zombie life

If you’re going through hell, keep going – here is how

Rare are the people who don’t face some kind of an extreme catastrophe, collapse or agony at least once in their lifetime. Most people go through several of these kinds of crises in their lifetime.

Breakups, illnesses, accidents, violence, bankruptcy, natural disasters, there are so many ways how life can shake you to the core. Countless are the ways you can find yourself in hell.

Hell is a big part of how life on the Earth is designed. If you watch Discovery Channel or Animal Planet for a few hours, the hell part quickly becomes more than obvious (I have a lion playing with a half-dead zebra in mind).

With technology, laws, knowledge, education, morality, social systems and many other mechanisms, we try to build safety nets for as many people as possible to avoid life-threatening or devastating situations.

Nevertheless, finding yourself in hell several times in your lifetime is still a very likely reality. There are absolutely fewer physical threats than there were hundreds of years ago, but there are many other types of crisis you can find yourself in – from emotional to financial ones.

The main question is: what to do when you find yourself in such devastating situations? What can you do when going through hell?

The answer is quite simple. If you’re going through hell, keep going. Just make sure you’re going in the right direction. It’s that simple. And this blog post will teach you exactly how to achieve that. So buckle up and let’s learn how to travel through hell like a boss.

Have a mission bigger than problems

Possess a vision and mission stronger than any of the problems you face

First, if you find yourself in the middle of hell, you need an emotionally strong vision and mission that keeps you going day by day.

I’m not talking about some dreamy vision of how you will enjoy life on a beach doing nothing after the crisis goes away, but a vision that makes you fight for something greater than life. It’s a mission that makes your current hell only a temporary and obsolete situation.

Your mission can be fighting for your family, a positive change you want to make in the world, a legacy that you must leave behind, something God (or whoever) sent you on this planet to accomplish and so on.

It must be a strong positive cause and you must feel it in your heart and bones. Your mission must be something worth living and fighting for, no matter how hard life is.

When you have a clearly defined mission or the so-called powerful why that inspires you beyond any obstacle, you need a visual reminder that will keep your vision and mission alive on a daily basis.

You need something that you look at every morning (and when you encounter an obstacle) and that reminds you why you must persist. A photo of your family, a mission statement, thank you notes from people you helped or even the Bible.

When travelling through hell, you need to carry a life mission reminder with yourself, something that can ignite the fighting spirit you possess in a single second. It’s like an emblem that turns any wussy energies into a “never retreat, never surrender” mentality.

Goal Journey Map Template

Build a superior strategy to get yourself out of hell

Extremely rare are the people who get out of hell by pure luck. I’ve seen it, it can happen. People in financial troubles winning a lottery. People meeting a soulmate a few weeks after a nasty breakup. People having such good genes that they miraculously recover from a severe illness.

But I’ve also seen many people who hoped for a stroke of luck, and yet their prayers weren’t heard. I’ve seen people hoping so strongly for things to get better while drowning in shit and nothing happened. Soon their hope led to them giving up and then transforming into zombies.

I wouldn’t count only on luck when I find myself in hell. It’s much smarter to build a superior strategy that you follow in tough life situations. A bulletproof strategy that leads to the exit. And if luck knocks on your doors while you’re working hard to get yourself out of a shitty life situation, even better.

So, just after clarifying your life mission and your fuel (“why”) to work hard to get yourself out of hell, you need to build a superior strategy for how exactly you will achieve that.

You need to stop and think what would be the best strategy for you to reach the hell’s exit. You need to prepare something like a Goal Journey Map, with a detailed flexible step-by-step plan.

The things that you need to define in your “getting out of hell” strategy are:

Introspection and habit changes – Your firm decision about what you will stop doing (things that got you into hell) and what you will start doing (things that will get you out of hell). In other words, which habits you will change. With self-reflection, you must have a clear picture of what got you into the situation (did you do anything wrong, what have you missed, what you learned etc.) and make sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes.
Process phases – If you want to get yourself out of hell, you must always go through several consequential phases. These can be the emotional stages of overcoming failure (shock, denial, frustration, depression, experiment, decision, integration) or different types of objectives and general milestones you must meet to get yourself out of hell (getting educated, changing habits, finding new supportive people etc.).
Milestones and the process you will follow – This is the most important part of your strategy. Process is the hard work you put in daily to get yourself out of hell. Process are everyday small steps that lead you to great achievements, meeting milestones and finally reaching the exit. More about the process in the next section.
Supporting environment – You cannot succeed alone in life. In the same way, you cannot get out of hell all by yourself. You always need strong support from your environment – trends, people, communities, books etc. Thus, a very important part of the strategy of how to get out of hell is finding and building yourself the right support.
Innovations – Many times, you need to innovate your way out of hell. You need to think about all the creative moves you can play, how can you turn setbacks to your advantage, you need to find a new angle of seeing your shitty situation in a more positive way, and so on. In your strategy, you must brainstorm and define all the innovations you can think of that can help you get out of hell faster or with fewer resources.
Metrics – Metrics are an extremely important part of the strategy and process you follow. They show your progress, they give you hope that you can reach the exit with small daily steps, and they should inspire you to fight even harder. When you see the first few dollars saved, the first few kilograms lost, the first smile on your face, your wounds getting healed and so on, it all gives you additional motivation to continue fighting and digging yourself out of hell. There are many different metrics you can use to follow your progress.
Feedback mechanisms – Together with metrics, you also need a very well set feedback mechanism that gives you all the data from your environment (people, net worth, trends etc.) and your inner processes (feelings, thoughts, body measurements, etc.) to see if you are going in the right direction.
Branches and forks – Every strategy and plan must be as flexible as possible. Branches and forks are potential pivots or changes in your strategy that you can make when your progress stops. You can plan some of the potential pivots from the beginning (your plan B, C or Z) or you can brainstorm pivots when you encounter a new setback. A very important part of any plan is a decision about how you will stay flexible on the road out of hell.

It usually takes 1 – 2 days of calm, relaxed planning to prepare a superior strategy. But when you have the strategy, it gives you additional motivation and zeal to start with all the necessary hard work to get yourself out of burning hell.

Follow the process

As we said, there are two ways you can get yourself out of hell. One is getting lucky and the second is following a carefully orchestrated process based on your superior strategy. The best option is to get lucky while you follow the process.

The good news is that by following the process, you increase the probability of getting struck by luck, based on the saying the harder I work, the luckier I get. So, let’s focus now on the process and what it really means.

There are two categories you have to distinguish – first we have the final event, the goal you want to achieve. That’s getting yourself out of hell, in our case. And the second category is the process, the daily hard work you put in to get to the final event. The process are everyday steps that lead you towards the exit.

The process is what requires discipline, sacrifice, commitment and delayed gratification. The process is your sweat and tears, it’s the life’s test of whether you really want to get yourself out of hell or not.

Because if you really want something badly enough, you’ll always find a way; if not, you’ll find an excuse. And that leads us back to the powerful “why” that you must have.

The powerful why or mission is the fuel to follow the process. Here are a few simplified examples of what following the process means:

Event	Process
	Have a strict limit on	Do every SINGLE day
From obesity to a healthy body Phase 1: Exercise Phase 2: Diet Phase 3: Lifestyle changes	Overeating Eating after 5pm Sugar and simple carbs Junk food Alcohol Cigarettes	Don’t eat for 16 hours Exercise Eat green veggies Eat 3 healthy fatty foods Eat 3 pieces of fruit Drink water Get enough sleep
From bankruptcy to the first$1,000 Phase 1: Costs under control Phase 2: Increase earnings Phase 3: Consolidate debt Phase 4: Save first $1,000	Expenses – Use budgeting Emotional spending	Cut all expenses Find ways to save more money Develop new competences Contribute ideas in your company Network Ask for a raise

Event

Process

Have a strict limit on

Do every SINGLE day

From obesity to a healthy body

Phase 1: Exercise
Phase 2: Diet
Phase 3: Lifestyle changes

Overeating
Eating after 5pm
Sugar and simple carbs
Junk food
Alcohol
Cigarettes

Don’t eat for 16 hours
Exercise
Eat green veggies
Eat 3 healthy fatty foods
Eat 3 pieces of fruit
Drink water
Get enough sleep

From bankruptcy to the first$1,000

Phase 1: Costs under control
Phase 2: Increase earnings
Phase 3: Consolidate debt
Phase 4: Save first $1,000

Expenses – Use budgeting
Emotional spending

Cut all expenses
Find ways to save more money
Develop new competences
Contribute ideas in your company
Network
Ask for a raise

You can’t get yourself out of hell if you aren’t willing to follow a carefully orchestrated process, which usually means a big lifestyle change. Changing a lifestyle is hard, that’s why your vision and mission must be so great and powerful that you have no problem at all redesigning your life and habits.

Injured? Consult with your doctor or physiotherapist and prepare a plan for how you will get to your optimal performance. Then do all the exercises every day, take supplements, stretch, follow the plan, measure your progress and make sure you are surrounded with motivational people when you want to give up.

Nasty breakup? Reconnect with people, analyze what went wrong, read 10 books about intimate relationship management, vent on a piece of paper or in an online forum, and when you are ready, start dating again. Every breakup is an opportunity to connect with new people, you just need to see the steps to getting there with time.

Whatever your “hell” situation is, there were many people in a similar situation before. Find them, consult with them, read the books they’ve written. Get all the knowledge necessary to build the right strategy and then just follow the process. Follow the process, that must be one of your mantras.

When things get tough, just repeat to yourself: follow the process, stand up and fight.

Expectations vs reality — Source: Wait By Why, Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

Have realistic expectations

People usually overestimate what they can achieve in one month and underestimate what they can achieve in one or five years. Getting yourself out of hell is rarely a task that can be achieved in a week or one month. Usually it takes several months, if not years.

Don’t have unrealistic expectations for how fast you will reach the exit. Unrealistic expectations will kill your spirit and motivation. You must keep the long-term view. Getting out of hell is often a marathon or a long series of many sprints, not only one quick sprint. Small problems that can be solved quickly are not the same as being in hell.

It took me 3 years to get out of debt after I had to liquidate a VC fund during the 2008 financial crisis. Three whole years to get myself out of a really bad financial situation.
It’s the 4th year since I’ve started working on healing my shoulder/ulnar nerve injury. Things are better every year, but they are yet far from okay. It took me thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of stretching and physiotherapy to even be able to exercise.
I’m working hard for the 5^th year to lose weight and get rid of fat once and for all, since I was obese as a kid. There’s a lot of hard work, dedication and setbacks to face. After five years of hard work, I’m still not where I want to be. But I keep going.

Hell is one big place. The devil has many faces. Problems tend to multiply. Going through hell is a very tough and challenging adventure measured in months, if not years. It’s like doing the Ironman, Spartan Race and Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc over and over again.

But remember, soft times make soft people and tough times make strong people. So, when you get out of hell, you will be the real Iron Man.

Don't repeat the same mistakes

Make sure you are going in the right direction

If you’re going through hell, keep going. That’s true. But you also need to check in regular intervals if you are following the right direction. You don’t want to go in circles, it’s too hot in hell for such nonsense.

To make sure you go in the right direction, you need two things – (1) completely new habits and (2) a set of metrics that measure your progress.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the formal definition of insanity. It’s also the formula for doing circles in hell (if your bad habits got you there).

So, the first thing you have to do is make sure you don’t repeat your past mistakes – all the behavioral patterns that got you into hell. If you got yourself into hell based on several small stupid decisions or one big stupid decision or even both, you must stop making stupid decisions.

Nothing helps if you persist at things that don’t work.

Maybe wrong decisions got you into hell, maybe it was only bad luck. No matter the reason, you need a set of metrics that clearly show your progress and how you are taking baby steps towards the exit. Only things that are measured can be managed.

There are many different life metrics you can measure, depending on what kind of hell you are facing. There are also several things you want to achieve by having a clearly defined set of metrics:

Knowing exactly where you are and having realistic expectations about how fast you can progress
Making sure you’re going in the right direction
Avoiding any fake feeling of progress
Gaining additional motivation when you see that hard work pays off
Having a compass on what to focus on and how to set priorities

Healthy habits, set of carefully set metrics and consistently following the process is what will get you out of hell.

Never retreat, never surrender, that is the law

When you have a carefully defined strategy, process and metrics to follow, the hard work begins. At this point, your mantra should be never retreat, never surrender. Every day, you just make sure that you perform all the actions that will get you one step closer to the hell’s exit.

When going through hell, there are always tough days, there are always days when you want to give up; especially when you have to take one step back, in order to take two steps forward later. You see other people who are luckier, you have to face unexpected setbacks and challenges, but you must never give up. Never ever give up.

Every time you encounter an unexpected setback, every time you lose motivation, you have to take a deep breath, adjust your strategy, stand up and keep fighting. Day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, until you reach the exit point.

Sometimes you’ll slip back to your old habits and sometimes you will feel exhausted. Sometimes you’ll be fed up with all the shit you must overcome and sometimes you’ll cry about how unfair life is.

But you can always take a day or two off, forgive yourself for not being perfect, look at your past progress, and then stand up and go back to fighting. Every day is a new beginning and thus an opportunity to take one step closer to the exit doors.

Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Dig yourself out of hell only with creative, positive and assertive energies

Negative feelings can be a great motivator to find the way out of hell as quickly as possible. Fear makes you run extremely fast. Anger can make you fight with all your might. But here is one big catch – negative feelings always backfire.

Buddha said that holding on to anger (or any other negative emotion) is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else. In the end, you are the one who gets burned.

Of course, you are caught in extremely negative feelings when you find yourself in hell. There is almost nothing else but a pile of shit and negative feelings. But you must be very careful about what you do with all the negativity.

If you suppress it, you will get depressed, bitter and fatigued. If you express it in an unhealthy way (losing temper, trampling other people, doing extreme sports etc.), you will only hurt yourself and others.

Thus an important part of getting yourself out of hell is learning how to deal with all the negative emotions. If you don’t learn to deal with negative emotions, you can quickly out yourself in even worse situation.

Thus you must employ different psychological techniques, such as taking walks in nature, practicing proper breathing, writing a self-reflective journal, going to group or even individual therapies, or whatever else it takes to neutralize negative feelings. You have to build your future on positive emotions and actions, not on negative ones.

It’s easy to smile when you are in heaven. It’s hard to smile when you are in hell. But that’s exactly what builds character. Imagine Sisyphus happy.

Focus on the positives and manage your mind properly

Much like you must properly manage your emotions, so you must properly manage your mind in tough life situations. When you are in hell, cognitive distortions tend to pile up.

It’s simply too hot to think straight. You often only see the negative things and consequently you grant your mind the permission to take you to the darkest corners in hell. You don’t want that to happen, you want to march towards the exit, not into even darker corners.

That means you have to even more consistently manage your mind. From doing emotional accounting and cognitive reframing exercises to focusing on all the positive things and things you are grateful for as well as employing optimal thinking and the abundance mindset.

These are all extremely useful mind exercises when you find yourself in hell. They are your core survival tools that help you not go insane and completely lose your mind when the atmosphere gets too hot.

Some things need time to heal

In general, there are two types of hell. One type of hell are the situations that only get worse if you do nothing (bankruptcy, obesity etc.). The second type of hell are the situations where only time is the real healer (injuries, breakups, loss of dear ones etc.).

This second type of hell carries a special life lesson, which is the following: Many things are way out of your control and you must learn to accept them.

In many life situations and especially in relationships, there is nothing you can do to improve the shitty situation. In such cases your strategy shouldn’t be to fight, but to surrender.

You can only reframe how you see the situation and/or actively grieve until all the negative feelings pass by. In some cases, only time can get you out of hell. It’s something all human beings must accept.

When you are neck deep in shit, don’t let your head down.

If you’re going through hell, keep going

If you’re going through hell, keep going – The guide summary

Hope is not a strategy. Giving up won’t get you anywhere. Drowning in self-pity won’t solve your problems. There are no miracles on the horizon. You might have to let some things go, you might have to say “f*ck it” to release some tension, but at the same time you have to stand up and fight (or surrender is some cases).

Now you have the exact steps for what to do when you find yourself in the middle of hell:

Have a vision and mission that is stronger than any obstacle on your way out of hell.
Build a superior strategy of how you will get to the exit point.
Every day, follow the process and have realistic expectations about how long it will take to reach the exit.
Define a set of metrics that will clearly show your progress, and be proud of every step forward.
Smile and enjoy all the warmth hell provides – learn to transform negative energies into a healthy assertive and fighting spirit. Think of the peaceful warrior mentality.
Don’t let your mind take you to even darker places in hell. Manage your mind properly.
Make sure you never retreat and never surrender, keep on fighting every day. And remember: some situations only get worse if you do nothing, while others demand from you to actively grieve and let go.

Good luck on your journey!

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

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

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

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

The idea behind the concept of good enough is that it’s completely acceptable to be reasonably consistent with your goals and not following them 100 % of time to complete perfection; because the latter is simply impossible and only makes you unhappy and miserable.
- You don’t need a perfect job, you need a good enough job
- You don’t need a perfect spouse, you need a good enough spouse
- You don’t need to be filthy rich, you need a good enough financial situation
- You don’t have to eat perfectly healthy, your diet must only be good enough
- You don’t have to be a perfect parent, you have to be a good enough parent
- You don’t need a perfect life, you need to fight for a good enough life
Perfectionist’s greed

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

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

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

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

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

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

The characteristics of perfectionists and maximizers when it comes to choice-making are the following. According to Barry Swartz and his book The Paradox of Choice, they:
- Have a big fear of missing out on things
- Always compare their decisions with those of other people
- Spend too much time and energy even on small decisions
- Are generally unhappy with their outcomes and constantly want something new
Rather than a maximizer, be a satisfier. Absolutely aim high and have big goals, but also learn to be satisfied with good enough. Learn to recognize and be aware of your greed, and curb it with the new better mindset and by developing a greater capacity for self-love. Learn the difference between happiness and achievements. Become aware when things are good enough for you.

Here are the characteristics of satisfiers, they:
- Have fear of missing out on enjoying high quality of life, in other words being happy
- Accept the good enough concept
- Don’t obsess too much about their options
- Can easily move on after making a decision
- Are generally happy with their choices and outcomes
Don’t constantly beat yourself up with perfect. It’s good enough, now move on.

Slipping from time to time will make you more disciplined

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aim high, but define good enough very clearly

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

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

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

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

Homework

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

Emotional accounting combined with the good enough concept

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

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

So regularly talking back to your perfectionist inner critic is the key. You do that with emotional accounting. To perform emotional accounting, all you need a simple table (you can download the template below). The table for doing the emotional accounting has a few columns. Here they are:
- Toxic thought going through your head (automatic thought, self-criticism and perfectionism)
- Type of negative feeling it’s causing and the intensity of it (emotions)
- Performing a rational response to the toxic thought (self-defense with using the good enough concept)
- New intensity of the negative feeling (outcome)
You simply go from column to column. First you learn to identify toxic negative thoughts and cognitive distortions (I’m not good enough, I don’t earn enough, the Joneses have a better car etc.). Then you try to identify what kind of negative feelings the negative thoughts are causing you (anger, sadness, self-hate etc.).

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

Here’s an example:
- I make so many grammar mistakes. I guess I am a poor writer. (pure perfectionism)
- Negative feelings: Anger, frustration (intensity: 8 out of 10)
- Rational response: Even if I still make quite a lot of grammar mistakes, I have great ideas for articles, my style is improving and so is my grammar, and I get a lot of positive feedback on my articles. I already am a good enough writer and I’m becoming better and better. I am proud of my progress.
- Negative feelings after the rational response: Anger, frustration (2 out of 10), feeling proud
As the first step, I suggest you use the template you can download below. You will soon become such an expert in identifying negative thoughts and performing emotional accounting that you will easily do the exercise in your head, like I do it now all the time.

Template

Here you can download the template:

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

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

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

Attention span – the ultimate advantage today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attention span

Producers have an extremely long attention span

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

Consumers and short attention span people have no problem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passive and active attention span

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Training focus

How to build your attention span

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

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

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

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

1. Find one productive thing you are obsessed with

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Unplug yourself and simplify your life

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build up your attention span

3. Deliberately build up your cognitive endurance and attention span

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homework

Commit to building the longest attention span in the world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder that people most often feel stuck in their:
- Own body – illness, being overweight
- Mind – bad thinking patterns
- Key relationships – boss, coworkers, spouse, family, social groups
- In a job or career
- In money-related things, or even in negative market trends
- In constant unhappiness
- In a lack of creativity or intellectual stimulation or a lack of hope or having no direction in life and similar.
The most important question is: what should you do when you are feeling stuck?

You are not really stuck, there is something else

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homework

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

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

When you are feeling stuck, solution is in craziness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer three simple questions and do one small thing

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

What are you willing to stop doing?

What are you willing to start doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you are deep in shit, stop digging.

Understanding global and local maximum when feeling stuck

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

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

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

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

Then there is the local maximum. The local maximum means maximizing your quality of life and success levels in different areas with your current life settings. You search for a position and behavior for yourself that gives you the most out of your current life situation.
- Global maximum: Completely changing your life settings – you make one or several new big decisions (like changing a job, getting a divorce, saving all the money possible etc.)
- Local maximum: Maximizing your quality of life in current life settings – you start making small better decisions (like letting go, getting a new hobby, changing your behavior towards a person, slowly paying off your loan according to a plan etc.).
Now, why are those two concepts important? Many times, it’s obvious what the best thing to do is when people are feeling stuck. You don’t like your job, change it. Your partner is abusive, leave them.

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

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

If you know that going after a new maximum is just too much for you (changing a job, getting a divorce etc.), do something small that will maximize your current situation. There is always something you can do to be in a better position.
- You can change yourself
- You can negotiate
- You can communicate differently
- You can start treating yourself better
- You can set strict boundaries
- You can strategically protect yourself
It’s a no-brainer that you are feeling stuck if you see your only option as leaving or giving up on something that is dear to you, but at the same time you know you can’t do that, it’s just too hard. Well, admit that to yourself and do something to maximize your quality of life in current life settings.

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

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

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

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

Homework

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

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

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

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

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

Instead start loving yourself, build up your self-confidence, become assertive and start playing again, like a kid. A kid who plays, can’t be stuck. If you are really so stuck that you have zero ideas on what to do, here’s a few of them:
1. Challenge your fears, just a little bit
2. Break your routine with something new
3. Change the way you think and look at things
4. Start communicating with a new behavior
5. Do something extremely fun or take a trip
6. Start exercising
7. Volunteer for charity
8. Get a pet
9. Get yourself a small garden
10. Write a novel about your being stuck situation
11. Draw a picture about your being stuck situation
12. Make new friends
13. Analyze yourself and get to know yourself better
14. Figure out if you are maybe a chronic procrastinator
15. Try doing the opposite just to see what happens
16. List all the possibilities you have, and keep an abundance mindset while doing it
17. Take an online course or read a book about your life problem
18. Do one thing that you really enjoyed as a child
19. Write down 50 ideas on how you can help your company to perform better
20. Find a mentor
21. Increase your margins and disinvest yourself
22. Do all the mind exercises to think better
Now go out and play, do something new. You only have one life. And remember, you aren’t stuck, you’re just spending your time, energy and other resources wrong. So shape a better life strategy. You only live once.
Valley of Death – where your dreams go to die
Every single startup has to go through the Valley of Death very early after being born. The same goes for personal goals and dreams. Unfortunately, around 80 % or even more businesses die in the Valley of Death; and the same goes for people’s goals and dreams. Getting trapped or lost in the Valley of Death means that startups and people die (inside) or at least turn into zombies, what is nothing but a living hell.

Before entering the Valley of Death, your imagination, visions, optimism, and even a little bit of naivety play a very important role – you need all of them to undertake any kind of adventure and start following your big goals and dreams. Without a dream of a greater life for yourself, you never take the first step.

You need to be a little bit naïve in the beginning, blinded by all the strong motivation and enthusiasm. That’s what leads you into action. But soon after taking a few serious steps, you enter the Valley of Death. There is where visions, imagination and optimism face a harsh and cold reality and often die.

In business and personal lives, people go after their dreams, but soon after figuring out how hard it is, they give up and turn into zombies. Most often only because they give up too soon.

The Valley of Death is a place where it gets tested who has the character to succeed and who doesn’t, it gets tested who really deserves it and who doesn’t. The Valley of Death is a place where you must show that you want it badly enough, that you will never give up, that you will learn, improve, adjust, play smarter and smarter, and somehow find a way through the Valley reaching the safe side.

It’s true that crossing the Valley of Death is dangerous and tough, but it can also be a daring and exciting adventure, especially if you love challenges. And as you probably know the saying, life can only be either a daring adventure or nothing.

I often found myself in the Valley of Death. When I started my own businesses. When I started to take care of my health and wealth and several other times in the past when I was naïve about how easy it is to succeed at something.

I still am in the Valley of Death with this blog, and I am drawing the map (validated learning, in other words) for getting out of it as quickly as possible. I am even deeper in the Valley of Death in trying to learn how to code. I’m just somewhere in between my imagination of how I could also be a hacker and the reality that learning to code is not that easy at all.

The point is that many times in my past, I walked through the Valley of Death proudly as a winner; and several times, I brutally died and learned hard lessons of how your dreams can be stumped by life with no mercy if you don’t play your cards right. So I want to share a few key lessons for how to successfully walk in and through the Valley of Death and what to do when you realize that you may not make it.

Nobody is born to die in the Valley of Death

Nobody is born to become a zombie. Nobody is born to die in the Valley of Death. Nobody is born to live a miserable life. In the beginning, we all have big dreams for what we want to do with our lives – who to become and what to achieve.

But it’s easy to dream when you are just a kid and don’t yet have any experience with the harsh reality. Then after becoming an adult, two things can happen:

Your life is either a daring adventure …

You learn how to walk through the Valley of Death and you persevere at following your dreams no matter what. You face your fears, you fight, you make smart decisions and put in the effort to get what you want. Sometime you make it, sometimes you get knocked down, but you never give up.

You follow your life vision, without any option to retreat or surrender. When you get knocked down, you know that there must be another way to get to your dream. You know that you can always innovate your way out and you can always make a step towards a better life. You know that beginnings are hard, but with time, the hard road becomes easy.

No matter how hard life is, you decide to live it as a real adventurer. As you have probably guessed, that is a small minority of folks.

… or nothing

Unfortunately, the majority of people are on the other side of the spectrum. The other side of spectrum is not somewhere between a good life and a life that sucks, but on a scale where the only axis is measuring how much life sucks. It can be from being completely miserable and depressed to only somehow unsatisfied (with your job, spouse or life in general) but anyway, no matter where you are on the axis, life still sucks.

Life can only be a daring adventure or nothing, there is no middle path.

You probably know the scenario of how quickly life can become nothing. You give up after the first few failed attempts of going after your dreams and turn into a zombie. A zombie going everywhere life kicks you, hoping for the best. Life rarely kicks you where you really want to be. Such behavior is also known as reactive behavior.

The majority of people give up when they set their foot in the Valley of Death for the first time. Because it seems so hard and scary. Nevertheless, it’s a valley full of CRAP – criticism, rejections, assholes, pressure and other traps.

So people rather turn back and go into the safe zone, often not aware that the comfort zone is turning them into a zombie. That’s sadly where most people are, usually right after graduating and getting their first job.

Comfort zone Valley of Death Success

Zombie mode C.R.A.P. God mode

Even though people turn into zombies, they usually keep dreaming. They keep dreaming of a good life, only without doing anything. They play the lottery, watch TV, subscribe to multi-level marketing from time to time, argue in bars, and so on.

They dream a lot, they talk a lot, but they stay at zero. Because only zero can invite vivid imagination, only zero can keep you in the world of naivety, where you can dream and talk a lot but do nothing, where you can flirt but never go after the first kiss.

Zero is where you can dream, but a single step into the Valley of Death is where your dreaming stops, it’s where your imaginary world meets reality. So you have to decide between staying at zero and keeping your dreams or facing harsh reality.

Zero invites imagination

The easiest thing to do in life is to stay at zero and only dream and talk. Everyone can do dreaming and talking, and most people stay at this stage. You build a kind of psychological defensive system to protect your self-image. You dream like when you were a kid, a kid with zero experience and a vivid imagination.

Practical examples
- If I decided to take good care of my health, I could be on a magazine cover.
- If I decided to take good care of my wealth, I could be a successful investor.
- Someday I will make enough money to buy myself a small house in nature.
- One day I will meet the love of my life.
- I am smart, I can easily learn how to program.
- This is such a good business idea; I could build a successful company around it.
It’s so easy to dream about how fit you could be if you haven’t stepped in the gym a single time. It’s easy to dream about how successful an investor you could be, if you haven’t made a single investment in your life and lost some money. It’s easy to dream about a house you want if you haven’t checked prices in real-estate listings at all or gone to the bank asking even for general loan terms.

It’s easy to dream about the love of your life if you haven’t gone on a single date in years. It’s easy to dream about being a hacker if you haven’t written a single line of code. It’s easy to dream about being a successful entrepreneur if you haven’t tried to sell a single thing ever in your life. Zero always brings vivid imagination.

When you are at zero, you are frankly at the same level as that 7-year-old kid with no real life experiences.

If you don’t have experience with something, you simply can’t know it and understand it. You can talk, you can dream, you can imagine, you can defend your point of view and your assumptions, you can protect your self-image by creating an imaginary world where you are successful as shit, but in reality you know nothing. You are like Jon Snow.

After zero comes beginner’s optimism

You are at zero, dreaming about doing something with your life, and then finally at some point you decide to go after the goals you always dreamt about. Usually there is a trigger – inspiration or desperation.

Mid-life crisis, relationship breakups, losing a job, neighbor buying a new fancy car, best friend starting a successful business, getting a business idea, falling in love and similar events are frequent triggers that kick you straight out of the comfort zone and into the Valley.

And that’s good. Deciding to really make something out of your life and not only dream about it is awesome. But there is usually a big problem. Initial vivid imagination starts turning into beginner’s optimism. You add to your dreams sentences like: It can’t be that hard. If s/he could do it, I can do it too.

Don’t get me wrong, you have to be motivated, enthusiastic and optimistic for every goal you go after. The problem is when beginner’s optimism helps you lie to yourself and continue living in a bubble of imagination now called a fake feeling of progress.

Practical examples
- You go on a diet without really changing your lifestyle and you can’t wait for it to end. You measure your progress only by your weight and no other metrics.
- You invite a salesman of financial products to your home, to present all investment opportunities and advise you on the best ones that will make you the best ROI.
- You create accounts on online dating sites, you chat with folks on Tinder, Snapchat or wherever, but you never really go on a date, you never escalate or make a move.
- You learn the basic syntax of a programming language and then switch to a new one and a new one, never really diving deep into a language and mastering it.
- You write a business plan with a financial plan for how you’re going to earn millions in a few years. You never really try to find customers for your products.
In other words, you do the easy stuff that leads you nowhere. On top of that, you live in a lie of how successful and awesome you are becoming.

Obviously living in a lie is not a superior strategy for walking through the Valley of Death as a winner. That approach is closer to entering the Valley with your eyes blindfolded hoping that somehow you will manage to avoid all the traps. Few are that lucky.

It’s time to face the harsh reality and stare into Death’s eyes

The more you lie to yourself, the harder it is when you have to face the harsh reality. Sooner or later, a trap or a barbed wire bursts your bubble of naivety and you have to deal with real facts.

You have to face the reality that to achieve anything great in life, you have to invest really a lot. You can’t be only interested; you have to be committed, dedicated, persistent, resilient, focused and much more. This is where most people give up, run back into the comfort zone and forever turn into zombies.

Practical examples
- Losing weight stops after squeezing some water out of your system and then the yo-yo effect happens when you finish with the diet after several weeks. You go to a personal trainer that writes you a dieting and exercising program and when you see that you have to completely overturn your lifestyle if you want to permanently lose weight, you rather go back to your old habits.
- The “once in a lifetime opportunity” investment you were sold by a financial advisor starts losing money. You open a book about investing to get more knowledge why that is and get completely confused by all types of investments, markets and financial products complexity, and simply give up.
- You go on a few dates, get rejected, and when you finally don’t get rejected you figure out that the person is far from your ideal partner, but anyway you somehow settle, because you are too afraid of one more rejection.
- You figure out that a basic (really basic) programming challenge takes a lot of mental effort, hours of intellectual work, googling and fighting with the problem. So you again give up instead.
- Now that you built your shiny product based on the business plan, you finally try to sell it and nobody wants to buy it. You realize on your own skin that “build and they will come” doesn’t work.
All that hurts, but here is the most important secret of life. Every single master was once a beginner. And every beginner in whichever field was in such a naïve and painful situation. That’s normal and that’s natural. It’s part of the process of becoming great.

All great people, all high achievers and all billionaires find themselves in such situations in life – realizing they had no clue what it really takes to be successful. In the startup world, there is a saying that every successful startup goes through a big crisis or two and has to look death straight in the eyes before finding the path to real success.

This tough situation is very nicely described in the saying that in the dark, stars shine the brightest. So the only question is, what do you do next, when you find yourself in a situation full of dark and horror?

In the dark, stars shine the brightest.

You have only two choices, either you face the harsh reality and really learn how to walk through the Valley of Death or you go back to the zero, back into your imaginary world, where you can dream as big as you want, but in reality you aren’t really living life.

At this point, you have to decide to either become a real adventurer or a zombie. Will you take the blue pill or the red pill? That isn’t really a choice, you absolutely have to go for the adventurer option. You only have one life and it’s too precious to live it as a zombie.

Decide to learn how to walk through the Valley of Death

After seeing the gap between your imaginary world and reality, and after realizing that hope and beginner’s optimism are a good beginning but not a superior strategy, it’s time to really learn how to walk through the Valley of Death.

Now, everyone has their own Valley of Death, depending on their goals, environment, life situation and many other factors, but general rules for walking through the scary valley are the same.

It’s not easy, but you have to think long-term

The first fact is that if it were easy, everybody would do it. If it were easy to get fit, rich, fluent in a (programming) language, build healthy relationships etc. everybody would do it. Because it’s not easy, only a minority is willing to put in the effort and commitment. If you read this article all the way to this point, I’m sure that you are part of this minority!

If it were easy everybody would do it.

So for every big goal you want to achieve, know that it will not be easy, but hard. Probably extremely hard. Usually we are talking about years of hard work and dedication.

In the frame of 5 to 10 years, you can usually see big results – in your body structure, bank account figures, business size and profitability or your competences at a mastery level. But although it’s hard, it can be done. Many people have done it and so can you. Just keep the long-term view.

Always carefully manage your expectations

Next to admitting to yourself that it won’t be easy, you have to know that the starting point you have matters a lot. That’s where life isn’t fair, but you have to accept the rules of life and play by them.

Your genes, your IQ, how rich your family is, how well you were raised, where you live, how early you started to work on your goals and so on, it all greatly influences the potential you have and how fast you can achieve it.

The shittier your starting point is and the more ambitious your goals are, the more you will have to work hard and smart and the longer it will take you to get to your goals. That means you have to pick challenges suitable for you and then intensify them gradually.

Compete with yourself, not with people who were given a much better starting point. In the long term, you can catch up to them in most things, but you have to start with the first step that isn’t too big for you. The good news is that along the way, you will learn so much more and you will be richer for the experience of knowing how to get yourself out of a shitty starting point to achieve a certain goal. That kind of knowledge is gold.

Having unrealistic expectations is pretty much the same as going back to zero and starting to daydream.

So manage your expectations wisely. Having unrealistic expectations is pretty much the same as going back to zero and starting to daydream. So instead manage your expectations properly and first build strong foundations, then build your skyscraper of success floor by floor knowing that you have a very strong basis. Even if it takes 10, 20 or 30 years longer than it took somebody who had a much better starting point than you.

Be utterly obsessed with your vision and mission and get educated

Since you have to be 110 % committed to achieve anything big in life, you should carefully choose which dreams to follow. Every action you take has to be based on a really strong emotional vision and mission that will drive you through every single challenge and obstacle on the way.

The best way to measure your true obsession is by how much you read about a specific topic and with how many people you talked about it. You see, only reading is never enough, but getting educated is mandatory to walk successfully through the Valley of Death. And people who are obsessed with something usually read everything that exists on the topic they want to achieve.

The smartest thing to do is to have a vision list and go after a specific dream when the time is ripe. Especially when you have the support from the market trends and key relationships and are competent enough. You have to enter the Valley of Death ready somehow, you have to play your game smart.

Follow the process

When you decide to go after your vision, when you get educated and the time is ripe, there is only one thing you can trust – the process. Every success is nothing but following a carefully orchestrated process. A process means repeating boring things day by day. Following the process means doing something every day that gets you closer to your goals.

If you want to achieve the final event, which is always to get yourself out of the Valley of Death and really succeed, you have to follow and trust the process. You have to put in the daily effort, constantly learn and adjust, you have to continuously improve yourself, find new ways when you fail and never give up.

Always measure your progress, metrics are your map

To know if you are really progressing or not, you need a set of metrics. Actionable metrics are the ones that help you draw a map of the Valley of Death so you can walk through it more easily. Actionable metrics are the ones that help you adjust your process so that you are really going in the right direction.

It’s never easy to measure your progress. Not only does it take additional effort and time, even more so because metrics are the ones that force you out of your imaginary world and show you the harsh reality. But they are also the cure. Actionable metrics are also the bright stars that shine when reality is dark and full of horror.

Metrics are the ones that lead you to success at the end.

So always have metrics you measure and follow, no matter how harsh the reality they show you, especially in the beginning (calculating your net worth, your body fat percentage or whatever). When you see your numbers going in the right direction after you put some effort and commitment into your goals, you will get much more motivated.

Find your fit and stay flexible

When you enter the Valley of Death, assuming you follow the right set of metrics, you soon realize that there is a big gap between your assumptions (imaginary world) and the real world. You’re always wrong before you’re right. When you find yourself in such a gap, you have to accept the harsh reality and start living in the real world.

You have to leave your naïve dream world behind and build new, more accurate dreams based on real facts, not your false ego assumptions.

It’s nice to protect your self-image with illusions, but it doesn’t bring results.

That means you always have to put all of your assumptions to the test. That was one of the strongest characteristic traits of Steve Jobs. Even as a successful leader, he had no problem admitting that he was wrong. Based on new data and facts, he could easily change his opinion.

Many assumptions can be simply validated only by getting educated enough, acquiring new knowledge and talking to people who did what you want to do, but some of the assumptions you have to put to the real life test and learn what works for you and what doesn’t.

Your final goal is to find the fit through the search mode, and then build your success on it. It’s your unique way out of the Valley of Death.

There are many ways out of the Valley of Death, find yours

There are two important lessons in validating assumptions. The first one is that you absolutely have to get educated before you enter the Valley of Death, but you will learn the most out in the real world by experimenting, trying and failing. That is a very painful part of the process, but failure is the best teacher ever. So you must learn how to fail properly and get the most out of every failure.

When you feel it in your bones that you have to do things differently, that’s when you’ve really learned something new.

And the second important lesson is that you always have to stay flexible about how you will get to the final destination. There is no one right path through the Valley of Death. You have to stay flexible, always innovate and keep your mind open for which way to take that will get you closer to your goals. You will have to do many pivots in the Valley of Death to avoid fatal traps.

Practical examples

Let’s go to our first example. You decided to lose weight and a personal trainer wrote you a program and a diet. Instead of giving up, you decide to follow through with the program. You start reading fitness blogs and books. You get madly educated. Besides following the program, you start experimenting on your own with different sports and diets.

You build a set of metrics you follow every week (calorie counter, body fat percentage, etc.), you get yourself a training partner and join a few sports groups. Every month, you improve your diet a little bit. You face setbacks but you trust the process and do something for your body every day, even if things don’t go as planned. You are 110 % committed to achieve the goal you want. You can find more examples in the AgileLeanLife Manifesto.

Please don’t become a zombie, you matter to me

One of the hardest things in life is to decide when to persist and when to give up. Sometimes after entering the Valley of Death, you may figure out that something is not as important to you as you might have thought. Sometimes you figure out that it’s not worth the effort and that it makes more sense to follow some other dreams. And that’s completely okay.

There is always a gap between what you think will make you happy and what really makes you happy. You can’t know the difference until you try things.

It’s completely okay to let go of some goals. It’s completely okay to give up from time to time. It’s completely okay to fail and move on. For example, I definitely know I’m not giving up with this blog, no matter what, but learning to code is still completely open.

What’s not okay is turning into a zombie. It’s not okay to completely give up on all of your dreams. It’s not okay to stop being proactive, action-oriented and stop growing and continuously improving yourself. It’s not okay to stop fighting for the dream life you want and deserve.

It’s not hard to see the difference between a zombie and a person who decided to do a pivot or goes through a collapse but is still determined to fight for their dream life. You can see it in a person’s spirit, you can see it in their eyes, but most of all you can see it in their actions. You can always see if somebody is a fighter or a zombie with a broken spirit from miles away. Because no matter how hard the knockout was, they stand up again and fight.

Never ever let your spirit get broken.

The Valley of Death absolutely exists. It’s a very harsh and cold place, where more than 80 % of people’s dreams die and where passionate individuals get turned into zombies. Don’t be one of them, please. You only have one life. It’s better to live one day as a lion than decades as a sheep or a zombie.

But to live as a lion, you have to do lion shit from time to time. Fortunately for humans nowadays that only means facing your fears, being assertive and goal-oriented, building a superior life strategy, going into action and following the process. You don’t have to kill and eat a zebra.

Comfort zone	Valley of Death	Success
Zombie mode	C.R.A.P.	God mode

When you need to reprogram yourself and fix brain bugs

Besides developing my blog, I’m also teaching myself how to code. Learning how to code is not easy and it takes a lot of time and hard work, but I think it’s worth it. I’m not doing it to be a programmer someday, but more as an intellectual challenge and to better understand what’s happening with my blog behind the scenes (technology aspect) and, most importantly, I think programming will be the best way to talk to our “servants” in the future – robots.

Writing a piece of code that does exactly what you wanted it to do is an awesome feeling. While entering a few lines of code in the code editor a few days ago, an interesting thought came to me. I’ve actually been programming for decades, just not machines to do all different useful kinds of stuff. I’ve been programming or, to be more exact, reprogramming myself: to be more productive, more efficient, wiser, happier and to ultimately make smarter decisions.

When your code is buggy

Your body is the hardware and your brain is the piece of hardware that runs the code (software). You’ve inherited and acquired your code with genes, primary and secondary socialization, through main authoritative relationships in your youth, different early life experiences, trends in your environment, culture, friends, and so on.

Most of the code (your character) that defines how you operate in your adult life was written in the first 7 years of your life.

In a healthy environment, with many healthy relationships and positive behavioral patterns, you take over lines of biological code that are positive, productive, assertive. Well, the code you inherit always has some errors, there is no perfect environment. And it’s supposed to be like that. Because errors in the code bring the desire and motivation for progress and growth. Friction drives you.

Nevertheless, there is a limit when too many errors in the environment lead to a very buggy code. If you are raised in a very toxic environment, your code can be seriously malfunctioning and damaged. That kind of a malfunctioning code leads to developing personality traits that are harmful to you and even others. It leads to things like severe negative thinking, shaping a poor life strategy, making bad life decisions, unhappiness, self-sabotage, poor relationships, and so on.

That’s what we call a negative spiral, the double knockdown of life. First you are put in a toxic environment, where you suffer for sure, and then you suffer even more in your adult life because you make bad decisions that are a result of having been raised in a toxic environment. That’s the bad news in the whole story.

But there is also some good news, of course. The good news is that you have the power to reprogram yourself, to fix the buggy code and thus change the course of your life to a more positive one.

Searching for bugs

It doesn’t take a lot of analytical effort to figure out the quality of the code that runs in your brain. Here are a few methods that can help you with such a task:

The parents test
Pinpointing toxic behavior
Short-term future predictions
The happiness index
The life satisfaction test
Gap to ideal self

The parents test

Like father like son If you aren’t doing anything about your personal growth and personal development, you are slowly turning into your parents, especially when it comes to the things you hate about them the most; they only appear in a slightly different way. One of your parents may be financially greedy and you are intellectual greedy, for example.

The older you are, the more you realize that you’re turning into your old folks. If you don’t do anything about it.

The test is very simple. Look at your parents, where they are, what they’ve achieved in their life, the quality of their code, and ask yourself if that’s what you want. You inherited many lines of code from your parents, so it’s logical that your destiny doesn’t lie far away from theirs. The more different destiny you want, the more work you’ll have to put into reprogramming yourself.

Pinpointing toxic behavior

A very good exercise for getting to know yourself better is to perform a personal SWOT analysis. You list all your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. One big segment of your weaknesses are the so-called toxic behavioral patterns. These are the behaviors that lead you to cause harm to yourself, other people and the environment in general.

Many times, we see ourselves in a much better light than we actually are, so while doing such an exercise It may help to ask other people for an honest opinion or to perform a few personality tests. Or give yourself a goal to find at least 10 toxic behavioral patterns and then rank them. If you’re out of ideas, you can help yourself with things like:

Signs of being an emotional midget
List of primary personality traits (positive, neutral, negative)
List of coping strategies
List of cognitive distortions
Top 100 traits and behaviors of personality-disordered individuals
List of 170+ bad habits

When you pinpoint a toxic behavioral pattern, your job is to of course rewrite it with a healthier one.

Short-term future predictions

Short-term past is a great predictor of short-term future. Take different life metrics like body fat percentage, net worth, the number of books you read etc. and analyze them for the past 3 – 9 months. Analyze the trends and where you’re headed. Are your metrics improving or not, are you advancing, declining or standing still?

If your metrics are slowly getting worse, it means that you’re running a buggy code. You’re making bad decisions and executing bad habits. The rational conclusion is that in the future, your life situation will only get worse and that it’s time that you start working on a better code. Otherwise things will only get much harder for you. Instead make sure your life metrics are improving every month, just a little bit.

The happiness index

You’re here on this planet to grow, create, enjoy life and connect with other people. If you do all four, you open the potential to real happiness.

Constantly improving yourself gives you faith in your abilities and competences, creating value gives you a sense of being valuable to the society and having an important life mission on this planet, and enjoying life is the cherry on top that makes life really worth living . And of course you can’t be happy and successful alone, you need to connect with other people, you need quality relationships in your life to really flourish.

The happier you are in general, the better core code you are running.

All that leads to real happiness in life. Under one big condition. If you were programmed to be happy. If you were not programmed to be happy, there is no relationship, achievement or material possession that could bring happiness into your life. Even if you follow the “grow, create, enjoy, connect” formula, you can be very unhappy if you’re hindered by too many cognitive distortions, high emotional lability, suboptimal thinking or any other type of weak thinking.

So if you want to be truly happy, you must first deal with your core code (kernel) and then build the right kind of actions and behavior on top of that. That leads to a simple conclusion. The happier you are in general, the better core code you are running.

There is a simple exercise that will show how good your kernel code is. All you need to do then is to figure out how happy you really are on your average day, and you will know the quality of your code. The best way to do that is to introduce the happiness index into your life.

Every day, you mark how happy you are on a scale from 1 to 10 on a chart. After doing that for a few weeks, you can quickly see your general level of happiness and the quality of the code you’re running in your brains. Everything from 8 – 10 means your kernel is running the right code, everything below 4 means that it’s supper buggy, turning you into a zombie. Even if you’re somewhere between 5 and 7, that’s not good enough for a quality and happy life.

The life satisfaction test

The happiness index shows how happy and satisfied you are with your life in general. You can do a very similar exercise, only that you dive a little bit deeper and estimate how good your code is for specific life areas. You expand the table with a few new columns and build your life-satisfaction chart.

First you draw a scale from 1 to 10 horizontally, like with the happiness index, while vertically you list the key areas of life or the areas you’ve chosen to assess. You assess every area or category of life from 1 to 10. Below, you can find an example of that kind of a life-assessment chart.

	1	2	3	8	9	10
Health					X
Relationships					X
Money				X
Career			X
Emotions			X
Competences				X
Fun				X
Spirituality					X
Technology skills			X

Made-up case as an example

Then there is the second step. In the second step, you take another look at all the life areas you assessed with marks 4, 5, 6 or 7. These are all the life areas where you’re averagely satisfied. But average satisfaction doesn’t tell us if you’re running good code in your brains or not. The truth is that life areas either work or they don’t, you’re either satisfied or you aren’t, there is no middle ground. You’re either super healthy or not, you either have enough of money or you lack it.

That is also known as the possibility to have only two different kinds of problems in life. You either rock or you suck in different areas of life. Therefore, in the second step you assess life areas again, but now only by using the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 8, 9, 10. You must take more time to really think about the areas you’re satisfied with and the ones you aren’t.

Then you can make a simplified conclusion to further analyze your life and its quality. For the life areas rated from 1 – 3, you’re probably running very buggy software. And for the life areas rated 8 – 10, your software is working fine or even super great.

That kind of an analysis can help you a lot with determining which parts of your brain code you have to work on the most. You often see that we only have parts and pieces of code that are broken and need an update. For example, you are doing well financially, but aren’t taking care of your health. It’s obvious where you need an update.

Gap to ideal self

The last test I call the ideal self gap. You have your actual self, who you are at this moment, and you have an ideal self, representing who you would like to become. Not many people are aware that they have an ideal self, so the best way to become aware of it in a very detailed way is to make a persona of your ideal self. Once you make that, you can easily compare your actual self to your ideal self.

In the next step, you can analyze how far your ideal self is from your actual self. How fast are you approaching your ideal self? In the past year, how many personality characteristic, behavioral patterns and competences have you changed or improved to come closer to your ideal self? The greater the gap, the more recoding you need to do. The faster you want to approach your ideal self, the faster you have to write new lines of code.

Reprogram yourself

A few simple tests can very quickly tell you how much reprogramming you have to do and the quality of the code you’re running in your brain. The good news is that you can reprogram almost everything about yourself. I mean really everything. It’s impressive how you’re nothing more than a lot of lines of biological code you can rewrite. It’s often not very easy to do that, but it can be done.

Practical examples

I used to hate exercise, now I simply love it. There is no perfect day without doing something for my body. I am currently reprogramming myself for a better posture. It’s hard work, but I can already see the new code giving me better results.

My favorite dish used to be the Wiener Schnitzel (fried veal) with French fries. Back then I was extremely fat. Now my favorite food is broccoli. I used to hate olives and flicked them off a pizza. Now I love olives. I just forced myself a little bit to eat them for a few weeks, and then they became tasty. I now eat pizza maybe twice a year. Yes, you can even reprogram your taste.

I used to have huge problems with my temper. I reprogrammed myself to be calmer and wiser. I used to hate reading and books, even though I was an extraordinary pupil in primary school. Now I love reading, I never go to sleep without reading at least one page in a book.

In primary school, my favorite subject was math. Then I unfortunately reprogrammed myself somewhere on the way to hate math (I suppressed some negative painful experiences). Now I want to reprogram myself back to loving math again.

You can basically reprogram yourself for anything. From how your body operates to what foods you like, the habits you follow, how you think and behave, what are your emotional reactions, how happy you are in life, what kind of relationships you forge and how healthy you are, how good you are at acquiring and managing money, and everything else you can think off.

There are some limits, of course, you can’t reprogram yourself to be taller, but there are so many things you can do. All you need is a little bit of courage, motivation and awareness that you only live once, so you want to make the most out of it.

How to reprogram yourself?

The last question is, of course, how to reprogram yourself. There are many ways to reprogram yourself and new ways are constantly being invented.

From cognitive conditioning to behavioral conditioning, changing your environment and building relationships with people who have the personality traits you want, getting a mentor, strategically developing healthier habits, modeling, going to therapy, meditation, reading, cognitive reframing, refocusing your mind on gratefulness and positives, visualization, the search mode, and so on.

If you go to the personal development track, you can find a lot of information and resources on how to reprogram yourself. Free book on how to Upgrade your mindset can also help you a lot.

Much like there is no one best programming language and one best code environment, there is also no one ultimate technique for reprograming yourself. You must test, experiment and find the ones that work best for you.

So the first way you must reprogram yourself is to keep an open mind, always try new things to see if they work well for you, and to always stay curios together with nurturing the will to constantly improve yourself.

You already are a programmer

You don’t have to learn how to code to be a programmer. And you don’t have to learn Photoshop to be a designer and user experience expert. You see, you are already a designer of your own life.

You are already running code in your brain that shapes your life strategy and consequently your destiny. Your life code and your life design dictate whether your life will be a daring adventure or nothing.

BTW, code is what runs behind a program, and the user experience and design are how you see and use the program. The same way as your brain runs the code with which you make decisions and that gives you a certain life experience and design (style, functionality etc.).

Homework

Never ever take the code in your brains as it is, especially if it’s not leading you in a positive direction. Instead become a programmer of your life and reprogram yourself to a better version.

Reprogram yourself to become the best version of yourself. Start by updating your brain code now and write the lines that will lead you to the best life possible, the good life.

Don’t get too frustrated in the beginning. Beginnings are the hardest. And don’t get demotivated if you fail from time to time. The new code can’t always work as you hoped it will. You usually have to rewrite your code several times (the search mode) to find the one that works best for you (your fit). For example, you may have to try several different diets to find the one that works best for you.

It’s hard, beginnings are the hardest, but it’s definitely worth it. And it can be a lot of fun. Okay, now I have to go back to improving my knowledge on coding. You know, to efficiently communicate with robots soon. Good luck with reprogramming yourself.

zombie life

If you’re going through hell, keep going – here is how

Possess a vision and mission stronger than any of the problems you face

Build a superior strategy to get yourself out of hell

Follow the process

Have realistic expectations

Make sure you are going in the right direction

Never retreat, never surrender, that is the law

Dig yourself out of hell only with creative, positive and assertive energies

Focus on the positives and manage your mind properly

Some things need time to heal

If you’re going through hell, keep going – The guide summary

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

Perfectionist’s greed

Slipping from time to time will make you more disciplined

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

Aim high, but define good enough very clearly

Emotional accounting combined with the good enough concept

Attention span – the ultimate advantage today

Producers have an extremely long attention span

Passive and active attention span

How to build your attention span

1. Find one productive thing you are obsessed with

2. Unplug yourself and simplify your life

3. Deliberately build up your cognitive endurance and attention span

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

Commit to building the longest attention span in the world

The only solution on the table if you are feeling stuck

You are not really stuck, there is something else

When you are feeling stuck, solution is in craziness

Answer three simple questions and do one small thing

Understanding global and local maximum when feeling stuck

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

Valley of Death – where your dreams go to die

Nobody is born to die in the Valley of Death

Your life is either a daring adventure …

… or nothing

Zero invites imagination

After zero comes beginner’s optimism

It’s time to face the harsh reality and stare into Death’s eyes

Decide to learn how to walk through the Valley of Death

It’s not easy, but you have to think long-term

Always carefully manage your expectations

Be utterly obsessed with your vision and mission and get educated

Follow the process

Always measure your progress, metrics are your map

Find your fit and stay flexible

There are many ways out of the Valley of Death, find yours

Please don’t become a zombie, you matter to me

When you need to reprogram yourself and fix brain bugs

When your code is buggy

Searching for bugs

The parents test

Pinpointing toxic behavior

Short-term future predictions

The happiness index

The life satisfaction test

Gap to ideal self

Reprogram yourself

How to reprogram yourself?

You already are a programmer