you and want to try new things in life with you.

    Have fun while doing it, even if you fail. Learn from your failures. Then there are no failures at all, just validated learning. Laugh. Smile. Have fun. Never settle into a routine.
    Einstein - Quote about insanity

    4. Don’t waste your life by sticking to things that don’t work

    Our psychological tendencies dictate that we finish what we begin. For example, it’s quite difficult for the human mind to stop watching a movie in the middle, even if the movie sucks.

    I know that it’s kind of ironic. Initially it’s so hard to try and do new things, especially the ones that aren’t the most pleasant, and then we want to stick to something even if it doesn’t work.

    That is a big trap that you can fall into in the search mode. For example, when I was searching for my perfect diet I also tried the raw food diet. Well, I even tried different types of raw food diets, from the fruitarian one to the fatty and green one.

    It was extremely hard to start and stick to that kind of an extreme diet, but once I started, I regarded it as a magical solution for all my health problems.

    It was more than obvious that the raw food diet didn’t work for me, but I had stuck to it for too long ­­- for more than a year to be exact. And before that, I was a vegan for two years and a vegetarian for five.

    It was only after a severe burnout, fatigue, dry skin, cavity, sugar intolerance, vitamin deficiency and other health issues that I came to the conclusion that this diet really doesn’t work for me.

    It’s very strange, but by going to that kind of an extreme diet, your beliefs about health and diet also become quite extreme. In the raw food community, all negative effects of the diet are connected to the fact that the body is cleansing.

    Their standpoint is that you just have to do it a little while longer and all negative effects will go away. It’s the price you pay for not being on the raw food diet straight after breast feeding.

    Since I’m very persistent and disciplined, that was quite a big downside in this situation. I waited for the body to cleanse, but that was not really the case. The diet didn’t work for me and I was starting to damage my own health.

    Back then I didn’t see changing the diet as an experiment, but rather as an ultimate solution that I had to stick to no matter what. That was pretty stupid, but it can easily happen to everybody.

    Thus you have to make sure that you set the boundaries and limitations to your experiments very specifically. Here are some other ideas how to make sure that you don’t become stubborn about the wrong thing and keep your final goal in mind while staying flexible when experimenting:

    Do regular reflections and always question everything

    Do regular reflections after experiments and after sprints. Every reflection event should be an opportunity to question everything you are doing. Do you see the progress in your life, how is the environment reacting, how does it influence your short-term and long-term goals, is that something for you or not etc.

    Define the hypothesis and the experiment very exactly

    The more explicitly that you define what you want to test, the limits and the duration of the experiment, and the expected results, the more you will learn and the quality of the experiment will be that much higher.

    When defining the hypothesis and the experiment you can also incorporate enough safety nets that stop you when you are going to an extreme that isn’t giving the right results.

    Make sure that you aren’t causing any damage to yourself or to your environment

    Whatever experiment you are doing, make sure that you’re not doing anything really dangerous. Make sure that you aren’t causing any damage to yourself, to other people or to the environment. Consult with a specialist, do enough research and take small steps. Don’t be stupid.

    We have invented standards and averages (diet, working day etc.), because they represent the safest thing for most people. It doesn’t give the best results for every individual but it’s safe and good enough for all people. Deviating from the average means that you are looking for something that is better for you as an individual.

    Thus you have to take some risks. But they must be calculated risks (small downside, big upside) done in the right kind of way, not being really dangerous.

    At some point it’s more art than science

    There is a very thin line between giving up just before you start to see some results and sticking to something that doesn’t work. At this point we are talking more about art than science.

    You have to listen to your inner voice, do an enormous amount of self-reflection and know yourself to the point where you recognize when you are being lazy, when you are procrastinating, when you are not investing enough into it and when it really does make sense to stop.

    Don’t experiment to compensate for your negative feelings

    Make sure that you’re doing all experiments and new things with positive emotions of excitement, love, respect for yourself and others. Your negative emotions like anger could lead you to do extreme things just to prove something to yourself and others.

    In that case you can do a lot of damage to yourself and others. It’s extremely important that you are tender to yourself in all kinds of ways. Nothing good comes out of rough accession. Yes, you have to be tough, yes, you have to be fair, but acting out of extreme negative emotions means nothing but hurting yourself.

    Trying new things in life

    5. Don’t have unrealistic expectations and manage your irrational fears properly

    There is one more trap you can fall into in the search mode and it’s by far the most difficult one. People love short-term results.

    But all real results are long-term and they come after years and years of hard work. You usually overestimate what you can achieve in a few months and underestimate what you can achieve in a few years.

    While being in the search mode, you can find out how hard it really is to achieve big goals. It takes years to get yourself in really good shape. Going to the gym a few times is not even remotely close to getting into extraordinary shape.

    People in magazines devote their lives to their bodies. In much the same way, it can also take decades to build up personal wealth. You have to make many hard decisions in order to progress in life. It’s not easy and it never becomes easier, you only get better at it.

    Well there’s good news and there’s bad news for all this. The bad news is that I have zero tricks at this point. You either want it badly enough or not. If you want it badly enough, you will always find a way; if not, you will always find an excuse.

    The hardest thing to do is to motivate an unmotivated person. And a blessing is giving the direction and tools to a motivated person. You will have to decide for yourself if you want it badly enough.

    Here is an ancient story that shows this point really well:

    A young man visited Socrates and asked him for the secret to success. Socrates told the young man to meet him near the river the next morning. They met. Socrates asked the young man to walk with him towards the river. When the water got up to their neck, Socrates took the young man by surprise and ducked him into the water.

    The boy struggled to get out but Socrates was strong and kept him there until the boy started turning blue. Socrates pulled his head out of the water and the first thing the young man did was to gasp and take a deep breath of air.

    Socrates asked, ‘What did you want the most when you were there, under the water?” The boy replied, “Air.” Socrates said, “That is the secret to success. When you want success as badly as you wanted the air, then you will get it.”

    And here come the good news. It really takes brutal efforts to get to the top. It really takes brutal efforts to have a perfect athletic body, to become super rich, to win a Nobel Prize etc. But it doesn’t take that much effort to live a life happy and true to yourself.

    It doesn’t take that much to live healthy, to have enough financial intelligence to properly manage your money, to find your dream career etc. That’s something that anyone can do. And you can do it too. You just have to kick yourself in the ass a little bit harder.

    At the end of the day, you have to decide what you want out of life. Just don’t settle for average and for the society’s expectations for you. You want to live your own life with your own goals. So start experimenting without any irrational fear.

  • The Search Mode

    One of the ways to learn about yourself and the world is the so-called “search mode”. The better you know yourself and your environment, the better you can execute, and consequently achieve your true goals that much faster.

    In order to get to know yourself and your environment, as well as build up an adequate life strategy, you have to first do enough searching, experimenting and trying, since all that leads to understanding and insights. Based on that, you can start executing and making sound decisions.

    As you can see in many action movies, when the super team steps into action, the first order they always get from their command officer is “Gather intel”.

    In the search mode, you make assumptions and test different options. In the execution mode, you constantly perform and optimize what you preserve from the search mode.

    There are two main reasons why you want to introduce the search mode into your life:

    Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups and execution based on wrong assumptions means nothing but failure, sorrow and obstacles. Reality (the objective reality) is significantly different from your assumptions and your own interpretation of reality (the subjective reality). You want to come as close to the objective reality as possible.

    The difference between what you think is valuable to you and what really is valuable to you in your life creates waste. One of your tasks when living an AgileLeanLife is to eliminate all waste by finding out what really brings value for you. You don’t want to live life based on wrong assumptions of what you like or expectations of other people.

    You learn three important things in the search mode:

    You learn about yourself

    You learn about yourself as a person, what you want in life, your true desires, fears, who you are and where your talents lie, your current capabilities and so on.

    You want to get a very clear picture of who you are and what you want.

    You learn about your environment, the world and the society

    We all live our own lives as well as the common destiny of the world and the smaller environments we live in (country, company…).

    In the search mode you experiment in order to learn the basics of how the world works, how people behave (from the aspect of biology to the aspect of psychology), and so on. You learn how to build an environment that supports you and how you can create as much value as possible for other people.

    You learn how to build an environment that supports you and how you can create as much value as possible for other people.

    You learn about the markets

    Markets always win. You don’t want to play against the market. Therefore you want to understand the trends and movements on the market, be it the labor market, the dating market, financial markets etc. Markets are like turbo accelerators on your car. They can help you advance really fast.

    But first you have to learn how to drive a car, which means learning enough about the previous two points.

    The better you understand all three, the greater the potential you unlock in your life. Therefore in an AgileLeanLife, you have to divide all activities of all areas of life into two groups:

    Here are some additional reasons for why you need the search phase before doing any real execution:

    • To do adequate research and form first assumptions about yourself and life
    • To conduct small experiments and figure out what your best personal fits are
    • To not put pressure on yourself to achieve and do something that’s not really you
    • To have fun and try as many things as possible
    • To set a realistic execution strategy that you can follow and really implement

    Once we become adults we assume that the time for searching, exploring and learning is over. But that is a completely wrong approach. You should never stop experimenting and learning about yourself and the world.

    No goals, just learning

    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 and before you understand something, your expectations are definitely completely wrong.

    Commitments lead to heavy energy investments, and you shouldn’t be investing before you know what you are truly investing in 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.

    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 job is only to test the assumptions you have written down, correct them, and try different things in order to find out what suits you best This phase is only for learning about yourself and the world. No goals. No measurement of progress. Just learning and playing.

    After you find your fit in the search phase, you start executing. You set a big vision, strong foundations, have laser focus, commit fully, start working hard and achieving your goals. You optimize, improve and measure your progress. But first, you have to find the right thing. You must put the ladder against the right wall before you start climbing.

    It doesn’t make sense to set deadlines for being skinny and fit until you understand your body, metabolism, your favorite sports, what kind of a diet suits you best etc. It doesn’t make sense to make deadlines for being rich if you don’t have enough financial knowledge, don’t know how to increase your earning potential and which financial investments suit you best etc.

    It doesn’t make sense to make plans for getting married after a second date, when you don’t even know the person next to you and how you two function together.

    Before making any real execution plan you should learn, talk with people, try different things, test, experiment and write down your insights. After that you will be able to execute perfectly.

    You have to do it scientifically

    The search mode is all nice and fun with the right approach (it can be scary but more about that later). There is one big catch, however. You have to do it scientifically and systematically.

    No goals, no pressure, just discovery, but you have to make sure that you are really learning about yourself and the world. Learning can become an easy excuse for failure. And you don’t want to fail.

    If you have learned something new, you haven’t failed in the search mode. If you haven’t learned anything new, you’ve failed big time and wasted resources on top of that. But how do you know whether you’ve learned something new or not?

    Very easily, namely by setting and testing hypotheses. We call that validated learning. Let’s look at an example.

    You want to get in better shape. The formula for getting in shape is pretty easy. You have to eat less, the food has to be of higher quality, and you have to exercise more. No greater secret. But there are many ways for doing that. Based on knowing yourself, you start making some assumptions and then testing them.

    Experiment

    Practical examples

    Example of assumptions about exercising

    H1: I prefer individual sports over team sports. I will try two individual and two team sports. (Validated)

    H2: The individual sports that suit me best are fitness, running and boxing. I will also try crossfit, golf, judo and hiking.

    (Validated – with one exception: I like hiking more than boxing)

    H3: Since I’m in bad shape, it’s enough if I start exercising two times per week. I will try to do it three times for the first time and see how it feels.

    (Rejected – I can work out three times per week without a problem. Will try four times after one month)

    H4: I will make better progress with a personal trainer and I have the money to afford it.

    (Validated – Personal trainers show me how to do exercises right and boost my motivation. After two months, I will see how well I work alone, following a new program prepared by a personal trainer)

    H5: My motivation is better if I have a pairing buddy to work out with.

    (Rejected – Scheduling, talking, drinks after the workout, it’s not really helping me)

    H6: I now have enough knowledge to set serious goals about my fitness progress. I will make a 3-month program and measure how I am doing.

    (Rejected – I need more time to adjust my body to exercising. I will enjoy it without any serious goals. Will try again after three months).

    It’s more or less the same with dieting assumptions (or any other for that matter). You have to see your body’s reaction to cutting down calories, decreasing the consumption of sugar, finding the veggies that you like the most etc. For some people, eating at night is a catastrophe, for others it’s no big deal. After a few months of experimenting, you will find the right diet for you, the right activities and after that you can do some fine-tuning and additional adjustments.

    The main point is to write down what you have learned (especially when doing reflections). That way you won’t feel like you’re running in place but you will see your progress. You will also focus on things that work.

    Finding the right fit will enable you to really change your lifestyle and become healthy in the long term, not just go on a diet and gain back all the weight afterwards, according to the yo-yo effect.

    After searching and trying and finding the right fit, changing your lifestyle is fun and easy. That is what the search phase is all about; getting excited about the changes that you will make in your life and finding the right things that will not lead to a loss of motivation after only a few weeks.

    But you have to do it gradually and scientifically to some extent.

    The Search Mode

    Your life is like a puzzle you have to build

    By knowing what you want, how the world works and what markets need, you can put together all the pieces of life that suit you best, and build the right strategy. You can compose your masterpiece life puzzle, your dream life.

    Your job in the search mode is to find the perfect diet for yourself, the best career to serve the world and provide real value for it, the relationships that empower you the most, the best computer operating system for you (or whatever), the things that you enjoy the most in life, and so on.

    What suits you best may be a waste for someone else. And vice versa. You have to search for what fits you best.

    There are four more goals you have to achieve in the search phase besides validated learning:

    Acquiring the best knowledge possible

    The rule of an AgileLeanLife is to go straight to the best knowledge there is and then adjust it to your life. For every life area, there are only a few key points you have to know and master, and then practice them regularly.

    To go straight to the top, you have to learn and mirror the people at the top. You can easily get lost in crappy content in today’s post-information age.

    Setting strong foundations

    The bigger the skyscraper you want to build, the stronger you need to make the foundations. Implementing the best knowledge into your life requires extraordinarily strong foundations.

    You set a strong foundation by making small linear changes and then accumulating them into rapid big changes or quantum leaps. The key principle of the AgileLeanLife is to really master a few things that are the building blocks of strong foundations.

    You can build your skyscraper floor by floor on that. Strong foundations mean nothing else but mastering yourself and your environemnt.

    You won’t get more fit if you can’t skip dessert and exercise a few times per week. You won’t get rich if you don’t learn to increase your earning potential and spend less than you earn. You won’t find your dream career if you are obsessed with a current secure job.

    Setting strong foundations means mastering yourself and you can do that in the search mode by testing and experimenting and consequently building up your will and stamina (being in the search mode means handling uncertainty).

    Preparing a plan for execution and daily application

    When you find your fit in the search mode, you have to start making a shift into the execution mode. For the execution, you need discipline to perform daily tasks that lead you to your goal. Search mode should help you get insight into how fast you can progress and what realistic expectations are.

    In AgileLeanLife practices, you execute in intervals (sprints) and after every sprint you make a reflection and adjust the plan. Your first execution plan when going from the search into the execution mode will be the worst and you have to be aware of that.

    Thus you need to make constant adjustments to your plan during regularly scheduled reflections. Learn more how to organize yourself with to-do lists.

    Interacting with other people

    In the search phase, you should interact with people who have achieved the same things you want to achieve as well as with people who have views totally different from your own. Talk with them, try to understand them.

    Try to walk a mile in their shoes. Imagine your life and your decisions if you were to live with those kind of values. Broaden your horizons and test things that don’t come naturally to you. That approach will help you manage your own expectations and expectations of others in life.

    The search phase is the phase of constant tests and experiments. The really big problem is that testing is not your natural state, because it lacks security, because it contains the unknown. Trying something new can be scary from time to time.

    But you know you need guts to live an amazing life. Nothing worthwhile in life comes easily. In the search phase, you have to constantly keep trying out something new, fail over and over again, and do things that you haven’t mastered yet. As already said, that is scary.

    But it can also be fun. If you are consciously in the search mode and you carefully define your downsides and upsides, shape an adequate strategy and focus on validated learning rather than on the outcome, then the search phase becomes the fun life experience all in itself.

    A big plus of today’s world is that you can experiment without risking your life or lives of others (in most cases; and where such kind of danger exists, you should avoid it). There is no lion behind the corner that’s going to eat you if you try new ways. You have the tools, knowledge and examples. Thus it’s time for you to start scientifically and systematically testing and learning about yourself and the world.

    Every test should be seen as a life experience, part of your life vision. After performing the test, you should know more about yourself, the world and the society. In some cases even about the markets. If something new works for you, great. If it doesn’t, you should discard it and look for clues on which experiment to do next. That’s called pivot.

    There are two main goals for testing and experimenting in the search phase:

    1. Looking for your best fits so you can start building your dream life
    2. Trying, experimenting and testing more and more new things, so you can not only improve but also experience as much as possible. Testing and experiencing new things is the best way to not live a dull and routine life.

    The sum of all desired experiences is the vision of your life. You should have a list of potential ideas and constantly brainstorm for new ideas and possibilities. You can choose priority experiments for every interval.

    In order to test as many things as possible the concept of Minimum Viable Experience can help.

    Reflection in the search mode

    After every experiment you do in the search phase, you have to make a reflection. That is the most valuable part of the process. Before marking a hypothesis as validated or rejected, you should ask yourself about what you have learned, what you will test next, how you will change your plans, and so on. A search mode without deep and systematic reflection has very little value.

    You learn about yourself by reflecting on your actions. Reflection is an insight into knowing yourself and life better. Never forget that reflection is actually an insight into how to do things in a better way. Therefore if you want to be more successful, effective and efficient, you have to find better ways to do things for you personally, by experimenting and reflecting.

    You should also remember that insights only come to a relaxed and rested mind that’s prepared to think about the experience that had happened.

    Never stop searching for new ways

    You never know whether you’ve reached your local maximum in life and where other, even bigger maximums are. That is why you should constantly be in the search mode, even when you had already switched to the execution mode and vice versa. It’s just the emphasis that’s different.

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

    In the search mode, you make assumptions and test different options. In the execution mode, you constantly perform and optimize what you preserve from the search mode. But even when executing, you should test new things from time to time. And in the search mode, you are already doing execution in a way.

    For the end, another important thing. Because all living beings, including you, don’t like change by nature, you should not implement too many experiments and changes at once. From the macro perspective, the whole search mode must be limited to the point at which you can still measure what’s happening with your life, what works for you and what doesn’t.

    Our willpower is a weak muscle, thus all experiments and changes should be made in a systematic and controllable way. And you should have as much fun as possible on the way.

  • The most effective way to learn new things

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

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

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

    Passive methods of learning

    Listening to lectures: 5 %

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

    Reading: 10 %

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

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

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

    Listening to audio recordings or watching video material: 20 %

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

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

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

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

    Demonstration: 30 %

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

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

    Brains at work
    You should combine all different methods of learning

    Active methods of learning

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

    Group discussion: 50 %

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

    Real life experience: 75 %

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

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

    Teaching others after real life experience: 90 %

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

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

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

    Combination of different methods is the real winner

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

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

  • The key principles of the Agile and Lean Life – Have it ALL Manifesto

    This blog post is the Agile and Lean Life Manifesto, setting the foundations and key principles for living the Agile and Lean life. The twelve principles introduced in the manifesto are based on best business practices like “lean manufacturing”, “lean start-up”, “agile development” and other advanced business strategies, transformed so they can be used for managing personal life. In addition to that, a few best personal development practices and my own, already tested, ideas are also included.

    The five most important goals of living an Agile and Lean life are to:

    • Acquire inner assets faster (knowledge, skills, decision-making power …)
    • Create more external assets (time, money, revenue streams, status, energy, relationships…)
    • Have the tools to tackle the biggest challenges in life, such as career change
    • Successfully manage negative situations like anxiety, information overload and indecision
    • Blossom in all areas of life and thus live a more happy and quality life

    The key philosophy behind achieving these five goals is to eliminate waste from your life. Everything you do and have in life (decisions, material things, relationships etc.) either adds value to your life or drags you down. There is no third option. You can either make a return or loss on your every investment.

    Things that add value to your life are the things filled with positive energy and emotions. That means:

    • doing various different things that make you happy and self-confident,
    • doing things that lead to creativity and greatness,
    • having loving and empowering relationships,
    • being a part of a group in which you fit in and prosper,
    • doing things that make you healthier and more energetic,
    • doing things that lead to building up your inner assets and external assets by providing real value to the world, developing your talents and using prestige – a non-dominant approach.

    A very important task for all of you who want to live a more quality life is to eliminate as much waste as possible, with the end goal of making room for things that really matter to you – bring value. Unfortunately today, it is very easy to get distracted by waste, having wrong assumptions about life.

    If nothing else, you are exposed to thousands of ads that are fighting for your attention and assets on a daily basis. As the famous quote goes (and is sadly not far from the truth), before you know it, you can find yourself working a job you hate, buying things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like. This is all a big waste of life that you should totally avoid. That kind of a situation is the opposite of the Agile and Lean Life.

    Eliminating waste is an endless process and, in addition to that, it’s also not an easy task to carry out. But it’s very worth it in the long run. Eliminating waste is an important step towards personal freedom and genuine self-actualization, no matter where your starting point is. The Agile and Lean manifesto sets the foundations and key principles for doing it.

    Too long read for now? Download the PDF file!

    The Agile Lean Life Manifesto Banner

     

    Life can be managed even in today’s complex and turbulent world

    Before we go to the key principles, you have to be aware that it can be done, that there is a way.

    It’s true, life is not always easy. In life, you have to face big challenges, a lack of resources, negative emotional states and disappointments sooner or later. The new digital era has added additional pressure on top of that, with challenges like having too many options and unrealistic expectations, dealing with information overload, extreme market complexity and hardly bearable uncertainty, like no job security.

    But as you know, the world isn’t that dark. We live in the best times ever. Life can be an awesome and beautiful experience. But only if you manage it correctly. Only if you have the formula for facing life challenges and turning today’s disadvantages into advantages; and deep down inside you know that the formula is not posting your happy pictures on social media, no matter the short-term satisfaction you get.

    And don’t forget. There are no second chances in life. You have to get it right the first time.

    But what is the formula? In school, they teach you everything from mathematics and chemistry to history and geography, but almost nothing is said about life management. There are thousands of books written about personal development, but most of them are either too superficial or only offer small insights on how to improve some areas of your life. That may have sounded arrogant, but it is not meant that way.

    Yes, you should definitely read as much as possible in order to gain new insights on life, and there are many great books, but what you also need and is missing out there is a systematic and structured manual for how to live and manage life in today’s turbulent and complex world.

    Life is too short and you want to figure out the formula for success as soon as possible, and then live life to the full. You don’t want to bother with how to live life all the time, making and correcting big mistakes, feeling sorry for yourself while life passes by. You want to achieve as much as possible, have as many good moments as possible, acquire enough assets to fulfill your desires, have deep and empowering relationships and so on – as soon as possible in life.

    It’s true that everything takes time to be achieved, but the Agile and Lean life is about speed. It’s about the formula for accelerating your success. It’s about doing it as fast as possible in the right kind of way, meaning not being an asshole.

    There was a pretty good formula for living life that worked very well two decades ago. The formula was: get a good education, find a safe job, get married with your first love, live by the values of the local church, write down your goals and try to achieve a few of them, and live happily ever after. Jobs were available, markets were booming, education was cheap. The formula worked.

    Unfortunately the formula doesn’t work anymore. The times have changed too much. In 50 years, the world has been turned upside down.

    The businesses were the first ones to be dramatically affected by the new digital age and struck with all the new challenges, from market saturation and globalization to new internet competition and financial markets’ meltdown. They had to adapt, there was no other choice. Adapt or die. Many manuals have been written on how to do it, about running a company successfully in the new digital age. For example, two very popular new age manuals are the “lean production” and “agile development”, while the “lean startup” philosophy offers a new formula for success in business today.

    There is no reason why you shouldn’t use similar techniques for managing your personal life. More on that is written in the About this blog section. This gives hope that it can be done. By adapting the agile and lean philosophy to your personal life, you have access to a new formula for living life and being successful.

    The measurement of success according to the Agile and Lean Life formula is very simple. On your death bed, looking back on your life, you want to say to yourself: “Life was an awesome experience and a daring adventure. I have faced many difficult challenges but I have played the game right. I have made the right moves and have taken the right decisions. It was worth it. And I have contributed to making the world a better place to live in for generations to come.”

    The Agile and Lean Life Manifesto will show you how. You can become happy and successful in life no matter how difficult your life situation is – as long as you have access to the internet and possess sufficient intelligence to comprehend this text. For the rest of the world, we must all work hard so that they will have the same options. By living the Agile and Lean life you may not become the next Bill Gates, but you can definitely make a move towards a better and happier life.

    Before we go to the key principles, you should be aware that:

    • We all have to face many (old and new) life challenges that are not easy at all
    • We all deserve to live a quality life with adequate resources, self-actualization and happiness
    • Life can be systematically and scientifically managed in order to achieve these goals
    • You can do it as well, no matter where your starting point is. You can live a better life.

    The Agile and Lean Life Manifesto is based on twelve principles that successfully replace old life management techniques like setting goals, looking for job security and giving personal power for the important life decisions to other people (formal systems, bosses etc.).

    The twelve principle of an Agile and Lean Life

    1. Search before you execute: Experiment – Reflect – Learn – Execute
    2. Go out and see for yourself, see in order to compose your dream life
    3. Optimize your entire life, not only parts of it
    4. Visualize, simplify and make a move
    5. Move fast and with focus in the execution phase by using the flow
    6. Plan regular intervals with reflections and adjustments
    7. Believe in yourself over looking for outside safety
    8. Relationships and environment over work and tasks
    9. Continuously improve yourself and your environment
    10. Create value, be flexible and modest over having an ego
    11. Life Accounting – measure everything
    12. Live life with love and respect

    1. Search before you execute: Experiment – Reflect – Learn – Execute

    The key to a more successful life is having a superior strategy for how to live it. Your life strategy is shaped especially by your values, beliefs, personal management system, and thus by your decisions about spending your time, energy, money, skills and other resources.

    The Agile and Lean life strategy begins with the old Ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself”. If you want to be successful in life, you have to know yourself and what you want out of life very clearly.

    But how? The best way to get to know yourself and World is by experimenting, reflecting and learning (here you can find all the techniques how to get to know yourself better). The best way is to introduce a new search mode in life, the phase you should be performing every time before you do any kind of real execution.

    If you execute before you search, you could be climbing a ladder that’s leaned against the wrong wall. Somewhere midway or at the top, you can discover that this is not you, it’s not something you want. The higher you are, the more difficult it is to climb down. Most people never climb down, and instead start living a “zombie life” – a life of constantly running away from reality.

    Therefore in an Agile and Lean Life, you have to divide all activities of all areas of life into two groups:

    In the search mode, you shouldn’t have any expectations, you shouldn’t have any commitments and you shouldn’t do any hard work. Expectations lead to disappointments and before you understand something, you definitely have expectations that are completely wrong. Commitments lead to heavy energy investments, and you shouldn’t be investing before you know what you are truly investing in 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.

    In the search phase you just try, experiment, observe, reflect and learn about yourself and the world. The most important thing is to have no fixed ideas and no expectations at all in this phase. Your job is only to test the assumptions you have written down, correct them, and try different things to find out what suits you best. Your only job is to learn about yourself and the world. No goals. No measurement of progress. Just learning and playing.

    After you find your fit in the search phase, you start executing. You set strong foundations, have laser focus, commit fully, start working hard and achieving your goals. You optimize, improve, and measure your progress. But first, you have to find the right thing. You must put the ladder against the right wall before you start climbing.

    After every experiment (action) you do in the search phase, you have to make a reflection. You learn about yourself by reflecting on your actions. Reflection is an insight into knowing yourself and life better. Reflection is an insight into how to do things in a better way.

    Why you need a search phase before execution:

    • To do adequate research and form first assumptions about yourself and life (for example you can write down your assumptions using the persona technique for people and organizations you interact with or you can just write down your assumptions on the spreadsheet)
    • To conduct small experiments and figure out what your best personal fits are
    • To not put pressure on yourself to achieve and do something that is not really you
    • To have fun and try as many things as possible in life and stay open minded
    • To set a realistic execution strategy that you can follow and really implement
    Practical examples

    Let’s look at an example. The old strategy was to write down a goal in a smart way (SMART = Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, Time-bound). OK. You then write down something like: “I want to lose 10 kg by exercising and dieting in one year.” What usually follows is that after a few months, you look at your goal paper, you step on the scale and feel even worse. No progress at all.

    In the Agile and Lean Life Search phase, there are no goals yet and no pressure at all. The first phase is driven by curiosity. You know that you want to lose weight and you know that you lose weight by exercising and dieting. But instead of setting goals, you ask yourself: Is there a sport that I would really enjoy and wouldn’t even be hard exercise? Is there a diet for me that is tasty, healthy and makes me more energetic? With whom can I try the first sport I think I might like? Then you continue reading, trying and researching. In the first phase, you put no pressure on yourself, you just experiment.

    Let’s look at another example. In every company that hires you, you are usually on a trial period for a few months. They want to know if you and your skills are actually what you have presented in your CV. It makes complete sense and you should have the same approach towards the company. It’s not enough to just have a job. You must find out for yourself if you really fit in the company culture, if you like the work, if you can develop your talents further and so on. Only then you can decide if you really want to fully commit.

    2. Go out and see for yourself, see in order to compose your dream life

    The second principle of an Agile and Lean life is based on the “genchi gembutsu” philosophy, which means go and see for yourself in Japanese. It is an important concept in the Toyota production system, and is also known as “Go out of the building” in the lean start-up philosophy. The “go out and see” principle is an important part of the search phase.

    It’s a very simple rule in the Agile and Lean Life. Don’t talk about things, but go and try them.Don’t assume, go out and test. Testing and trying is the best way to gain firsthand knowledge about yourself and the world. For every new experience you get, you should decide whether to preserve it in your life or not (pivot). Every new experience should also give your ideas and insights into what to try next. The best way to test and try new things is with minimum viable experience concept. The idea is that you try as many things as possible in life (your vision list), and based on your physical, emotional and intellectual response, you decide whether you should keep something in your life or pivot to something else.

    The difference between what you think is valuable to you and what is really valuable for your life creates waste. Don’t assume anything, try and test everything.

    Let’s look again at the previous two examples to prevent things from sounding too abstract.

    There is plenty of advice on fitness and diet. You can even find contradictory advice. But you can test what works and what doesn’t work for you as an individual. For someone, being vegetarian is the optimal diet. For others, far from it. There is no single formula for success. You can only try vegetarian, vegan, fruitarian, paleo and other verified diets until you find the one that suits you best. It doesn’t make sense to only read about it or argue about it, you have to try it for yourself and see. With no expectations and by keeping an open mind. After the search phase and finding what works for you best, you can execute (keep, set goals, measurements…) by optimizing details.

    While experimenting, you must be careful you don’t do anything that would really damage you. If necessary, you should consult specialists.

    The second example would be looking for a new career. Your emotions show you complete dissatisfaction in your current career. Here is how you would tackle this challenge in the first phase of an Agile and Lean Life. In your free time, you write down assumptions for careers you think you could blossom in. You start testing how much passion awakens in you when reading about specific industries, join forums and attend online courses etc. You take some part time projects, even for no payment, just to see how engaged you become. You continue experimenting until you find the new perfect fit for you. Then you go into the execution phase. At the end, you may find that design is your thing after trying to prepare an outstanding CV for a completely different industry.

    These are two very simplified examples. This phase must be done scientifically and systematically, and on this blog, we will talk a lot about how to do it and which tools to use.

    Your task in an Agile and Lean Life is to find your perfect fits in all areas of life by searching and experimenting. Trying completely different things, hanging out with different kinds of people and so on.

    At the end of the day, you must find your best fits and have your dream life composed like a beautiful mosaic – perfect diet, best exercise, best fitting career, investments best suited to your character, perfect partner etc.

    If we have started with the Agile and Lean Life rule that you have to search before you execute, this rule is all about you searching for your perfect fits by performing experiments in real life – actually doing and trying, not only talking about it. Talk is cheap and gives zero insight into you and life.

    3. Optimize your entire life, not only parts of it

    You can’t run a successful business if your marketing or cash flow management or any other key business functions suck. You have to optimize the entire business, not only a few business functions. In the same way, you can’t have a happy and successful life if you only focus on some parts of your life and forget about the others. There is no running away from any area of your life. You have to look at your life as a whole, and optimize it on the macro level.

    If one of the life areas collapses, everything else can collapse as well. Your health greatly affects your earning potential and the quality of your relationships. Your income level has a big influence on all other areas of life. There are some periods in life when you have to put more focus on a single area (e.g. when getting a baby), but you should never let the bigger picture out of your sight.

    Ten key areas of life

    You have ten key areas of life you have to juggle:

    1. You
      1. Your personality – knowing yourself, your beliefs, values, behavioral patterns, daily habits, your ideal-self etc.
      2. Your environment – country, city, home, office etc.
    2. Health and primary needs (body)
      1. Diet
      2. Fitness / Sports
      3. Other (sleep, sex, breathing…)
    3. Relationships and people skills (love and belonging)
      1. Spouse
      2. Family (primary, secondary)
      3. Friends
      4. Coworkers
      5. Others
    4. Money and wealth
    5. Career, achievements and respect
    6. Emotions (your emotional body)
    7. Competences – Intelligence, knowledge and skills (your intellectual body)
      1. Formal education (degree, certificates…)
      2. Informal education
    8. Fun, creativity and travel
    9. Spirituality, self-actualization and giving back to the world (your spiritual body)
    10. Technology as a leverage for being more productive on all areas of life

    The Agile and Lean Life formula for managing life at a macro level is pretty simple. You should do constant linear improvements (kaizen) in certain chosen areas of your life, and one big rapid improvement (kaikaku) in one area of your life, when the time is ripe. At the same time, you should maintain all areas that are currently not your priority.

    Out of the ten life areas, you should choose, best in one year time frame:

    • One area where you plan to do a rapid improvement (that is your focus area for the time being)
    • Two to three areas where you will implement a few linear improvements
    • In all other areas, you try to maintain the current level (of course improvements on other levels will, in most cases, also positively affect the areas you are maintaining)

    You cannot implement too many changes in your life at once. You only have a strong enough will to do a few linear changes, and you can only implement one really big change in your life at a time, provided there are foundations strong enough for it. Therefore you should do only a single rapid improvement at a time.

    If you want to live a happy and successful life, you have to optimize your life from all ten perspectives. Of course all the areas are interconnected and consequently improving one area leads to improvements in other areas. The important thing, however, is to not only think about money, sex, fun, career or any other isolated area, but rather look at your life as a whole. First see the woods, then go and cut down trees.

    You should always thoroughly think about how every major decision influences all ten areas of your life. That is the principle number three, and the additional thing you should find out in the search phase.

    You can decrease the quality of your life or even destroy it with:

    • One or several big wrong decisions (for example choosing your spouse, industry, career…)
    • A series of small wrong decisions (unhealthy diet…)

    For every big decision you make, and for all the small decisions you are making almost every day, you should ask yourself where they are leading you and how they impact all ten areas of your life. Short-term history is a good predictor for short-term future. Ask yourself where your past decisions and current behavioral patterns are going to lead you in one year’s time in all ten areas of your life. That is the best technique to use for determining priority areas of your life: where you should be doing rapid changes and linear improvements.

    4. Visualize, simplify and make a move

    Brain neurons for our visual perception account for approximately 30 % of brain’s grey matter. When we look at pictures, our brain can process several pieces of information simultaneously, which means it is processing around 60,000 times faster than when reading a text.

    Therefore you first have to “see” what you want from life before you can have it.

    A very important rule of an Agile and Lean Life is to visualize everything. In the future, we will talk a lot about the fact that in an Agile and Lean Life, you have to do all kinds of creative stuff, from Kanban boards, “want-to-have experience” boards and master list visualizations to outlining mind maps and constantly drawing, sketching and sticking pictures together. Even if you suck at it, like I am.

    Much like the business model canvas is a much more fun experience in the business planning phase compared to a dull business plan, boards and visual materials are similarly a much better and more fun tool in a personal life compared to writing down goals. And they work so much better.

    This rule of an Agile and Lean Life is pretty simple. You must have extreme fun when outlining your life and designing what you want to experience.

    For your better performance you have to visualize everything.

    Besides better clarity and comprehension, you should get two more answers by visualizing and sketching your desired life experiences:

    • Scenario-based thinking: What are all the potential moves I can make and which ones will I try first? With more options, you get a feeling of more freedom and personal power.
    • Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication: What is the simplest thing that would work for every move I can make? You can take action only if you don’t feel overwhelmed.

    Having everything visualized and outlined makes it become obvious to you. There is always a move to make towards a better life. There is always a way to live a better life by implementing simpler and faster solutions. That should give you a feeling of inner security.

    Let’s review

    The next, fifth, principle is a step further from the search mode to the first execution step. So let’s look back at the first four principles we had covered so far:

    1. Get to know yourself by searching, experimenting and trying. Don’t execute and invest yourself strongly before you find your perfect fit. Don’t have any commitments and expectations in the search phase. There is no failure in the search mode. Only playing. That should free your mind of pressure. You should do regular reflections in order to acquire knowledge about yourself and the World.
    2. You have to go out and see for yourself. You have to try things and experience them in order to gain knowledge. Don’t talk about it, experience it. Don’t judge if you haven’t tried it for yourself, don’t assume if you don’t know how it feels. You are here on Earth to experience as much as possible. Do it. Test, try and experiment.
    3. Think about how every action you plan to do influences all ten areas of your life. You have to optimize your whole life to be happy and successful, not just a few isolated parts.
    4. Visualize everything you are doing or planning to do in your life and want to experience. Pictures, sketches, mind maps, boards and so on are the best tools for our brain. Use them and have as much fun as possible while visualizing it.

    5. Move fast and with focus in the execution phase by using the flow

    In the Agile and Lean Life, interested does not equal committed. “Interested” and “interesting” are the two main enemies of real progress in the execution mode, after you have conducted the search mode. No. Try not. Do or do not. There is no try. After the search mode.

    When you find your fit, you have to make more than a hundred percent commitment. You have to move fast, be focused and learn more about which innovations work and which don’t. The more energy you put into a few of your key goals (one major, a few minor ones) the faster your progress will be. In the execution mode it’s all about speed.

    In the Agile and Lean Life, the following is strictly forbidden in the execution phase:

    • Multitasking and other bad time management practices (read The best time management guide ever)
    • Doing too many things and having too many goals at once
    • Not having a place where you can work without any distractions and be in the flow at least once a day for a few hours (you can help yourself to achieve that with No interruptions day)
    • Losing focus because of distractions and urgent tasks, instead of working on the important ones
    • Not working on your goals on a daily basis
    • Not regularly measuring your progress in the intervals you have set with visual elements

    The key point in the execution phase is to work on your goals on a daily basis, and measure progress at regular intervals. An example of the right mindset would be: if your goal is to live a healthier life, there is nothing that can get in the way of me doing my daily exercise.

    Most of the work should be achieved in the flow. The flow is a superior creative and execution phases. The flow is a divine experience that enables you to create, deliver and capture real value added quickly and efficiently. The biggest killers of the workflow, the most productive state for a human being, are distractions. Therefore you need a place for yourself where you can get real work done.

    Laser focus by eliminating all distractions and being in the flow as much time as possible is the formula for good execution results. Use it.

    It’s also very important to break down your “life vision” with all the desired experiments into small steps you can easily take. You should break down all the goals to extremely small tasks that you can perform immediately, and gather feedback to do reflections.

    6. Plan regular intervals for reflections and adjustments

    When living an Agile and Lean Life you don’t just do work and execute tasks. You have to think regularly about why you are doing it and how you are doing it, and whether you are making real progress – the progress that brings value to your life. Being strong and passionate about the reason why is the best motivator you can have in life, and there is always a way to do things better.

    You need regularly planned introspection intervals for:

    • Reviewing the tasks done in the previous interval
    • Connecting with yourself and straightening out your life vision (and whys)
    • Measuring your real progress
    • Adjusting the strategy and plan
    • Reflecting on new things that were learned
    • Gathering new ideas
    • Identifying potential improvements
    • Setting new tasks for the upcoming interval

    First of all, in life things will never go as you assume, think and plan. Even less so in the future, since the environment is becoming even more complex, turbulent and unpredictable. Be prepared to change your strategy frequently and constantly. Your goals will be constantly changing in the Agile and Lean Life. You have to constantly adapt to the fast changing environment.

    The best way is to have reflection days at 14-day intervals. Every two weeks, you take two hours to reflect on your life. You look at all ten areas of life, determine your progress and do strategy and goal adjustments.

    In the 14-day reflection intervals, you also set tasks for the following two weeks (the so called sprint) based on your strategy adjustments. You should visualize your two-week execution sprint on the Kanban board.

    • In the Agile in Lean Life you have so called Sprints – 14-day intervals
    • Every single working day within a Sprint you should be working in the flow as much time as possible
    • You start your working day with a short morning meeting with yourself

    The sprint and the flow are your execution techniques in the Agile and Lean Life.

    Let’s review

    After the search phase, you enter the execution mode. We have looked at two principles you have to follow in the Agile and Lean Life execution phase:

    1. In the execution phase, you fully commit. You laser focus yourself. No excuses are acceptable. Most of the work you do is in the state of flow.
    2. You set 14-day intervals in your calendar. Every two weeks, you take two hours to reflect, adjust your strategy and set activities for the upcoming two weeks (sprint). You use visualization tools to have a clear picture of your progress during every sprint.

    Now let’s look at some other important rules that aren’t in the scope of search and execution, but are very important for living a happy and successful Agile and Lean life.

    7. Believe in yourself over looking for outside safety

    If you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to do extraordinary things. If you want to do extraordinary things, you have to extraordinary believe in yourself. You must find your inner security and be aware of your personal power. You must find safety in knowing that there is always a move you can make towards a better life, no matter what kind of a situation you find yourself in.

    The path to an extraordinary and awesome life is full of little risks, experiments and failures. If you cling to your current relationships, especially the bad ones, if you seek job security, if you are not willing to try new things, you will get what most people get: an average life. An average job, an average paycheck, an average relationships. But being average is not awesome, it’s boring and dull. You may even become a zombie.

    Don’t get me wrong. There is a big difference between stupidity and doing extraordinary things. Being certain that you are more productive if you are texting while driving is completely stupid. The probability of causing an accident if texting while driving is pretty similar to the probability of causing one if you were driving drunk. The latter is also very stupid. And you don’t want to do stupid things that can ruin your life. That is forbidden in the Agile and Lean Lifestyle.

    What you want to do is firmly believe in yourself by developing and executing a superior life strategy, as well as taking smart risks (opportunities with low risk and massive potential reward). For that, you need courage, self-esteem and knowledge for mitigating risks and scientifically measuring progress.

    For example, you must have the courage (trust yourself enough) to speak the truth, regardless of how unpleasant it is. Honest communication builds trust. That doesn’t apply only for communication with others, but also with yourself. Lying to yourself and making compromises merely brings hardship in life later on. There are many cases like that in Agile and Lean Life where you need courage and where you have to believe in yourself.

    If you don’t believe in yourself, you will never make a move towards a truly better life. You may make small linear improvements, but you will never gather enough courage to make a quantum leap in the quality of your life. Doubt kills more dreams than failure. Therefore the rule of the Agile and Lean Life is to look for safety in yourself (your inner assets like knowledge, skills, competences…) and not in external things, like relationships, money and contracts.

    In an Agile and Lean Life, there is no external security (although it’s of course good to have safety nets in assets, loving relationships etc.). There’s only the World you must experience to the full. For that, you need to free yourself by believing in yourself. It’s the key enabler for executing a superior strategy for better life quality. Forget about social pressure. Forget about expectations of other people. Forget about rotten compromises. Live life true to yourself.

    Two important mindsets that can help you to believe in yourself better are:

    8. Relationships and environment over work and tasks or money

    The two most powerful influencing factors on your life are your relationships and the environment you work in. They can either drag you down or empower you, thus helping you achieve your goals. The more ambitious your goals are, the more empowering relationships you need, with less room for compromises.

    You can have ambitious goals and high expectations for life, but if you are not in an environment that supports you, you will never thrive. You will never achieve your goals without an adequate support system. You are more a product of the environment than you might think.

    The rule of an Agile and Lean life is to surround yourself with motivated individuals who have goals similar to yours. People you spend time with, including your spouse, are the most important decision in your life. Choose your environment very carefully. Much like your mindset should not be fixed, your environment should not be fixed either. You are the one who chooses your own environment.

    Make sure that the following environmental elements are supporting you in achieving your goals:

    • Market (chosen industry trends, occupation potential, structural changes, market size…)
    • Country (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental factors)
    • City (logistics, culture, fun, nature, food, education, kids…)
    • Office (possibility of working with no distractions, no need for a long commute…)
    • Home (quality of sleep, room for visualization of goals…)

    Look for environments with 5T: Talent, Technology, Tolerance, Transparency, Transcendence.

    Make sure that the following relationships support you in achieving your goals:

    • Spouse
    • Friends
    • Family
    • Acquaintances
    • Coworkers
    • Business partners
    • Other people in your life

    There are two important things regarding relationships that are a part of an Agile and Lean Life.

    • The basic foundation for good relationships is outstanding communication. You have to communicate honestly, frequently and deeply with people you want to have good relationships with. You need to learn how to be a good communicator. It’s an enabler for the Agile and Lean Life.
    • Coaches and mentors, because no one can succeed alone. You need other people who empower you and help you. One segment are people who surround you, and another are people whom you hire to help you or who you have mentoring exchanges with. In an Agile and Lean Life, you accelerate your progress with your personal mastermind group and coaches for different life areas.

    9. Continuously improve yourself and your environment

    You must never forget that there is always room for improvement, there is always a way to do it better. You should always look to improve yourself and grow. The foundation for an Agile and Lean Life is the growth mindset. You can always change yourself and by changing yourself, you can change your environment and the situations you are facing.

    Don’t be afraid of problems and challenges. Problems and challenges only present opportunities to learn and change. Don’t try to hide your mistakes. Expose them, talk about them and learn from them. But don’t make the same mistake twice. That is a big waste in life. Make sure you learn from mistakes the first time you make them.

    When making changes, knowledge and insights are your greatest assets. You can learn from your own past experiences and experiences of other people by reading, talking, watching, observing, listening etc. When using knowledge and insights of other people, go straight to the best knowledge and learn directly from the best people who achieved what you want to achieve. With the information overload, there is just too much crappy information and too many cheap copies. It’s better to read one really good book than 1000 average blog posts.

    To get the best out of life, you have to learn from the best or in other words learn from the best, forget the rest.

    Linear and rapid improvement

    You change yourself when you find a way to do something better. Self-improvement in your life can be either linear or rapid. When there is no more room for linear improvement, rapid improvement takes place, if the foundations are strong enough and if big enough motivation is present.

    You can only improve your current practice to a certain point. You can optimize your current behavioral patterns only to a certain level. Your current actions will only lead you to a specific level of success (it’s called a local maximum). You know you have reached a plateau when every new improvement experiment leads to an inferior performance.

    If you want to achieve more in that kind of situation, you have to do a dramatic (rapid) improvement. Painful situations and setbacks usually lead you to these kinds of more dramatic changes in life.

    The key questions to ask yourself when doing linear improvements:

    • What are my current values and behavioral patterns?
    • How can I make things faster or better?
    • How can I get the same result by using less resources (money, materials…)?
    • How can I make things simpler?
    • How are other people doing it more efficiently?

    The key questions to ask yourself when it’s time for a rapid improvement in your life:

    • What are my current values and behavioral patterns?
    • What is the best result that this kind of behavior can get me? Is it enough for me?
    • Why do I work like that? How should I work to achieve a quantum leap in productivity?
    • What is really holding me back from changing dramatically? Which values are holding me back?
    • How are other people doing it differently and being much more efficient than me?
    • What knowledge and skills am I lacking to do rapid improvement?
    • How and what would you work if you were totally free of your problems?

    You should also use the 5 Whys Technique when doing a specific linear or rapid improvement. It’s a technique where you ask yourself “why” five times, with the final goal of tackling the cause not the effect. Describe the situation you are facing. And then ask yourself five times: why?

    Question everything. There is always a way to do it better. Constantly push yourself to improve. Try new ideas. Never stop.

    There’s one more important thing for an Agile and Lean Life, regarding improvement and trying new things. It’s easy to be different. But it’s hard to be different and better. Different doesn’t always mean better. Try all the options, even the mainstream ones, and find the ones best suitable to you.

    10. Create value, be flexible and modest over having an ego

    In the Agile and Lean Lifestyle, your ego is the biggest obstacle on your path to a better and more successful life and personal growth. If you don’t believe that you can improve yourself and achieve your goals in a smarter and better way, you are driven by your ego. If you are driven by your ego, you are drawn towards exploitation and dominance. Both principles are short-term survival strategies, which are forbidden in the Agile and Lean Lifestyle.

    There are two options for how to act in life:

    1. You create, deliver and capture value, by serving and solving people’s problems (people pay you for solutions, skills, creativity etc.)
    2. You exploit, meaning that someone else has to create value for you (you take by fraud or force)

    There are two approaches for achieving social status in life:

    1. Prestige, meaning sharing expertise and knowing how to gain respect
    2. Dominance, which encompasses using force and fear over others

    The Agile and Lean Life is about creating value and achieving social status with prestige. You need to have a modest ego and trust yourself to live that way. You should never try to look superior in favor of learning something new and doing well. You must create value for people by using prestige.

    It is also very important that when you are creating value, you are market-centric not ego-centric. Markets always win, therefore you always have to count market structure and trends into your decisions (choosing a career, investing money etc.). You have to be flexible and not fixed in your assumptions about markets.

    The world will not change to be more to your liking. You have to be flexible and change to the point where you find common ground with markets, and then start making the world a better place.

    11. Life Accounting – measure everything

    On the one hand, the Agile and Lean life is all about creating, visualizing, testing and playing, but on the other, it’s life in spreadsheets. You have to very carefully and closely measure the progress you make in all areas of life.

    The most important thing is to avoid vanity metrics and the fake feeling of progress. If you are using olive oil, that doesn’t yet mean that you are living a healthy lifestyle. If you are driving a good car on a lease, that doesn’t mean that you are financially prospering. You want to be rich in life, not only look rich.

    There’s a simple reason behind the need for metrics. Numbers don’t lie and you can manage only what you measure. You should not talk about your progress in life at all, if you don’t have the metrics to show it.

    In the search mode, you should have sufficient insight and gather enough Intel and knowledge to set up basic metrics that need to be monitored. You should also know a few priority metrics and one metric you should focus on the most (the metric that matters). In the execution mode, the more experience you have, the more advanced and detailed metrics you can set and follow.

    12. Live life with love and respect

    The final foundation and the last principle of an Agile and Lean Life are respect and love. Respect yourself by believing in yourself. Respect other people you have chosen to be with or work with by empowering them and learning from them. Be humble and grateful for the relationships you have chosen in your life after the “cleaning” had been done. Lead, follow or just go away.

    Respect Mother Nature. Respect markets. Respect the global flow. Don’t expect them to change. You will have to change yourself first. You can change the world only after changing yourself. Never get cocky, never get full of yourself no matter how well are you doing.

    Besides respect, never forget about love, as it is the strongest force in the universe. The opposite of fear is not courage, but love and understanding. Courage is just a tool for managing fear. You cannot have positive and negative emotions at the same time. You cannot live a positive life with a negative mind. Life and happiness can’t occur where death and sorrow take place. Therefore do all things with love and respect. Love is the most powerful positive emotion in life.

    The moments you most remember in life are the moments filled with love and passion.

    It’s not about being happy at every single moment, but about doing things in a positive way for a positive cause. For yourself and for others. Do no evil. Be a good person. Create value. Share. However don’t expect that just because you’re a good person, life owes you something. You will still have to fight for a better career, a deeper relationship, a pay raise or anything else you want in life. Love doesn’t mean being soft and naïve.

    The final question at the end of this manifesto is how to start living an Agile and Lean Life. You simply start with your “life vision” – a list of everything you want to experience in your life. Continue now to the Agile and Lean Life productivity framework.

    Too long read for now? Download the PDF file!

    The Agile Lean Life Manifesto Banner

    Reference:

    • Liker, J. 2004. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from Toyota. New York: McGraw-Hill.
    • Blank, S. 2013. The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Second Edition. Amazon Kindle Books.
    • Ries, E. 2011. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Publishing Group, Inc.
    • Cheng JT, 2013. Two ways to the top: evidence that dominance and prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to social rank and influence. J Pers Soc Psychol
    • Dweck, C. 2006. Mindset: The new Psychology of Success. Random House.
    • Agilemanifesto.org

  • Personas – Know what you want

    One thing in life is sure. The more exactly, accurately and the sooner you know what you want from life, the easier your will get it. Usually the most successful people in the world are the ones who know what they want to do in life from a very young age, and have the talent to really do it.

    The best programmers, athletes, businessmen and so on, they all know that they were born to excel at exactly one thing. Knowing what you want in life allows you to focus on that thing only. If you are lucky and the environment supports you to the point where you can invest 10,000 hours into your talent development, then you can become a real Outlier.

    I very well remember one sentence from the movie Limitless, where Bradly Cooper gets the special brain enhancement pills, becomes super smart and goes from rags to riches. When he takes the pill, only one magical thing happens – quoting him: “I wasn’t high, I wasn’t wired. Just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it.”

    Well, that is the secret to a much better quality of life – be clear about what you want and make the strategy for how you will get it. You must know what you want as clearly as possible. You have to see the final outcome you want. Just saying to yourself “I want to be rich” or “I want to have a cute girl/boyfriend” is not enough. You have to be more specific. That is the rule for every aspect in your life. Even for relationships.

    And you don’t need any pills for that. Let’s look at a better technique for being more proactive at choosing your personal and professional relationships – personas.

    Personas in business

    In internet user-experience and marketing expertise, personas are used to represent different user types that might use the product in a similar way. Personas are fictional characters representing the ideal customer or a typical character for a user segment. They are hypothetical users. It is also a very popular method used in lean start-up marketing to help you focus your efforts. You try to imagine everyone who could potentially use your product (customer segments) and then you create fictional characters for either every segment or for the priority ones.

    In user experience, the purpose of defining personas is to more easily make decisions about product features, interaction, architecture and design of the website. A persona is nothing but a substitute for a target user. You create as realistic and reliable representation of the user segment as possible.

    When you are defining a typical persona for a selected customer segment, you are defining their goals, desires, behavioral patterns, buying triggers, limitations and other elements, such as demographics, biographics, geographic and psychographic attributes, and so on.

    Hubspot Personas
    Personas Example. Source: Hubspot

    The most frequently used parameters for defining personas are especially based on what they want to do, how they behave, what motivates them, how they think and what they want to accomplish.

    To be more exact: for every persona, you should define the elements listed below, if you have enough data to back them up. The list is meant to help you with ideas for defining personas in your personal life later on.

    • Fictional name, photo, representative quotes for a better notion of the potential user
    • Demographic and geographic features
    • Professional background, responsibilities and skills
    • Context or a narrative story
    • Behavioral patterns and key characteristics
    • Values, attitudes and beliefs
    • Environment
    • User goals, desires and expectations
      • Life goals
      • Product experience goals
      • End goal of using the product
    • User tasks, activities and workflow
    • Limitations and accessibility issues
    • Buying triggers
    • Needs and pain points
    • Use cases or specific usage pattern
    • Interaction, information, sensory, emotional aspects
    • Typical day in a life
    • Potential customer journey
    • Empathy map

    The biggest benefit of creating personas is personalizing abstract data and therefore better understanding different customer segments and their goals. You “materialize” your assumptions and much more clearly define who your potential customer could be.

    Creating personas helps the product development team to:

    1. focus on creating value,
    2. user experience experts to prevent common (design) pitfalls, thus avoiding “self-referential design” creation which means subconsciously projecting your own mental models on the product.
    3. With personas, you can more easily (3) evaluate product feature ideas, develop wireframes and site architecture, design the overall look,
    4. and of course copywriters can write a better (4) targeted copy.

    Here is a good presentation about personas:

    Before defining the persona, you should also do user research and gather as much data as possible about the selected segment. Data can be gathered by interviews, surveys, different testing methods (A/B), user observations, field studies, and so on. In reality, personas are only as good as the research behind them. The best research is usually based on ethnographic data – ethnography being the systematic study of people and culture. The purpose of research is to find what people do, what frustrates them and what gives them satisfaction. After conducting adequate research, you should be able to identify their behavioral patterns. One technique to do that is user mapping by behavioral variables.

    For every product, more personas are usually created, specific to every customer segment. But even the same customer segment can be represented with more than one persona, for example if there are gender specific roles and use cases. When you create a persona, you also try to imagine a typical day in the life of that persona and, of course, how and when they would use or buy your product.

    All information about the persona should lead to some decisions. In the next step, you can also make scenarios describing a persona trying to do a specific task in a specific environment or context. This is the so called scenario-based design.

    If you don’t have enough research information to create real personas, you can create provisional personas. They are not that detailed and are based on a few best guesses of their needs and characteristics. That is still better than having no personas.

    When creating your personas you can mark different assumptions as:

    • Validated hypothesis (what you already know, is confirmed)
    • To be tested hypothesis (what still needs to be tested)

    Without doing personas, you have the so called “elastic user”. An elastic user can be anyone and therefore no one. The consequence of an undefined user is usually unfocused design with too many features.

    Bad userinterface
    When having an elastic user and not knowing what a customer wants

    Personas tell stories, spark ideas and ignite action. They are the in-put information for marketing and selling activities (sales funnel, customer segmentation…).

    Using Personas in your personal life

    Let’s build a use case based on those two understandings – (1) the first one, that the clearer picture you have of what you want in life, the easier you will get it, and the second that (2) the user experience experts use personas as a tool for visualizing probable users of the product in order to make the best possible user experience.

    The idea behind using personas in personal life is very simple. Based on knowing yourself and your assumptions about yourself, you can make personas for people and organizations you want to interact with in your personal or professional life. Starting with the most important person in your life, your spouse. After making a persona for your spouse, you can also make a persona for your perfect boss, the company you would like to work for (there should be different name for that, since a company is not a person, but that is okay), friends and business partners.

    Benefits of creating personas
    Benefits of creating personas

    Having this kind of personas will help you attract or select only quality relationships and improve the current relationships you have.

    Well, at this point I know exactly what you’re thinking and I totally agree with you. How can this make sense, especially for your personal relationships, if …?

    Attraction isn’t a choice. You are simply attracted to someone before really knowing them. It’s true nonetheless… Maybe you cannot choose who you fall in love with, but you can definitely choose who you will stay in a relationship with and devote your life to. Choosing the right partner is probably the most important decision of your life. You don’t want to make the choice based only on your animal instinct.

    It goes the same for the company you (will) work for, as the second most important decision of your life. You are going to spend approximately one third of your life at the workplace. You don’t want to spend your life working only for those companies that first replied to your received CV or that give you the biggest paycheck. You want to work for the companies that make you feel good, with which you share the same values and where you can blossom.

    Personas can help you with that. Personas can help you move from lottery to strategy.

    With personas, you are more proactive and growth-oriented

    You have two options for how to interact with life. The first one is the reactive way and the second one is the proactive way. Being reactive means that you simply react to things that happen to you in your environment based on your (subconscious) behavioral patterns. You assume that your personal power is quite limited. You are how you were born to be and you live life that was given to you. That is also called a fixed mindset.

    In personal relationships, that means falling in love because of the “greater power”, usually physical attraction. You try to stay together with someone without thinking of how good you two fit together. But if there is no other fit except physical attraction (emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social attractions, sharing the same values…), relationships often become sour and there are many disappointments for both partners.

    In business life, being reactive means sending your CV to hundreds of companies and hoping that one of them will invite you to an interview. In the second step, you hope that at the interview, someone will recognize you as a fit for the company and hire you. In this kind of thinking, people usually don’t even know much about the company. They are only focused (reacting) on being invited to the interview.

    In both cases of reactive thinking, what usually happens is that business and personal relationships can very quickly become relationsh*ts. You expected more, you had the wrong assumptions, you find out that maybe there is no real fit after a big struggle. And remember:

    The hottest hell on Earth is when you are forced to work or live with people who have totally different values than you, with no common ground to build on.

    The solution is pretty simple. You have to know yourself better, you must know better what you want in life and you must be much more proactive. Steven Covey, author of the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People defines proactivity as the act of taking charge of your life. Proactivity means being responsible for your life and taking actions to master it.

    One of the most fun and quick solutions for being more proactive is making a persona – of your perfect spouse, the company you would like to work for, and so on.

    Creating your own personas will help you:

    • Have better focus for who to meet and spend time with, in business as well as in private life
    • Know immediately which relationships you have to discard
    • Decrease the number of pitfalls in relationships (wrong expectations…)
    • Do a quick benchmark of how big the potential of the relationship is when you meet and interact with someone new
    • Be more honest in relationships and avoid many disappointments, like hoping that people will change
    • Quickly identify what you can learn from the other person and where the relationship needs to grow
    • “Market” yourself better, know what to look for and where
    Know what you want
    Be proactive. Go for what you want. Have a strategy , don’t play a lottery.

    In order to use personas in your personal life, for business and pleasure relationships, you should especially define (the brackets contain an example from business as well as personal life):

    • Basic demographics (age of potential partner, size of the company)
    • Must-have values and traits (intelligence, technological company)
    • Key characteristics (company culture, hobbies)
    • Deal breakers (smoking, industries not to work for)
    • Goals (building a family, becoming number one in the industry)
    • Other

    It may sound extremely dull, so let’s look at all the benefits of going from reactive to proactive behavior when creating personas in both cases.

    If you do a persona for your perfect spouse, you can:

    • Know yourself much better, and be more aware of what you want out of the personal relationship
    • Get new ideas for where and how to meet a potential spouse (hobbies, online dating…)
    • Make a better personal “sales pitch”
    • Evaluate the potential of the relationship really quickly (common goals…)
    • Know what the deal breakers for you are
    • Be honest about the potential, avoid hurting yourself and others (we can just be friends…)
    • Talk about what you like or dislike in other people and what the deal breakers are
    • See what you can work on in your personal relationship to make it even better
    • Identify common hobbies and start doing things together
    • Based on all the facts above, you can more easily “attract” someone that fits you better

    If you do a persona for the perfect company to work for, you can:

    • Know better where you would like to work (size of the company, culture…)
    • Prepare a list of companies you would like to work for
    • Do detailed research for your targeted companies (company goals, board members…)
    • Better customize your CV and personal presentations
    • Think of ideas for selling yourself to the companies, bypassing traditional approaches such as sending a CV and hoping they will invite you for an interview
    • Write down numerous ideas for how you can add value to the company
    • Develop new skills you know the companies you are targeting are looking for
    • Monitor all new information about the targeted companies via Google Alerts and so on

    As mentioned before, you can do the same for other relationships in your life (friends, boss, business partners…).

    The more experience you have in life and the more often you reflect on your past choices the more clear picture you should have what you want in your life. Thus more persona assumptions should be marked as validated, not to be tested.

    There is no perfect match in life

    Of course even if you do make your perfect personas, you will never find a perfect match. If there were a perfect match for you, then there would be no room for growth and learning. And life would be very boring without any challenges. But you can definitely find a close fit to your likings.

    There is no straight lines in nature or life.
    There is no straight lines in nature or life.

    On the other hand, you also shouldn’t fear that there is no close fit for you. There are more than 3 billion people of the opposite sex living in this world, and we have more than 100 million companies. Statistically, it is very probable that you can find your fit, a place or a person where you feel extremely good and you can blossom.

    The only thing holding you back is not knowing what you want, a lack of strategy, and fear. Life is too short and too precious for that kind of nonsense.

    And last but not least: personas should be dynamic. Your preferences and values do change throughout life and therefore your personas can become outdated. The expiration date of your personas usually depends on how fast you grow in life and how fast people in your life grow with you.

    Thus you should regularly update your personas. A good compass for when to do it is when you feel that it’s time for a change in life, when you want something new or you are very frustrated with current relationships. Extremely good times or extremely bad times usually accelerate even more relationship transitions and are real relationships tests.

    The more you want to experience in life, the more you change and grow, the faster your environment is changing, including people you are spending your time with. Thus you will have to update your personas more often. But it doesn’t take long. It’s just a short exercise to clear your mind, define what you want and focus yourself.

    Your ideal self-persona

    There are some relationships in your life that you cannot choose by yourself – especially your kids, your mother and your father. Making a persona for them should be done from a different perspective. You should move from what kind of relationships you want in life to how you can help them and empower them to become what they really want.

    You can do the same for yourself. If you don’t like spreadsheets and the personal Kaizen table (a list of personal improvements you have to make), you can make a persona of your ideal self. In psychology, the self-discrepancy theory talks about how everyone has an ideal self and that is what usually motivates you to change, improve and achieve more. Having a clear picture of your ideal self will definitely help you focus, set the right priorities and grow faster.

    For your Ideal self-persona you can make a mind map, a list, a Pinterest board or a notebook with pictures, quotes and attributes for the direction you wish to grow in. You can expand the context of what kind of person you would like to become, what kind of skills you would like to develop, what you would like to have, in what environment you would wish to create and so on.

    Homework

    The first three steps you can make for creating Personas as a technique to help you know better what you want in life is concretizing and visualizing:

    1. the ideal spouse you would like to have in life and,
    2. the ideal company you would like to work for (or what kind of business would you like to have) and of course,
    3. you should make a Persona for your ideal self (if you don’t already have your Kaizen list).
    Practical examples

    My example

    Here are two examples from my life as guidance to help you with the whole process. I have used the mind-mapping technique in order to create Personas.

    Company Persona Me Example

    Below you can download two files, one for my ideal spouse and one for my ideal company.

    [sociallocker]

    Persona of my ideal spouse

    Persona of my ideal company

    In user experience, personas should often tell stories, which means you can make a life or relationship story instead of a mind map or list. Be creative and use the tools in a way that inspires you the most.

    [/sociallocker]

    Enjoy playing and creating your personas!