Patrik Edblad's Blog, page 21

I’m Taking May Off From Blogging

This is a quick note to let you know that I’ll be taking May off from writing here at Selfication.

Between coaching, running my business, writing my Bachelor’s thesis, and some other projects and obligations, there won’t be much time left so I’m taking my own advice and avoiding the planning fallacy.

I’ll be back in June. In the meantime, feel free to check out:

My ‘now’ page to learn more about what I’m working on right now.


The archives to read previous articles (17 published so far this year).


My coaching page to work with me 1-on-1. And hey, use the promo code ‘PATRIKWEEK’ to get the first week for free.

Oh, and if you have any questions, comments, feedback, or just want to say hi, drop me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

As always, thanks for reading!

Forget About Motivation. Focus on This Instead.

A lot of clients come to me asking for advice on how to get more motivated.

And this is hardly surprising. No matter what you’re trying to get done, it certainly gets easier when you have that nice feeling of motivation fueling your efforts.

But please note that’s exactly what motivation is. It’s a FEELING. And the thing about feelings is that they fluctuate.

No one is motivated all the time. So, when you rely on this feeling to take action, you’re essentially leaving your most desired outcomes up to chance. Not a good plan.

So, what should you do instead?

Just Show Up & Get to Work

Painter Chuck Close claims he’s never had a ‘painter’s block’ in his whole life. In an interview for Inside the Painter’s Studio (1), Close said:

Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work.

And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will – through work – bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art [idea].’

And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you [did] today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.

The “just show up and get to work” motto is a great creed to live by in all areas of life. No matter what you want to get good at, you won’t get there by ‘getting motivated’, but by showing up and doing the work every single day.

I know this from my own experience because when I was relying on motivation and inspiration to write, I’d publish less than an article a month. But ever since I committed to writing a certain amount of words every day no matter what, I consistently publish at least one article per week while at the same time making good progress on several other writing projects.

Very rarely do I feel deeply motivated when I sit down to write. But that doesn’t matter because I’ve trained myself to sit down and do it every day anyway.

And no matter what you’re trying to achieve, you can do it too. All you need to do is put a system in place that makes it second nature for you to show up and do the work.

How to Create Your Own System

There are plenty of strategies you can implement into your system. Here are the most powerful ones I’ve come across:

Create a trigger to remind you to show up every day. For example, implementation intentions or scheduling.


Start ridiculously easy. Make your initial efforts so small you can’t say no. Do not increase your daily effort until you’re consistently showing up every day.


Track your progress. Measure everything you do and compete with yourself to always get better.


Reward yourself for making progress. Celebrate even the smallest wins to reinforce your good efforts.


Create immediate consequences for procrastinating. Raise the stakes by using commitment devices.


Shape your environment. Make your desired behaviors easy to do and competing behaviors harder to do.


Surround yourself with the right people. We adopt the goals, emotions and attitudes of the people we spend the most time with. Choose your social circles wisely.


Get accountability. Start a mastermind group, join a team or club, hire a coach, or team up with an accountability partner.


Plan for failure. Conduct a weekly review to track your efforts and readjust as needed. Adopt the view that setbacks are valuable data rather than failures.

All of these strategies are very powerful in general, but you’re going to have to experiment to find out which ones are most effective for you.

Change Your Identity, Change Your Life

I hope I’ve convinced you that relying on motivation is a bad strategy and that creating a system that supports you is a much more reliable way to reach your goals.

The reason this works is because a system helps you show up every day. And when you do that, soon you’ll have some momentum going. Once you’ve got momentum going, you’ll begin to create lasting change. And when you’ve successfully created lasting change, you’ll start to reshape your perception of yourself.

Now, you’re no longer the kind of person who needs motivation to make things happen. Instead, you’re the kind of person who, no matter what, just shows up and gets to work every day. And once you’re in that place, you can make anything happen.

Sources

Chuck Close on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Problem-Solving vs. Problem-Creating

The post Forget About Motivation. Focus on This Instead. appeared first on Selfication.

Announcing the Winners of Patrik’s B-Day Giveaway 2016!

Drumroll, please!

It’s time to announce the lucky winners of my 2016 B-day Giveaway! After doing a random draw of all the names enrolled, I’d like to say…

Congratulations

Clara, Robin, Aslam, Cyndi, Carlos, Marina, Gábor, Kavi, Mona & Judy!

You guys have each won a free lifetime membership to The Science Of Habits: 14 Days To Change That Sticks!

E-mails with promo codes are on their way. Thanks for participating and reading! I hope you’ll enjoy your prize!

The 3 Essential Elements of Successful Goal Setting: The What, The Why & The How

Have you ever felt like you’re adrift in the world? Like you work hard but still don’t seem to get anywhere?

If so, one likely reason is that you haven’t taken enough time to consider what you want from your life, and turned these wishes into goals.

When done properly goal setting can be a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future and turning this vision into reality.

Goal setting helps you choose where you want to go in life. And when you know exactly what you want, you can concentrate your efforts.

Instead of drifting around, you can start to say no to distractions and take massive action on what is truly important to you.

Let’s explore how to create effective goals. Specifically, let’s look at the three essential elements of successful goals: The ‘What’, The ‘Why’, and The ‘How’.

Essential Element #1: The ‘What’

Most people have an idea of what they want to achieve, but more often than not, it’s painfully vague. ‘I want to lose weight’ is not a goal — it’s a wish.

To qualify as a goal, a statement needs to meet certain criterias. It needs to answer EXACTLY what it is you’re going to do.

And the best way to uncover this is to use an acronym there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with; S.M.A.R.T goals.

When you’ve taken your goal through the S.M.A.R.T. process, you can be sure you have the first essential element of your goal down. You’ll know exactly WHAT it is you’re going to do.

Specific — State exactly what it is you want to achieve. If your goal is to lose weight, write down exactly how much you’re aiming to lose. Clarity breeds achievement.

Measurable — If you do not measure your progress, you’ll have no idea of how you’re doing and no way of getting the small wins necessary to build motivation and momentum. Know exactly what your goal is on a yearly, monthly, weekly basis. Whenever possible, create a minimum daily quota to aim for.

Attainable — Your goal should be challenging enough to get you excited but not so hard that it causes you to consistently miss your mark. It’s usually a good idea to start small and increase the effort as you go.

Relevant — This is a very important criteria that a lot of people neglect. Before you set out to try to achieve your goal, ask yourself if it’s truly important to you or if you should spend your precious time elsewhere.

Timebound — Lastly, give your goal a specific deadline for its completion.

By considering these criterias, you’ll turn your vague intention into an actionable target.

For example, ‘I want to lose weight’ becomes ‘By December 31st, 2016, I’ll lose 22 lbs’.

Now you have a goal.

Essential Element #2: The ‘Why’

Once you’ve decided exactly WHAT it is you’re going to do, the next step is to get very clear on WHY you’re doing it.

This is the element of your goal that will provide you with the burning motivation you need to execute on it consistently, especially when things are not going your way.

There are two ways you can uncover your Why: by considering the pleasure you’ll gain from achieving your goal and the pain you’ll have to deal with if you don’t.

To build the necessary drive to constantly take action on your goals, ask yourself:

Pleasure questions:

If you change this now, how will your life be?
What will you gain?
What will it mean for the people you love?
What will it give you?

Pain questions:

If you don’t change this now, what will this cost you?
What has it cost you in the past?
What will you miss out on?
What does it cost the people you love?

Based on your answers to these questions list out at least three massively compelling reasons for why accomplishing this goal is an absolute must for you.

Also, list out three specific awesome things that will happen if you do, as well as the three worst things that will happen if you stay on the path you’re currently on.

And don’t be afraid to use big words. Be honest with yourself about what achieving this goal will give you, as well as the pain it will cause you if you don’t.

The pain and pleasure you associate with your goal is your fuel for achieving it.

The ‘How’

And finally, you need to have a concrete plan of action for reaching your goal. The ‘how’ will depend a lot on the type of goal you’re going after. Here are a couple of strategies that are always worth considering:

Find the necessary resources and tools. Ask yourself where your knowledge gaps are for your goal as well as what tools and equipment would be helpful for creating and sustaining it. Write down a list of stuff you need.
Design your environment. Alter your surroundings so that you’re taking action becomes easier and procrastinating becomes harder.
Get accountability. Involve others in what you’re doing. Get a coach, mentor, trainer, tutor, accountability partner or someone else to help speed up your progress and hold you accountable.
Create short-term rewards and consequences. Set up a token economy to celebrate your small wins and build momentum. Use commitment devices to ramp up the immediate consequences for procrastinating.
Schedule it. If your goal is truly important to you, it deserves a spot on your daily schedule. Carve out the time you need to make it happen.
Set up daily reminders of your why’s. If you don’t keep your goals front of mind, you’re very likely to get caught up in everyday life and quickly forget about them. Keep your most compelling ‘Why’s’ somewhere you’ll revisit them daily. Put them on your computer desktop, your screensaver, inside the cover of your journal, or whatever else works for reinforcing your goals daily.
Create a weekly review. Use this time to keep track of your goal, celebrate your progress and adjust your approach as needed.

Enough drifting. What’s your what, why and how?

The post The 3 Essential Elements of Successful Goal Setting: The What, The Why & The How appeared first on Selfication.

This is the Best Way to Stick to Your Goals

Humans have always used more or less clever of ways of binding themselves to do what they want or need to do.

One classic example is Odysseus ordering his men to plug their ears with beeswax and tie his body to the mast of the ship so he could listen to the siren’s song without being lured into jumping overboard (1).

Another one is Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés bold move to destroy his ships to remove the possibility of retreat and thereby increasing his chances of defeating the Mayans (2).

Now, I realize there’s a pretty good chance you won’t get seduced by sirens or fighting Mayans anytime soon, but these kinds of self-binding strategies can be very effective for day to day obstacles as well.

Overcoming ‘Akrasia’

Most people have a good idea of what behaviors are good for us. We know we should exercise to be strong and healthy, read to expand our minds and meditate to reduce stress and be more mindful. We have a good idea of how much work or studies we need to put in every day to get a satisfying result.

For the most part, it’s not a lack of information but a lack of follow-through that’s the problem.

And this struggle to execute on what you genuinely want to do is by no means a new obstacle. Philosophers all the way back to Plato and Aristotle even created their own fancy term for this failure of the will.

They called it ‘akrasia’ (3) and it encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.

This tendency of doing something else than we want is a little strange, especially to economists, who often presume that whatever we do by definition is what we want to do. This theory is called ‘revealed preference’ (4) and fails to account for a stubborn quirk of the human mind: what we want depends on when we’re doing the wanting.

We’re all susceptible to what’s known as ‘time inconsistency’ (5) and this tendency is nicely illustrated in a study on grocery-buying habits (6): When buying groceries online for delivery tomorrow people buy a lot more ice cream and a lot fewer vegetables compared to when they’re ordering delivery for next week.

So, our preferences are inconsistent and at times even contradictory over time. Our ability to weigh costs and benefits (in this case tastiness vs. healthiness) is heavily affected when some of those costs are immediate, and some are not.

In general, it seems we want to do what we know is good for us. Just not right now.

Enter ‘Commitment Devices’

And here’s where the strategy of commitment devices is so helpful. A commitment device is essentially something you put in place in the present to ‘lock you in’ to a certain course of action in the future.

If you know you’re going to be seduced by Sirens later; you have yourself tied to the mast. If you know you and your soldiers may be tempted to retreat from battle; you destroy the ships so you’ll have to charge forward.

Other, less extreme, examples include (7, 8):

Signing up for long-term gym memberships instead of single day passes.
Cutting up your credit cards to avoid mindless spending.
Leaving work at the office so you can’t keep doing it at home.
Buying junk food or candy in small packages, rather than in bulk.
Getting rid of all alcohol in your house to prevent drinking.
Using temptation bundling and restrict certain fun stuff only to occasions when you’re engaging in a healthy/productive behavior.
Buying small plates to avoid overeating.
Teaming up with a workout partner for accountability.
Having a portion of your paycheck automatically transferred to your savings account.
Canceling your TV service to protect your time.

These days, there are also plenty of clever services you can use to commit yourself to your goals:

Coach.me — Get a coach for the particular goal or habit you’re working on.
StickK — Create commitment contracts and, if you want, put some money on the line. If you don’t meet your goal, they will send your money to a charity or organization you don’t like!
Beeminder — Combines self-tracking and commitment contracts. Your challenge here is to keep all your data point on a Yellow Brick Road, or they take your money.
Pact App — Allows you to create weekly pacts to exercise more or eat healthier and decide what you’ll pay other Pact members if you fail. If you stay on track, you’ll earn cash from other who didn’t.

There are also plenty of great apps you can use to remove energy-draining clutter from your digital environment and help you commit to more productive behaviors (9):

Quicksilver is a launcher utility app for Mac OS X that gives you the ability to perform common, everyday tasks rapidly and without thought. After installing this app, you’ll never have to have your computer desktop cluttered with icons again.
OneTab is an extension for Google Chrome and Firefox that converts all of your open browser tabs into a list. A very handy way to remove clutter and free up more computer memory.
Adblock Plus is an extension that blocks annoying ads from your web browser.
Bartender lets you organize your menu bar apps in Mac.
Readability turns any web page into a clean view for reading on your computer, smartphone, or tablet.
News Feed Eradicator for Facebook is a Chrome extension that replaces your Facebook news feed with an inspiring quote.
Freedom is an app for Mac that allows you to lock yourself away from the Internet so you can become more productive.
SelfControl is an app for Mac that lets you block your access to sites and mail servers for a set amount of time.
StayFocusd is a Chrome extension that allows you to restrict the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.
Forest is a clever way to stay off your phone when you should be working. The app lets you plant a digital tree whenever you want to focus. The tree will then grow during the next 30 minutes, but if you leave the app, the tree will die. Stay committed and you’ll plant a forest.

Let’s Commit!

As you can see, there are PLENTY of ways you can use self-binding to your advantage. When it comes to commitment devices, the only limit is your imagination. Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas for how you could kick akrasia in the butt and get moving toward your goals.

For me, my accountability partner Nik, my clients, and my 2000+ newsletter subscribers make for powerful commitment devices to always improve my coaching and writing skills. For you, it might be something else entirely.

Regardless of what you’re trying to achieve the key is to find a way to consistently show up and do the work. So, before you close this article I highly recommend you decide on 1-3 commitment devices to start experimenting with immediately.

Put a system in place that makes success easier and failure harder. The way to beat akrasia is to commit!

PS.

If you haven’t yet joined my B-Day Giveaway 2016, now is the time! Click here to claim your spot and a chance to win one of ten lifetime memberships to my popular plan The Science Of Habits: 14 Days To Change That Sticks (Value $9,99).

Sources

Bestiary of Behavioral Economics/Commitment Devices
Hernán Cortés
Akrasia
Revealed preference
Dynamic inconsistency
I’ll have the ice cream soon and the vegetables later: A study of online grocery purchases and order lead time
Commitment Devices Using Initiatives to Change Behavior
What are some examples of commitment devices?
List from The Science of Willpower: Proven Strategies to Beat Procrastination & Get Big Things Done

Thanks to…

The Beeminder Blog, for sparking the idea to this article.
Joel Lindmark, for the Odysseus image.

The post This is the Best Way to Stick to Your Goals appeared first on Selfication.

Commitment Devices: The Strategy of Binding Yourself to Future Actions

Humans have always used more or less clever of ways of binding themselves to do what they want or need to do.

One classic example is Odysseus ordering his men to plug their ears with beeswax and tie his body to the mast of the ship so he could listen to the siren’s song without being lured into jumping overboard (1).

Another one is Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés bold move to destroy his ships to remove the possibility of retreat and thereby increasing his chances of defeating the Mayans (2).

Now, I realize there’s a pretty good chance you won’t get seduced by sirens or fighting Mayans anytime soon, but these kinds of self-binding strategies can be very effective for day to day obstacles as well.

Overcoming ‘Akrasia’

Most people have a good idea of what behaviors are good for us. We know we should exercise to be strong and healthy, read to expand our minds and meditate to reduce stress and be more mindful. We have a good idea of how much work or studies we need to put in every day to get a satisfying result.

For the most part, it’s not a lack of information but a lack of follow-through that’s the problem.

And this struggle to execute on what you genuinely want to do is by no means a new obstacle. Philosophers all the way back to Plato and Aristotle even created their own fancy term for this failure of the will.

They called it ‘akrasia’ (3) and it encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.

This tendency of doing something else than we want is a little strange, especially to economists, who often presume that whatever we do by definition is what we want to do. This theory is called ‘revealed preference’ (4) and fails to account for a stubborn quirk of the human mind: what we want depends on when we’re doing the wanting.

We’re all susceptible to what’s known as ‘time inconsistency’ (5) and this tendency is nicely illustrated in a study on grocery-buying habits (6): When buying groceries online for delivery tomorrow people buy a lot more ice cream and a lot fewer vegetables compared to when they’re ordering delivery for next week.

So, our preferences are inconsistent and at times even contradictory over time. Our ability to weigh costs and benefits (in this case tastiness vs. healthiness) is heavily affected when some of those costs are immediate, and some are not.

In general, it seems we want to do what we know is good for us. Just not right now.

Enter ‘Commitment Devices’

And here’s where the strategy of commitment devices is so helpful. A commitment device is essentially something you put in place in the present to ‘lock you in’ to a certain course of action in the future.

If you know you’re going to be seduced by Sirens later; you have yourself tied to the mast. If you know you and your soldiers may be tempted to retreat from battle; you destroy the ships so you’ll have to charge forward.

Other, less extreme, examples include (7, 8):

Signing up for long-term gym memberships instead of single day passes.
Cutting up your credit cards to avoid mindless spending.
Leaving work at the office so you can’t keep doing it at home.
Buying junk food or candy in small packages, rather than in bulk.
Getting rid of all alcohol in your house to prevent drinking.
Using temptation bundling and restrict certain fun stuff only to occasions when you’re engaging in a healthy/productive behavior.
Buying small plates to avoid overeating.
Teaming up with a workout partner for accountability.
Having a portion of your paycheck automatically transferred to your savings account.
Canceling your TV service to protect your time.

These days, there are also plenty of clever services you can use to commit yourself to your goals:

Coach.me — Get a coach for the particular goal or habit you’re working on.
StickK — Create commitment contracts and, if you want, put some money on the line. If you don’t meet your goal, they will send your money to a charity or organization you don’t like!
Beeminder — Combines self-tracking and commitment contracts. Your challenge here is to keep all your data point on a Yellow Brick Road, or they take your money.
Pact App — Allows you to create weekly pacts to exercise more or eat healthier and decide what you’ll pay other Pact members if you fail. If you stay on track, you’ll earn cash from other who didn’t.

There are also plenty of great apps you can use to remove energy-draining clutter from your digital environment and help you commit to more productive behaviors (9):

Quicksilver is a launcher utility app for Mac OS X that gives you the ability to perform common, everyday tasks rapidly and without thought. After installing this app, you’ll never have to have your computer desktop cluttered with icons again.
OneTab is an extension for Google Chrome and Firefox that converts all of your open browser tabs into a list. A very handy way to remove clutter and free up more computer memory.
Adblock Plus is an extension that blocks annoying ads from your web browser.
Bartender lets you organize your menu bar apps in Mac.
Readability turns any web page into a clean view for reading on your computer, smartphone, or tablet.
News Feed Eradicator for Facebook is a Chrome extension that replaces your Facebook news feed with an inspiring quote.
Freedom is an app for Mac that allows you to lock yourself away from the Internet so you can become more productive.
SelfControl is an app for Mac that lets you block your access to sites and mail servers for a set amount of time.
StayFocusd is a Chrome extension that allows you to restrict the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites.
Forest is a clever way to stay off your phone when you should be working. The app lets you plant a digital tree whenever you want to focus. The tree will then grow during the next 30 minutes, but if you leave the app, the tree will die. Stay committed and you’ll plant a forest.

Let’s Commit!

As you can see, there are PLENTY of ways you can use self-binding to your advantage. When it comes to commitment devices, the only limit is your imagination. Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas for how you could kick akrasia in the butt and get moving toward your goals.

For me, my accountability partner Nik, my clients, and my 2000+ newsletter subscribers make for powerful commitment devices to always improve my coaching and writing skills. For you, it might be something else entirely.

Regardless of what you’re trying to achieve the key is to find a way to consistently show up and do the work. So, before you close this article I highly recommend you decide on 1-3 commitment devices to start experimenting with immediately.

Put a system in place that makes success easier and failure harder. The way to beat akrasia is to commit!

PS.

If you haven’t yet joined my B-Day Giveaway 2016, now is the time! Click here to claim your spot and a chance to win one of ten lifetime memberships to my popular plan The Science Of Habits: 14 Days To Change That Sticks (Value $9,99).

Sources

Bestiary of Behavioral Economics/Commitment Devices
Hernán Cortés
Akrasia
Revealed preference
Dynamic inconsistency
I’ll have the ice cream soon and the vegetables later: A study of online grocery purchases and order lead time
Commitment Devices Using Initiatives to Change Behavior
What are some examples of commitment devices?
List from The Science of Willpower: Proven Strategies to Beat Procrastination & Get Big Things Done

Thanks to…

The Beeminder Blog, for sparking the idea to this article.
Joel Lindmark, for the Odysseus image.

The post Commitment Devices: The Strategy of Binding Yourself to Future Actions appeared first on Selfication.

Patrik’s B-Day Giveaway 2016: Ten Lifetime Memberships to The Science Of Habits (Value $9,99)!

Today is my birthday! Yay! To celebrate, I’m giving away ten lifetime memberships to my popular coach.me plan The Science Of Habits: 14 Days To Change That Sticks to my fabulous readers!

As the name suggests, this simple plan will walk you step-by-step through a series of scientifically proven techniques based on the latest and best research on behaviour change, applied to the habit of your choice. And since the membership is for life, you can go back and put these powerful strategies to use every time you want to create change in your life.

This plan will show you…

How to create effective triggers, routines and rewards to make your habit stick.
How to make time for your habit in your busy schedule.
How to stop procrastinating and being lazy.
How to get over self-doubt and lack of confidence.
And much, much more.

Sound good? Want in? Awesome!

All you have to do to enter the giveaway is:

1: Join my newsletter.

Enter your email address below and click “Sign Up”:

fjsfjs(If you can’t see a sign-up form, let me know and I’ll add you manually. If you’re already subscribed to the newsletter, you can move on to the next step.)

2. Send me a quick message here.

Type in ‘B-day giveaway‘ in the subject box and let me know what habit you’d like to create and why this is important to you. This is how I make sure you’re serious about putting the plan to use. The last day for entering is April 10th.

3. That’s it!

The winners will be announced here on the Selfication blog on April 14th and receive a promo code to sign up for the plan for free.

Good luck! I’m off to have some more cake.

The post Patrik’s B-Day Giveaway 2016: Ten Lifetime Memberships to The Science Of Habits (Value $9,99)! appeared first on Selfication.

How to Deal With Problems

How do you typically react when life hands you a new problem to deal with? What do you do when nothing seems to be going your way? Do you accept that problems are a natural part of life or do you resist them and complain about the unfairness of it all? Perhaps you’re like the man who, in an effort to rid himself of all his problems, sought the advice of the Buddha:

(…) After the man had told the Buddha one of his problems and asked for help, the Buddha replied: ‘I cannot help you get rid of that problem.’

The man was surprised that the Buddha could not help him in this regard, but he told the Buddha about another problem; he thought to himself that the Buddha should at least be able to help him with that problem. But the Buddha told him ‘I cannot help you with that problem either.’

The man started to get impatient. He said: ‘How can it be that you are the perfectly Enlightened Buddha when you can’t even help people get rid of their problems?’ The Buddha answered: ‘You will always have 83 problems in your life. Sometimes a problem will go, but then another problem will come. I cannot help you with that.’

The baffled man asked the Buddha: ‘But, what can you help me with, then?’ The Buddha replied: ‘I can help you get rid of your 84th problem.’ The man asked: ‘But what is my 84th problem?’ The Buddha replied: ‘That you want to get rid of your 83 problems.’ (1)

This anecdote reminds of a scene in American History X where the main character played by Edward Norton is clearly agitated while folding sheets in the prison laundry room. Eventually, the prisoner working next to him gets fed up and says:

“Every day I watch you go through these sheets like you gonna get to the end of them. No matter how fast you get through them they gonna keep bringing them in and bringing them in. Throwing them around like that ain’t gonna do a damn thing but give you a heart attack!” (2)

Isn’t that what most of us do every day? We attack our problems aggressively thinking that the faster we get it done, the sooner we’ll get rid of all of them. And when the next one shows up, we get surprised and frustrated and attack that one in the same way. And so, this pattern repeats itself again and again.

Does this sound familiar to you? Do you suffer from the 84th problem and make yourself miserable over the fact that you have problems? If so, the good news is that THIS problem can be solved. All you have to do is learn to accept life, as it is, difficulties and all.

Instead of desperately trying to get all your sheets folded, realize that there will always be a new one brought in the moment you’re ‘finished’.

Approaching life this way will save you from a lot of unnecessary stress and help you move slowly and steadily toward your goals.

“If there is a solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it. If there is no solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it.” — Dalai Lama

Sources

Progressive Buddhism: A Few Buddhist Parables
American History X – English Transcript

The post How to Deal With Problems appeared first on Selfication.

The Tortoise Mindset: How Slow & Steady Wins the Race of Life

Have you ever heard Aesop’s fable about the Tortoise and the Hare? It goes something like this (1):

There once was a speedy hare who bragged about how fast he could run. Tired of hearing him boast, Slow and Steady, the tortoise, challenged him to a race. All the animals in the forest gathered to watch.

Hare ran down the road for a while and then and paused to rest. He looked back at Slow and Steady and cried out, “How do you expect to win this race when you are walking along at your slow, slow pace?”

Hare stretched himself out alongside the road and fell asleep, thinking, “There is plenty of time to relax.”

Slow and Steady walked and walked. He never, ever stopped until he came to the finish line.

The animals who were watching cheered so loudly for Tortoise, they woke up Hare.

Hare stretched and yawned and began to run again, but it was too late. Tortoise was over the line.

After that, Hare always reminded himself, “Don’t brag about your lightning pace, for Slow and Steady won the race!”

As in several of Aesop’s fables, the moral of this story is ambiguous and has been interpreted differently throughout history (2). Since that’s case, I thought I’d make up my own.

The Hare Mindset

These days, most people try to live like the Hare. Not necessarily in the way that they’re bragging and boasting and challenging random turtles to sprint races (although some crazy nuts might), but rather that they want things to go FAST.

And when you think about the contemporary obsession with immediate results and instant gratification we’re being sold every day, this makes perfect sense. Everywhere we look there are promises of getting rich quick, lotteries that’ll make you an overnight millionaire, fad diets and training programs that’ll transform your appearance in weeks or days.

You can get fast food, one-hour glasses, thirty-minute photo processing, overnight mail, microwaved food, instant hot water, and emails and text messages delivered anywhere in the world on a seconds notice.

These things have made us expect instant results to the point that when we don’t get them, we get discouraged and immediately quit.

But the truth is lasting change doesn’t happen overnight. And that is why I suggest we change our approach.

The Tortoise Mindset

For the most part, the results we’re looking for will rarely come quickly. But they won’t take that long, either. In my experience, they tend to take just a little bit longer than we’re comfortable going for.

Exercising for one hour three times a week for a month will show very little, if any, results.
Reading one book in January won’t make much of an impact on your personal growth.
Meditating 10 minutes a day for a couple of weeks won’t show much of an affect on your mind.

But what if you decided right now to drop the quick-fix mentality of the Hare and instead adopt the mindset of the Tortoise?

What if, instead of obsessing over (and very likely getting discouraged by) the short-term results, you focused on just taking the next tiny step in the right direction?

Jim Rohn used to say that “failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day” and that “success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.”

If you took these principles to heart you could have the following results within a year:

By exercising for one hour three times a week, you would have 150+ hours of exercise under your belt. More than enough to have a huge impact on your health and appearance.
By reading one book a month, you would have read 12 books. This means tons of new insights, ideas, and concepts to enrich your life.
By meditating 10 minutes a day, you would have 60+ hours of meditation experience. This translates (among many other benefits) into improved focus, creativity, compassion, memory, less stress and anxiety.

It’s not your speed, but your consistency that makes all the difference:

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

How Slow & Steady Wins the Race

Ironically, it’s when you shift your focus away from the results you want that they’ll start showing up.

When you start to relentlessly take the next tiny step, the results will inevitably show up as a side effect of the person you’re becoming.

I believe it works something like this:

When you’re consistent, that creates momentum. That momentum creates progress. The progress creates self-confidence. The self-confidence starts shaping a new, more resourceful and empowering identity. And with this new identity comes the ability to create lasting change in your life.

So, here’s what I suggest. Take your goals and chop them up into small daily minimum quotas. Then, start obsessing about executing on them every single day.

If you want a step-by-step process for doing this, I recommend you check out The 2016 Goal-Setting Workbook. That’s what the tortoise would have done.

“The 2016 Goal-Setting Workbook kicks ass!” – The Tortoise

Sources

Story Arts – The Tortoise and the Hare
Wikipedia – The Tortoise and the Hare

Thanks to…

Joel Lindmark for the tortoise illustration. Very cute.

The post The Tortoise Mindset: How Slow & Steady Wins the Race of Life appeared first on Selfication.

How to Have More Time

“I don’t have time.”

Think about this statement for a moment. How often do you say it to others? How often do you tell it to yourself?

Have you ever considered what a killer of dreams this sentence is?

‘I’d like to work out more, but I don’t have time’.
‘I’d like to read more books, but I don’t have time’.
‘I’d like to start my own business, but I don’t have time’.
‘I’d like to meditate, but I don’t have time’.
‘I’d like to be with my family and friends more, but I DON’T HAVE TIME’.

The list goes on and on. But what’s fascinating is that the most accomplished and busy people seem never to say this. Warren Buffet’s schedule, for example, is almost empty (1). How can this be?

Time is Our Most Precious Resource

The big idea is this: Time is more valuable than money. You can always get more money, but you can never get more time.

Most people are way more careful with their money than with their time. If someone tries to take our money, we tend to be very protective. But if someone is trying to take our time, usually we don’t care as much.

Realizing this critical blind spot is what separates accomplished people from the rest.

In his essay, ‘On the Shortness of Life’ (2), the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca writes that we suffer from a “foolish forgetfulness of our mortality” and reminds us that if we waste our life, nature will not give us any warnings or signals. Instead, life will “silently glide away”:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

— Seneca

How to Have More Time

According to the World Health Organization, the average life expectancy in wealthy nations is about 80 years (3). So, assuming if you’re lucky enough to live in one of these countries and that you’re not a statistical outlier, you can expect to live about 80 years x 365 days = 29,200 days.

Of course, you cannot know exactly when you’re time is up. All you can know for sure is that once you’ve spent one of your days, you will never get it back.

So, obviously we’re not talking about having more time in terms of adding more days to your life here, but rather how to have more time for what is important to you. And the first step to doing that is to appreciate fully how scarce a resource time is.

Once you’ve done that, you have to make a commitment to change. You have to decide what is truly important to you and start to ruthlessly cut out everything else.

Defend Your Time

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

— Warren Buffet

OK, so now that you’ve decided that your time is precious to you, let’s look at some ways to defend it:

Cut out TV. The average American spends more than 5 hours a day in front of the TV (4). That’s freakin’ nine years of our life. And I suspect the rest of the world isn’t doing that much better.
Get off the Internet. Limit the time you spend on computers and smartphones. Use apps and extensions like Self-Control, Freedom, Anti-Social, StayFocusd and Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator to limit the time you spend mindlessly browsing the web.
Reduce your commitments. Question all your obligations. Experiment with temporarily delegating or cutting out commitments. See whether you suffer from cutting it out, or whether you like the extra time. Despite what we often think, the world won’t collapse when we withdraw from a commitment.
Say no. Every yes that’s not important to you bring you further away from your goals. So from now on, no more yeses. It’s either HELL YEAH! or no (5). Learn to decline politely and quickly get back to what matters.
Declutter. Say no to unnecessary stuff in your environment. Spend a couple of minutes every day decluttering your home, workspace and digital devices.

You have plenty of time. You just need to defend it.

“Time is what we want most, but what we spend worst.”

– William Penn

Sources

Why Productive People Have Empty Schedules
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca
World Health Statistics 2013
Television Watching Statistics
No more yes. It’s either HELL YEAH! or no.

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