Adam Wik's Blog, page 3

Why Habit Building Is the Foundation for Success

Habit building is a sturdy foundation to build skills on top of.

“…we are we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” -Will Durant

The quote above, often mis-attributed to Aristotle, is used so much I was a little hesitant to use it here. It’s so true though, and sums up he point I intend to make so well that I couldn’t help it.

It’s not that you can’t reach success or excellence without using habits to drive your progress – but more that using habits to drive your success...

Fitness & Motivation Lessons from Pokemon Go

Unless you’ve been stuck inside Rock Cave for the last few months without an HM05, you probably know about Pokemon Go. As a side-effect of its wild popularity, people have been touting it as being one of the most successful fitness apps to date and some have even been suggesting it’ll have a big effect on fighting obesity.

While I think it’s being a little optimistic to think a little extra walking is going to get everyone fit, it definitely is getting otherwise sedentary people out and movi...

The Basics of Programming for Strength Training

Strength programming doesn’t have to be this complicated.

A problem I see repeatedly in people who begin a new fitness program – whether it’s strength training, bodybuilding, or something else – is what I call program paralysis.

Program paralysis is where a potential trainee spends so much time working on developing or finding the perfect training program that they either never actually manage to get started on it, or they over-complicate it to such a degree that they start it but then drop i...

5 Quick Ways to Combat Procrastination

Sometimes a little bit of procrastination isn’t a bad thing. It can be a good way to clear your head and come back to something with a new viewpoint or to hop over to work on another task for a while.

If you spend hours every day trying to combat procrastination though, that’s a problem.

When you can’t seem to get anything done because you’re always getting distracted, putting things off, and avoiding the tasks you need done the most in favor of other things your ability to be productive and...

The 5 Key Elements for Successful Fat Loss

We talk a lot about efficiency here – not necessarily because we feel everything has to be optimized and made super-efficient, but rather because a lot of things in life get severely over-complicated. As a result people struggle with things not because they can’t do them or they’re too difficult, but instead because they get too caught up in minutiae to make any real progress.

Fat loss is an excellent example of that process in action.

There’s so much information on fat loss out there that i...

New Guide: Learn 1,000 Words in 30 Days

If you’ve always wanted to learn a second language but have struggled to get to even a basic speaking level even after years of classes and study, you’re not alone. Just about everyone has a story about how their four years of classes in Spanish, French, or any other language during high school or college left them totally unprepared to converse with native speakers. It isn’t a problem with the students – the problem is no one is ever taught the most effective ways to learn.

For the past mon...

6 Ways to Overcome Procrastination

At some point or another, everyone has procrastinated. Whether there is a big project to complete, or a new habit you’re trying to build like practice a language or exercising, procrastination has gotten the best of all of us.

Nobody is immune, but it can be beaten.

Procrastination is, more often than not, us taking the easiest possible route. We’re wired to be like this – if we weren’t naturally discouraged from doing challenging tasks everyone would all be super fit, speak a dozen language...

Stop Outsourcing Your Purpose in Life

Some things should definitely not be outsourced.

Just about everyone would say they want to find their purpose in life.

Sites like LifeHacker, TinyBuddha and the like are full of articles on it, books like The Purpose Driven Life consistently top the sales charts in the relevant categories – everybody seems to be desperately trying to figure out the plan that’s been laid out for them.

I think they’re completely missing the point.

Outsourcing Your Purpose

Nearly all of the advice given on the...

A Basic Model for Personal Development

It’s important to have the right framework in place for successful personal development.

Personal development is something we talk about a lot here – primarily because the one thing I know for certain that everyone has and has control over is themselves. No matter what other variables there may be, I know for certain (at least until someone develops serious A.I. anyway) that anyone reading this has a self that they can improve.

To this end we tend to focus on more ‘high level’ or specific asp...

Habit Change as a Language Learning Tool

Being about three quarters of the way through the first month of our semi-unofficial Swedish challenge, I’ve noticed one of the biggest obstacles starting out was that I had almost entirely lost my study habit. With so many other things going on I’d frequently forget to do my vocab study until way late in the day. Then I’d either have to grudgingly accept that I was going to be behind and have to do extra to catch up, or force myself to grind it out before bed when neither my heart nor head...