Michal Stawicki's Blog, page 9

LinkedIn Riches Book Review

[image error]This is a very solid book. To the point, well written, containing useful information and just enough examples to make the information applicable. Seriously, there is nothing to nitpick on. But you know me, I’ll always find something. So, there is one…

CON

I didn’t take action after reading the book. I still don’t have a LinkedIn account. I knew what to do; everything was crystal clear. I just didn’t take action.

Of course, blaming the author for my laziness is irresponsible. Well, welcome to the 21st century and the world of social media drama queens.

I hoped this book would push me over the fence and I’d finally do something on LinkedIn.

It didn’t.

Apart from my extreme laziness, the whole book is gold. Let’s gloss over all those…

PROS1. Content.

A few months ago, we had a LinkedIn expert in my mastermind. His and John’s content overlapped by at least 90%. Apparently, they both know what they are talking about.

Also, I loved how well LinkedIn Riches was laid out. There is a process to it. First, you build a killer profile, then you figure out other elements, and reaching out is the last step. Oh, wait, nope! The last step is to keep reaching out and keep the connections alive.

2. Authenticity.

Making connections is all about being a human. Not a director. Not a CEO. Not a stiffy Corpo douchebag. A human.

John illustrated this perfectly, sprinkling personal stories and family photos throughout the book.

And some of those stories were piercing to the core of a soul. Dealing with childhood abuse later in life? It’s not a chit-chat matter. This is the level of authenticity you need to be ready to demonstrate in order to be perceived as a human being.

Hats off, John. Well done!

3. Personal Approach.

This is what we lack in today’s automated world, and this is what the author of LinkedIn Riches teaches. Well, maybe not entirely “personal.” Whenever you serve more than a few hundred people, it’s impossible to get at the personal level with each of them. I have over 4,000 readers on my email list; I just cannot spend even 10 minutes a month with each.

However, John teaches how you can make your communication personalized. It is the tiny bit that makes all the difference. Which he proves with a few impressive stories.

4. Stories.

This is another strong point of the book. The author doesn’t just dispassionately provide a step-by-step plan. He illustrates each step and principle with stories coming mostly from his experience.

That’s a great teaching technique. We are wired to pay attention to stories, not just dry facts.

5. Fishing for Big Fishes.

John provides an excellent system to get on the radar of high-profile folks. At this age, everybody can reach anybody. It’s not a feel-good slogan.

In December, I reached out to a millionaire and a serial entrepreneur. 15 minutes later, we were on a call. He said to me: “I’d say ‘no’ to 99.99% of people, but not you.”

How did it happen? I used exactly the same techniques John talks about in LinkedIn Riches. In my case, I had been showing up for months on that guy’s blog and commented on each and every post of his. It was enough for me to build a rapport with him.

And if you have something tangible to offer, like John and his profile-rewriting service? It’s easy!

6. It’s a Book.

Say what? Why is this even one of the pros?

I love learning from books. I hate learning from audio or video. That call in my mastermind with a LinkedIn expert? It was great, but I retained almost nothing from it.

I would refer to LinkedIn Riches whenever I finally decide to pull the trigger and create my LinkedIn profile. That will be THE resource for me, like 66 Ways to Sell More Nonfiction Books was for setting up my book business.

Summary

This is a great book. For just 99 cents, it’s a steal! Especially, if you have some kind of existing offering and your niche already figured out, you should get your first client on LinkedIn within a week.

I vote for the general approach. I vote for the excellent advice. And I enjoyed the read.

P.S. A couple of months after reading LinkedIn Riches, I pulled the trigger and created a half-decent profile in a few days. And I already landed my first customer.

The post LinkedIn Riches Book Review appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

The Hardest Bad Habit to Break

Plus 5 simple habits which will help you to beat it

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If we talk about a single habit the worst habit to get rid of is negative self-talk. Why? Because most of us just accept it as a part of our identity. We don’t even notice it, so we don’t even attempt to get rid of it.

That’s the ‘impossible’ difficulty level. You cannot fight the opponent you don’t even see; you don’t even know he exists.

Negative self-talk is usually at the root of every other bad habit. Being rude, alcoholism, swearing, sleep deprivation, being careless with money, a sedentary lifestyle — all those habits are just symptoms of your faulty thinking processes and behind each of such thinking habits usually lurks the negative self-talk.

You have low self-esteem, so you try to numb it with compulsive shopping or drinking. And where does low self-esteem come from? This vicious little voice in your head whispering:

“I’m stupid. I’m fat. I’m worthless. My father beat me because he didn’t love me; no wonder- I’m downright unlovable. I’m a failure….”

And you don’t even notice those whispers. You act as they were words of the infallible oracle.

Mind Triggers

Do you remember Marty from “Back to the Future?” Whenever someone called him a coward, he felt compelled to prove he wasn’t a coward. Usually, he ended up in big trouble because of that.

It’s the same with our self-talk, only it’s much more subtle because it comes from inside. But the solution to this problem is the same as the solution that worked for Marty: you pause, turn on your conscious thinking processes, examine what’s going on and make a choice how to react. The choice not dictated by your emotions, but by your brain.

“In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose.
Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose.
We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles.
It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.” ― Stephen R. Covey

To do that you need a very elusive skill (well, elusive for modern people) called self-awareness. You need to notice your thoughts sneaking on you to repel them. Self-awareness gives you such power.

Good News

Yes, your thoughts and internal dialog keep you a prisoner. And yes, we are hopeless at noticing and controlling our thought processes.

But you can modify those thoughts by attacking the symptoms. When you break the obvious break habits, the ones that are clearly visible in your life, you become a new person.
When you develop new good habits, it affects who you are. And this new persona has a slightly different thinking pattern, influenced by the change of your circumstances.

You cannot say to yourself “Your fat pig!” if you’ve just lost 10 pounds in the last month. Well, not if you are moderately sane.

However, I deem it an uphill battle. You can liberate yourself from many bad habits if you tackle their common root cause — what is going through your mind.
Instead of taking a detour route, you take the direct one, disarm your internal demons and then you can attack multiple bad habits and create multiple good habits at the same time.

Good Habits in Service of Self-awareness

Develop some self-awareness habits and you will get a fighting chance. You will notice your self-talk, so you will be able to step between the stimulus and reaction.

Here are several good habits very handy for developing self-awareness:

1. Meditation.

It’s a great activity which can bring you benefits practiced even in small doses. Just take three deep breaths and focus your mind on that. That’s the simplest meditation.

Of course, meditation works better in huge doses, but its power lies in the full-out effectiveness of any dose.

2. Journaling.

This activity is also very effective because writing forces you to process your thoughts through the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for abstract thinking. Writing translates emotions and images into words — the language of your conscious mind.

3. Walks.

I don’t believe walks are magical in themselves. They just create space for something modern people desperately need — reflection, free-thinking, lack of digital distractions; and some physical activity, which pumps blood through your brain. Put all of those together and you have a chance to notice your internal voice.

4. Asking for feedback.

It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s about as efficient as journaling. If you are a people person, it may be even more effective because you pay the utmost importance to social cues like tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language.

You can “ask” for feedback even yourself, I do it all the time with my journaling sessions. Make sure though you ask the right questions, focused on solutions (not: “Why I’m so hopeless?!?”).

Asking for feedback works like journaling – to communicate with another human being you need to put together a coherent message and process your emotions and internal images via the prefrontal cortex.

5. Tracking.

Any kind of tracking will do, especially if it involves writing. Your mind is a master liar, it says terrible false things about you, which you believe in.

Tracking is a way to confront your internal voice with reality. How can you be “a fat pig” if you lose 10 pounds and you have daily check-ins from the last month confirming your progress?

Tracking also instills filters in your brain. Track something, anything, and you have much better chances of success than by just trying to wing it.

The single most difficult habit to get rid of is negative self-talk. It’s an invisible enemy most of us don’t even know that exists.

The most efficient way to deal with it, or rather start dealing with it, is increasing your self-awareness.

The post The Hardest Bad Habit to Break appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

TOO BLUE! Book Review

[image error]I liked this book a lot. It was a quick read, full of facts, with the right amount of personal perspective, and overall good entertainment, mind training, and a history lesson.

But very few books are perfect, so traditionally I’ll start with some…

CONS1. Name Dropping.

IBM PC was an enormous project, with dozens of people involved in it at just the very top. In his attempt to give credit to all of them, the author dropped on a reader a massive number of names. And he did that next to dropping on us, poor readers, dozens of acronyms, functions, and some technical jargon.

Well, Dennis Andrews made a nice attempt to mitigate the sheer amount of knowledge dumped on readers. He provided the index of persons at the very beginning of the book. It didn’t help me one bit.

On the other hand, I was able to follow the storyline, and I remembered the key characters, like Sparky. So, the long list of names was confusing, but not fatal.

2. Untapped Potential.

I would prefer if the author focused just on his personal perspective or seriously expanded the whole book. I felt so many threads could have been explored in more depth. The most frustrating thing was that they were signalized in the book, the author gave them a paragraph or a page of thoughts… and that was all.

I can see this book thick as a roof beam, exploring not only the history part of the project but also all ‘what-ifs’ and scenarios that were left on the table.

Nonetheless, I broke through the flood of names, survived half-finished (or just hinted) subplots, and enjoyed the read. I graduated from a technical high school with the title of an IT Technician. I studied IT. I got my first computer around 1993. My father bought this machine from his factory through half-official channels. Since Poland had been about 10 years behind the world at that time, my comp’s specification was not much different from the first machines produced by the Acorn project.

I understand what ISA, RAM, processor, mainboard, hard drive, and floppy disks are. I still like DOS operating system better than Windows.

I wolfed the book with pleasure. For me, TOO BLUE!’s pros outweighed its cons by a long shot. Let’s go to them.

PROS1. The Idea of This Book.

It is not so common to be able to get the inside perspective into an enormous project with global implications. Even the half-chaotic personal perspective of a single executive in the project gave me so many points to ponder!

And of course, as an IT guy and PC lover, I loved the history behind the book.

2. Takeaways.

TOO BLUE! has made me think and ponder over so many different things. I think this is the book’s strongest asset.

-How little we can predict.
Microsoft got its chance by chance. Some stupid company didn’t want this job, so Microsoft got it. That other company didn’t even meet with IBM people when they showed up for the meeting at their site! Bam! A cosmic fluke and Microsoft got its chance. The rest is history.

Or how Dennis repeated time after time how they never truly understood the impact of personal computing on the world. They were just busy doing their thing and chasing the demand. Personal computers revolutionized business, accelerated globalization, and created the foundation for the World Wide Web.

-How incompetent big Corpo is.
IBM PC was a huge success because it acted like a startup. They ignored the corporate red tape. Well, not a small part of this success was that they had the comfort of both ignoring the red tape and tapping into the vast resources of the global corporation.

Money was the least of it. They had manufacturing facilities. They had the talent pool not available for any startup in history. But why am I talking about incompetence? The Vmail story. First, the morons at the top had no clue about the vital system of their own company. Second, they wanted to shut it down as soon as they discovered its existence.
*facepalm*

-How US-centric is the US population.
In the beginning, they didn’t even care about the worldwide distribution. If not for Dennis, who pushed to orchestrate the overseas distribution, who knows how the history of the world would have unfolded? Mind-blowing!

The US population is less than 5% of the world’s population, but Americans think of themselves as at least 80% of the planet’s inhabitants.

-The butterfly effect.
Well, in this case, it was more of a “Godzilla effect.” The IBM PC project was by no means small. Yet, Dennis alluded many times that they had no clue what kind of worldwide avalanche they would start. There was no vision. There were no plans for changing the world. IBM just saw the opportunity to make more money. They did. But they changed the whole world in the process.

Personal computers introduced global disruption into the way business had been done. This disruption prepared the ground for many others disruptions which followed. Each and every software company which is worth billions now could have been built only because there is a personal computer in every household (or just enough of households; and don’t forget our phones have now much more computing power than the original IBM PC). Whole industries were built at the foundation of PC (like the video game industry; in Poland, the 4th biggest company at the stock exchange is CD Projekt, the creator of the Witcher and Cyberpunk games).

-Complexity.
It was eye-opening to see how many moving parts were involved in creating this project and making it a success. It was enormous! Manufacturing was a challenge in itself! But to manufacture those machines, you needed first to design them. Distribution was crucial and practically non-existent before they started the project. The same goes for support channels and procedures.

They needed to build everything. From scratch. At once.

It was amazing to see, even unfolding in hindsight.

-Open architecture.
Cooperation was the main reason IBM PC became such a success.

IBM just couldn’t build everything on its own. They needed cooperates and contractors. Their competition actually helped them to grow their business. And the domination of IBM started to fade when they decided on the solutions perceived as anti-open architecture.

TOO BLUE! is a great read. I especially recommend it to early PC adopters who remember those times and those interested in business history and global disruption.

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Most Commmon Reasons Why We Quit (and what to do about it)

[image error]The reasons why we quit may be various and most of them come down to the wrong motivation. The way you articulated the question makes the most obvious reason for abandoning your habits:

Chasing Novelty

Humans have this natural (for us!) tendency to chase novelties. Why? I don’t much care. It is what it is.
Recently, I started to recognize typical human mental patterns by watching social media algorithms. We pay attention to negativity. We pay attention to novelties. Watch FB, Twitter or Instagram feeds and you will see that in a heartbeat.

We also have a natural tendency to preserve our energy and sit on our butts forever. However, it doesn’t mean you need to become a plant anchored to your couch. You also don’t need to subordinate your routines to chasing shiny objects. You are a human being and you have free will. Use it.

Not Enough Time

It is quite possible you didn’t give your routine a chance to become a habit. Consistently following a particular routine for a week doesn’t make it a habit. Nor doing so for two weeks, or – in most cases – for even two months.
The only research about the time needed for habit development I found says it takes on average 66 days. Hence, it’s quite probable your squirrel brain followed some routine for a week or seven driven by the desire for novelty. And when it wore out, you left the routine because it wasn’t coded in your brain yet.

Breaking the Streak

There is a magical value we attach to a sustained action in our mind. Often, when you put a habit on hold, even a fully developed one, the What the Hell Effect kicks in. You don’t feel it’s worth the effort to go back to the habit because we somehow stained it by breaking the streak.

Also, when you introduce a longer break (vacations, a busy period at work or school) the habit gets weakened. It’s not like you need to build it from scratch, it is hardcoded in your brain, but it gets rusty. It needs some attention and dedication on your part to bring it back to the previous shape.

Another reason for breaking the streak is losing a trigger. This is a tough one.

Let’s say your environment changes (like getting closed in your home because of the Covid lockdown). Plenty of cues are eliminated from your environment – you no longer commute, or you can’t attend your meetings and activities. If your habit was anchored to such a cue, it literally disappears. There is nothing in your life to launch it. You must pick a new trigger and build the habit from scratch. Well, not entirely, but it will feel like it for a few weeks.

What’s the solution here?
When you lose your routine and you need to go back to it, celebrate your small daily successes with your habit. BJ Fogg invented this method for his Tiny Habits framework and he explained it best:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1syo7Eyhx4Hek-U51lrEFIEcDtonnB6-vZ-3n0FsnPjU/
Go to the Celebrate Success section, read it carefully and implement. You will give yourself a dose of excitement for getting back to your habit.

It’s Not a Sin to Change the Routine

Our habits are powerful tools, but just tools. If necessary, we can leave them behind or modify them. A tool serves a specific purpose. If there is a better way to achieve this purpose or if circumstances prevent you from continuing the routine – stop it, or change it!

I had been doing a single series of consecutive pushups for a couple of years. Every morning, I did a series to the limit of my strength, and usually- beyond this limit.

However, when I reached about 115 pushups, I realized it took too much of my time. And I switched the routine. I started doing harder variations of pushups – legs-elevated, diamond, wide, and one-arm pushups. Later, I introduced even more variation into my morning workout by doing chin-ups or dips instead of pushups.

Over two years ago, I injured my shoulders. I couldn’t do pushups anymore; not with such intensity.
I changed my routine once again. I started doing squats, sit-ups, burpees, and lunges. I couldn’t achieve the level of intensity I wanted with most of them, so instead of exercising to my limit, I set the time limit. I do those exercises for 2-3 minutes, as fast as possible.

My routine transformed quite a bit throughout the years, but the overall goal remained the same: I exercise early in the morning to maintain my health and energy levels.

MOTIVATION

People often try to build new habits on a whim, without any strategy or tactics. This motivation dissipates as soon as the initial excitement evaporates.
However, employ the right kind of motivation, a deep reason to do something and it will be very easy to stick with your habits, even for years.

Wrong Motivation?

There is one clear signal that your motivation was wrong from the very beginning- you force yourself to perform your routine. Yes, you are able to consistently follow the routine, but almost every time it feels like drudgery. You avoid, procrastinate and postpone doing it, and when you do it, you feel repulsion.

Those kinds of habits have a very low survival rate. You stop doing them whenever you stop applying force to continuing them.

One of the very first habits I adopted after my transformation, was studying German for 10 minutes a day. It was heinous and tedious. I was often the merriest when I finished my German lesson for the day. I kept this habit for several months before I realized that my motivation for it was wrong. I wanted to catch up with my sisters. I have five sisters and each of them speaks at least two foreign languages.

This motivation, which sprang from the wrong kind of ambition, wasn’t enough to keep me going.

1. Define Your Why.

A routine serves some goal. What it is for you? If it’s killing boredom and chasing shiny objects, then it’s only natural you will leave it sooner than later.

However, actually putting your motivation on paper may clarify for you why you started this routine in the first place. Then, when boredom and temptation strike, just have a look at your stated purpose. Is it still valid? So, continue.

A habit only serves your goal as long as you practice it. Abandoning a habit creates a void that will be filled with something. Will this “something” serve your purpose? Probably not.

2. Identify with Your Routine.

I am a writer. I write. Every single day. I don’t negotiate with myself whether I’ll write or not. It’s a part of who I am.
This is how identifying with your habits make them unbreakable. Boredom? Exhaustion? Discouragement? They won’t steer me away from who am I.

Your identity is a powerful tool in sticking to your habits. Think of it: does a mother negotiate with herself if she will act like a mother today? Nope. She does whatever it takes.
When your identity is at stake, you do whatever it takes.

3. Personal Philosophy.

The core of my personal philosophy is this:

I KNOW that daily, sustained action brings results

It makes abandoning my habits close to impossible. Why should I ever do this? They bring me results. They are the only tools I can use on a daily basis to inch me toward whatever I desire.

It also makes me very conscious of what habits I adopt. When I integrate a new habit into my life, it is exactly it – the integration. I don’t start habits on a whim. I don’t start habits, which I cannot sustain for several months; there is little sense in it. If I quit after a few months I will have no results worth mentioning and quite a lot of time wasted.
How to shape and cultivate the proper personal philosophy is a subject for the whole book (which I wrote). However, having such an operating system, you can delegate dealing with your habits to your subconscious.

My wife discusses with herself every single time she is going to exercise. This is her operate the system. She hates sweating, she dreads the pain and effort, at least before the workout. After it, she enjoys the endorphins and the after-workout feeling.

My operating system, personal philosophy, says I need to take care of my body on daily basis to maintain a support system for my mind and soul. Thus, I exercise every day and don’t think twice about it. I don’t even think once about it, I just do it.

Troubles with continuing your habit often boil down to your motivation. Don’t depend on the pang of dopamine coming from the novelty. Think your motivation over and use deep reasons as the fuel for your habits, not fickle feelings.

Make sure you give yourself enough time to actually develop a habit.
When you break a streak remember to celebrate the return of your habit to your life.

The post Most Commmon Reasons Why We Quit (and what to do about it) appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Double Your Productivity in 48 Hours Book Review

[image error]A month ago my mentor, Derek Doepker, shared a book with me: Double Your Productivity in 48 Hours by Jason Fladlien. Jason is Internet marketer and an insanely productive person.

“Obsessed is the word the lazy use to describe the dedicated.”

In comparison to Jason, I can definitely be called lazy.

Traditionally, let’s start from

CONS
1. The Bragging Style.

More than once, Jason seems to be full of himself. On the other hand, and it will appear in PROS, he doesn’t brag in vain. He actually implemented what he preaches.

From his perspective, he might has merely described reality in dry words.

2. Overload.

When you are obsessed, err…, dedicated, your extreme techniques may not be for the faint of heart. I object especially to one advice from the book – to think about your projects in the spare time. It’s not the best, well not even passable, recipe for success for most people. We tend to take work home, and now when so many of us actually works from home, we never leave it.

“Wherever you are, be there. When you work, work. When you play, play. Don’t mix the two.” — Jim Rohn

It’s more than healthy to empty your mind and leave your work behind. If you won’t create the space for doing nothing your brain could never reset. It’s a guaranteed creativity drain.

3. PDF Format.

I’m so used to reading on Kindle and PDF is just not the right fit for this device. I couldn’t look up chapters in the table of content or jump between sections. Thankfully, I still could highlight.

 

This is a very efficient book. So, it’s full of

PROS
1. The Bragging Style.

Jason writes from his own experience. I value this kind of writing a way over even the most meticulous research and theory. His style comes with the whole package of the self-confident entrepreneur who has been there and done that.

2. A Few Simple Fundamentals.

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” – Jim Rohn

It applies to time management, too. Despite the sophistication of Internet marketing, Jason’s productivity techniques are rudimentary. Everybody can use them.

Ha! He even recommends using pen and paper!

And those are indeed, fundamentals. I included one or two of those tips in Master Your Time in 10 Minutes a Day (for example, the time journal). These are no new gimmicks, they are fundamentals.

3. Immediately Applicable Tips.

Jason doesn’t joke around, when he talks about 48 hours to double your productivity. In fact, I’d have been surprised if you implemented one of his tips and didn’t take your productivity to the whole new level.

It happened to me, when I used the time journal for the first time. Well, I’m kind of a turtle in life, I take things slowly and never give up. So, it took me two weeks of time journaling to change my approach. But the difference between before and after wasn’t 100%. It was closer to 1,000%.

The same goes with Jason’s techniques. If you haven’t used them before, you may be amazed how much of a difference they can make.

 

The list of techniques Jason discusses in Double Your Productivity… includes (but doesn’t end at):

-ALWAYS set deadlines

-stick to them rigorously

-track your time

-build productivity subsystems

-limit the number of options

-practice getting into a state of flow

-block your time

-maintain the right study to action ratio

Summary

This is a very good book to challenge your assumptions about your own productivity. It challenged my perception of what’s possible.

The book is short to the point and deosn’t overwhelm you with a zillion techniques.

Jason didn’t bother to upload this book on Amazon, so it’s only available through Karta. It costs $9.95. Pricy for a short book. But if your hour is worth more than $5, you will get it back in increased productivity in a few short hours.

 

Since I couldn’t share this book any other way, I created an affiliate account on Karta and will get a commission for sales made by my affiliate link below:

https://michalsta.krtra.com/t/mhQMCUSkWca4

Oh, and I must warn you, the purchase process is a bit grueling. I got four emails before I could finally download the book. Be patient.

However, there was an unexpected bonus at the end – an audiobook version of Double Your Productivity in 48 Hours!

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Why Is It so Easy to Get Addicted to Things that Are Unhealthy but so Difficult to Get Hooked on Healthy Habits

[image error]The short answer is: those “unhealthy things” hack directly into our bodily reward system.

Thus, we get an immediate reward (usually: pleasure) from doing them. We crave the pleasure, so the behavior gets reinforced. It easily becomes a habit.

The long answer is more complicated.

The reason why hacking directly into the reward system works so well is that it bypasses the conscious mind. The subconscious mind knows only one tense: now. It is not concerned with the future ramifications of present actions. And it’s quite a primitive creature. Do you feel pleasure? Well, it means this action feels good! Let’s repeat it and get the same pang of pleasure!

No reflections. No pondering of consequences. And your bad habits create on autopilot.

Good Habit Are Easy

Getting hooked on healthy habits is not so difficult. It seems difficult only in comparison with the “zero-effort” way bad habits form.

One of my healthy habits is to eat at least one raw vegetable or fruit a day. It’s very easy. All I need is to remember about the habit (now, after several years it’s my second nature), get a veggie, and munch it.

Yet, it still takes some effort, some investment on the part of my conscious mind. I need to remember. I need to have veggies or fruits at my home. I need to actually perform the action.

Hard Beginnings

It’s even more bothersome at the very beginning when the whole routine is new to you. Even remembering the habit can be an effort. Then, you need actually do it. It’s also beneficial to track it. It’s all the mental effort.

And the reward is not so big. Well, in the beginning, it’s hardly noticeable. And it is certainly not immediate. You switch your diet or exercise for a week before you can see any significant movement on a scale (a few pounds). But you don’t want ‘any!’ You want ‘many!’ And you don’t want them next quarter, but yesterday!

See? Your emotions are working against you. Instant gratification is getting the worst out of you. While developing unhealthy habits you feel nothing but pleasure. While developing healthy habits you often feel disappointment and frustration.

Emotions Are the Problem

BJ Fogg, the behavioral scientist from Stanford University, invented a brilliant addition to the process of developing new habits which make your emotions an ally, not an enemy: you celebrate your habits.

You don’t let your emotions to fend for themselves. You consciously entice the feeling of joy from doing your habit, not from its results. You create your own immediate feedback loop.

How does it look in practice? You do some gesture, or say something nice to yourself like “Nice job!” or “I’m awesome!”

If you have any difficulties imagining what those words or gestures could be, imagine yourself cheering your favorite team in the championships. They just scored! What do you do?! Jump in place? Roar with joy?

This is exactly what you should do to help your healthy habit to develop. Eat a vegetable and roar with joy. Do 10 pushups and jump with excitement. Drink a glass of water and pump your fists in triumph. Prepare a meal and tell yourself: “Well done!”

It takes time to develop good habits. They are worth both time and effort though.

“An immediate reward for lack of discipline is a fun day at the beach. A future reward of discipline is owning the beach.” — Jim Rohn

A future reward for healthy habits is health.

Celebrate each instance of your healthy habit and hack into the emotional reward system of your body.

The post Why Is It so Easy to Get Addicted to Things that Are Unhealthy but so Difficult to Get Hooked on Healthy Habits appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Eighty Eighth Income Report – July 2020 ($3,885.06)

Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.

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The highlight of July was a couple of vacations… which my wife went to. After being imprisoned for a few months we all needed some separation for our mental health. So, she traveled to my sister in Germany, spent a few days at home, and went with my daughter to get some rest at the Baltic Sea.

And I had two weeks, which I could dedicate to work. Well, it didn’t go exactly as I planned, I was prone to waste my time on social media and TV, but some work had been done.

Resurrecting Books

I maintained our weekly team call schedule. It was good for everyone involved, but especially for me. I could feel like a proper CEO

We got a few new customers in July, just a standard trickle of new prospects. Having an onboarding specialist, I finally reached out to a few people in my network, letting them know that I accept more customers. Not much came out of that, although I secured a webinar in September.

I had a couple of calls with Alex, who runs a very similar service. We exchanged our experiences. Encouraged by Alex, I tested the phrase keyword-matching feature and discovered, to my surprise that this worked even for my own books in the US. I quickly tested it in Canada (the results were half of it).

At the end of the month, Alex got an idea to help me out with optimizing the ads for the best books of my customers. I jumped at this opportunity.

When I summarized July revenue after the end of the month, I was pleasantly surprised: it was another record month. The revenue was 48% bigger than the average from the last 12 months and 4% better than the previous record.

Networking

I subscribed to the RadioListGuests service and applied for a few podcasts interviews. Almost every time, my application was accepted, mostly because I was very mindful to hit only the right shows.

As a result of one of my mastermind calls, I decided to proactively facilitate more calls between mastermind members. I started posting every week a call to network more. I had several calls with guys from other groups. It was nice to catch up with them. I think I got zero business out of those calls, but it wasn’t the point. It got me out of isolation a bit and was good for my mental health.

Podfest Summit

I got invited to speak at the Podfest Online Summit about Amazon ads. Of course, I agreed. I spent an hour or two on the organizing call and exchanging messages about the agenda with the self-publishing micro-con organizer.

Book Sales

My book sales shrunk in July. I just wasn’t able to get them to the pre-Covid levels. I mostly ignored this. Well, I created the phrase-matching ads and was happy to see a spike in my campaigns. But it remained neutral for the overall sales. I was able to limit my ad spendings, but not to increase the sales.

Limping Accountability

I posted my July goals in the accountability group on the 14th of July, two weeks after I should’ve done that! That was an indicator of how badly I neglected accountability. Every few days, I had been catching up with my habits tracking. I should’ve done this multiple times a day.

Fitness

The weather was great most of the time, so I biked and walked a lot. I made over 300k steps in July and well over 500 kilometers on a bike.

During one of my biking ventures, I fell hard turning on a crumbly road. I scratched my arm quite vividly and hit the road with my head. It was nothing, really. I had a mild headache for a few hours and I slept like a rock that night.

Only a day or so after the accident, a reflection came to me: “Well, that was close. If I would’ve hit the road harder…”
Life is a fragile thing. That’s why we should live it to the fullest.

Accountability Partner

In the last week of July I reached out to Marc Reklau. I wanted to update him on my recent discoveries regarding the ads. During the conversation he confessed he has no accountability partner.

Well, accountability is one of my few superpowers. That is, keeping someone accountable, not myself I offered him to become his accountability partner and he accepted without a moment of hesitation. We decided to have bi-weekly calls, and set the date for the next call.

Amazon Ads Takeaways

BTW, here are the things I shared with Marc.

-phrase keyword targeting in the USA works pretty well next to the broad targeting; I got 20% more impressions using the same keywords and the overall ROI was better

-the above wasn’t true for my Canadian ads; the volume increased only about 5% and I saw no difference in the ROI

-up and down bidding works great in the USA and quite well in the UK; using this kind of bidding, I was able to obtain the lower average cost per click

-in Canada, it actually works the other way; down-only bidding gives lower average cost per click than up and down bidding

The July 2020 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,430.65 ($2,483.86)
Coach.me fees: $121.92
Audiobooks royalties: $45.82
D2D royalties: $24.33
PWIW personal coaching: $335.45
AMS service remuneration: $3,429.69

Total: $6,801.07

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,123.45 Amazon ads
$500, ISI mastermind
$754, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$112.42, royalties split with co-author
$120.52, editor’s share
$17.58, MichalZone domain
$96, Calendly yearly fee
$25, book promo
$4.95, Scribando
$95.09, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,916.01

Net Result: $3,885.06

Previous Income Report: June 2020

The post Eighty Eighth Income Report – July 2020 ($3,885.06) appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Eighty Eighth Income Report – July 2020 ($3.885.06)

Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.

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The highlight of July was a couple of vacations… which my wife went to. After being imprisoned for a few months we all needed some separation for our mental health. So, she traveled to my sister in Germany, spent a few days at home, and went with my daughter to get some rest at the Baltic Sea.

And I had two weeks, which I could dedicate to work. Well, it didn’t go exactly as I planned, I was prone to waste my time on social media and TV, but some work had been done.

Resurrecting Books

I maintained our weekly team call schedule. It was good for everyone involved, but especially for me. I could feel like a proper CEO

The Vision Driven Leader Book Review

[image error]The Vision Driven Leader is an excellent book. I read it out of duty because it was read in my mastermind. I approached it with the “I know it all” attitude, which is the worst attitude you can have while reading a book.

And I knew it all. I created a few vision scripts for my enterprises. I was familiar with the process. Seriously, I couldn’t read in this book something I didn’t yet know.

Yet, I read the book with an interest. I highlighted numerous passages. I learned something new about envisioning and about other things too. This is an excellent book.

Traditionally, let’s start from

CONS

My only reservation, and this is pure nitpicking, is that the whole process of mapping out a vision felt so… mechanic. Do this step, then another… And once you went through them all, you’re done.

It didn’t feel exactly right. It lacked the soul.

On the other hand, I created my vision scripts “with soul” in the past and not much came out of them. So, what do I know? :/

PROS

The pros of The Vision Driven Leader are numerous and strong.

1. Great Writing.

I already told you that I approached the book with little expectations. Yet, it grabbed me from the very beginning. The stories were captivating. Michael’s experience shined through the pages.

2. Great Wisdom.

Speaking of experiences- I learned a bit about casting a vision for a company, but I learned a lot about business, human nature and other topics. And I learned in a “by the way” matter, just following what Michael had to say about vision-driven leader.

I got plenty of a-ha moments and highlighted many passages.

3. Great Motivation.

“Without this [a vision] you are effectively voting for the status quo.”

I found this quote at 8% of the book on my Kindle. And I immediately knew I will read it to the end and that I need to grapple with the book message. Because I have been voting for the status quo and this status quo is not something I enjoy.

“There is no reward for giving up.”

Oh, I very well knew that. I just needed a reminder.

You have no idea how much I want to give up sometimes. Of course, I have no idea what would I do if I gave up, but moving forward is such an effort!

The emotional rollercoaster. Uncertainty. Working crazy hours with seemingly little reward. For sure, not proportional to the energy I poured into it.

I’m tired. Rejected. Not understood. Lonely. Exhausted. Sad. I don’t want to keep going. I want to give up.

But there is no reward for that. None at all.

4. Great Process.

I complained about the process of hammering out the vision, but it makes a lot of sense. Most people, especially down to earth business owners are paralyzed by the whole idea. They have no clue how to start nor how to actually create something workable.

Michael’s process is step-by-step. You may turn off your thinking and just follow his guidelines. Answer one question, then another till you reach the end of the process. You have a vision.

Yes, it may not be perfect. Yes, it may leave out something very characteristic to your business. But even half-baked vision is much better than no vision at all. And “The Vision Driven Leader” provides an exact road map to reach that point.

Summary

I recommend this book. If you are a business owner and you don’t have yet the vision for your business, it is an obligatory lecture. It will convince you how much of a difference the vision makes for the bottom line and it will equip you with the tools necessary to formulate the compelling and workable vision for your business.

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How to Make Tiny Habits Even Better

In June 2020, I ran a couple of Tiny Habits online trainings for my Polish audience. Each time, I designed three new tiny habits for myself. I learned a lot from that experience.

BJ Fogg, the inventor of the Tiny Habits method, is a genius. I confirm everything he says about behavior design in his book.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. – Thomas Edison

It’s easy to be a genius, when you got tens of thousands of people through your trainings, gathered feedback, and put it back into work. Yet, there is still room for improvement in Tiny Habits. I went through two weeks of practicing tiny habits in one month and found numerous improvements that can increase students’ chances for success.

Hence, this post, lessons learned from my Tiny Habits practice.

Here are the tiny habits I practiced during those two weeks:

TH1

#1 After I use a bathroom, I will pop into my children’s rooms.

#2 After I finish my morning journal entry, I will open my journal on the last page and write down at least one person I’m grateful for (and the exact reason I’m grateful).

#3 After I come to my home office with the first morning coffee, I will write a thank you note.

TH2

#1 After I decide to use a bathroom, I will go to the bathroom upstairs (where my kids’ bedrooms are).

#2 After I come to the kitchen, I will clean something.

#3 After I sit down in my chair at the home office, I will rejoice.

1. Celebration.

It’s the core of the whole Tiny Habits method, yet BJ fails to mention it till the very end of the first huge reading assignment. The whole TH method makes little sense without celebration. Chances for success drastically decrease when you don’t celebrate. The celebration should be mentioned at the very beginning and heavily emphasized.

Why? Because it’s counter-intuitive. It should make zero difference, right? There is really nothing to celebrate! The tiny, less-than-30-second action? It’s laughable, not celebration-worthy.

I bet, the above train of thoughts is what goes through the minds of most people. Why? Because we have a negativity bias. We don’t pay attention to what’s going right or well. Especially, if it’s tiny.

Plenty of people are hammered with their own crappy self-talk and it’s a simple subconscious mechanism to keep the status quo. It’s less about the status quo and more about saving your energy. Your subconscious hates doing anything but indulging your senses with pleasure. So, there is friction even against your tiny habits.

However, celebration works like hacking your system for good habits development. You develop bad habits because you get dopamine shots right when you occupy yourself with them.

You bite a Choco bar and you feel a sweet bliss.

You masturbate and you immediately feel a different kind of bliss.

You drink alcohol and you get this joyful buzz inside your head.

You inhale tobacco smoke and you can feel how it soothes your system.

You yell at someone and you feel how the tension inside you dissipates in the eruption of anger.

You tap your mobile screen and you feel a pang of pleasurable anticipation looking forward to the new messages or funny memes.

You do whatever you do, and you are immediately rewarded with a shot of dopamine. Pure bliss! So, you repeat the unfortunate behavior to get this reward again.

 

The celebration of tiny habits is your way to generate a similar hormonal response in your body as the effect of something you consciously decided to do.

Celebrate, and you immediately will strengthen the habit loop. You will be looking forward to doing your tiny habit next time.

Sometimes, I think humans elevated themselves to the top of the food chain on the planet by becoming the most unpleasant creatures. Looking for dangers is our default mode. Feeling down, dissatisfied and frustrated keep our minds very sensitive to any eventual threats. Feeling good is nice at the moment, but not a preferable survival mechanism.

But we no longer fight for mere survival. We have no basic tools to keep ourselves happy and content. The celebration of your tiny habits is such a tool. It’s your excuse to feel good.

2. Multi-repetition habits are superior.

My TN1#3 habit was a disaster. I couldn’t remember it. I come to my home office with a coffee after my morning ritual. I’m ready to work. Writing a thank you note doesn’t connote in my mind with work. And I had no more chance to recall I should write the note. If I forgot in the morning, the only chance was gone.

3. Context matters.

Gosh, the whole tiny habits experience was enlightening on so many levels. Going through the training twice helped me to realize how important a context is for remembering habits.

Our memory is not a hard drive, it uses associations to store information. If we put a new habit in a similar context, it will make it much easier to remember and do.

Take my TN1#2 habit – writing a person I’m grateful for and the reason. It was also a single-repetition habit, but it went much better. I’ve just journaled, so my mind already was in the writing context.

I use my journal as a gratitude journal, so there an additional connection to gratitude existed.

 

I’ve told you what an utter disaster TN1#3 was. After the first week, I decided I need to change the anchor for that habit. I moved it right behind jotting down in my journal who am I grateful for.

And it worked like magic. I don’t think I skipped one day since I did that. A huge part of this was the right context. I was writing those people and reasons I’m grateful for them to become more consistent with writing thank you notes. It was a natural consequence to take a sheet of paper and start writing a note right after putting my journal away.

4. Visual cues are indispensable.

Multi-repetition habits are superior, but if you base your new habit on an activity that is basically mindless, it’s hard to remember your new habit. This is where visual cues are indispensable.

Let’s take for example my TN2#2 habit. Our kitchen is connected with a living room and a hallway. There are no doors. I barely notice I’m entering the kitchen. Well, I don’t notice it at all. There is no sign to signal that something changed between one step and another. My habit anchor was too common to trigger the habit.

While the training week, I remembered about it because every day I made an inventory of my tiny habits. But right after I started referring to my habit recipes every day, I lost this habit. Well, not exactly. It became semi-automatic, I think I still cleaned something more often than not.

But I lost any control over the process. I didn’t remember about a habit, so I didn’t celebrate it and didn’t track it. A visual cue in the kitchen would be great to keep this habit in the conscious brain of my brain. A simple thing like a sticky note with one word: “Clean” would be enough.

The same goes for TN2#3. I sit in my chair multiple days a day. This activity is totally mindless. I had no visual cue and only a very distant context (yes, I find joy in my work, most of the time). It was a struggle to remember to rejoice even during the training week, and it was even harder once I stopped reviewing my habit recipes.

Now, over two weeks after the second training I still struggle with remembering the habit. I don’t struggle with the habit itself or its celebration. It feels awesome. I just don’t remember about it.

I lacked the visual cue. I thought about buying a sticker, or a few, of a smiley emoticon, but never got about purchasing them. Then, one day, I noticed a mug on my table. I use it as a visual cue for my habit of drinking a glass of water in the morning.

 

Also, my morning ritual is a complicated process. I have dozen+ habits and each of them cries for at least a pinch of mindfulness. I need to be aware enough to switch from one activity to another. So, there was this natural level of watchfulness on what I need to do next. Thus, a “mindless” habit of finishing my journaling session could trigger a new habit.

 

The mug has a sticky figure with a smiley face on it. It’s an ideal visual cue to rejoice.

5. Modification is key.

My rejoicing habit is an ideal example. The original recipe was:

#3 After I sit down in my chair at the home office, I will rejoice.

But I couldn’t connote the act of sitting down in my chair with my new habit.

I thought about a visual cue, a sticker with a smile. And did nothing about it. Then I noticed my mug and decided to put it on my keyboard every time I’ll be standing up from my chair, so when I come back, I’ll have no choice but put it away, so I’ll notice it, so it will remind me about my new habit.

But that was too much fuss. I needed to introduce an entirely new habit of putting my mug on a keyboard.

So, since my mug is on the desk all the time, maybe I should rejoice when I glance at the mug. But it made my awareness too high and the habit too frequent. I would’ve rejoiced 10 times a minute.

 

Well, maybe I will go back to my original plan and stick a sticker on the chair’s seat. Then, I’ll notice the visual cue only when sitting down.

See? The key is to modify your habit till it fulfills the objective. I want to be more joyful and I need a discipline, which will put me in a state of joy several times a day.

When I defined the original recipe, this objective wasn’t as clear. I only knew I need more joy in my life to be an uplifting presence in the life of my family. It took me a few iterations to get this clarity and get closer to the exact discipline.

When you operate in BJ Fogg’s framework of behavioral design those tiny modifications beget fun, not frustration. There wasn’t a single moment when I was frustrated with this habit. I was constantly focused on the end goal and curious about how I can change what I was doing to reach my objective.

A great side effect of this attitude is that you subconsciously embrace the idea that yes, you certainly can modify your behaviors and achieve the desired end result. The lack of this kind of confidence is at the source of most human miseries on this planet.

My Favorite Tiny Habit

TH1#1 After I use a bathroom, I will pop into my children’s rooms.

Sometimes you will nail it at the first iteration. I spend most of my days downstairs in my home office, alone. My kids spend most of their days in their rooms. We don’t see each other much. The lockdown vividly demonstrated to me how our behavior degraded our family life. What we needed were more interactions.

This tiny habit at least tripled the frequency of our face to face interactions. Nowadays, I’m popping into my kids’ rooms several times a day. Interactions are the fabric of our family life. Now, it can expand and enrich.

Summary

The Tiny Habits method is great. You finish up with new habits, but the process is as valuable as the effect.

Even the most reliable anchor will not help you without the right context, visual cue, or a pinch of awareness. There must be a connotation between the anchor and a new habit.

Multi-repetition habits are superior to once-a-day habits. It’s easier to create a connotation between an anchor and a habit, the habit is developed faster and solidifies faster.

Modification of your tiny habit recipes is an indispensable part of the process. It teaches you that you are in control of your behaviors and creates a can-do attitude.

I hoped I inspired you to take your own Tiny Habits training.

 

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