The other day I was invited to an event called Launch48. It’s an online market event, aiming at pushing young entrepreneurs to launch a complete web application in 48 hours. I was invited to be part of the board. Little I knew about anything “launch48 related” until I made it there, I admit. Had no idea what a “board” means in this context, nor what exactly did I had to do.

I’m not going to give you any details about the technical part, but I do think there’s a lot to talk about the implications of the event at the personal development level.

The Set Up

So, just to be clear: the goal of the event was to launch a complete, functional web app in less than 48 hours. Young entrepreneurs had a 1 minute time frame in which they pitched their ideas. After an evaluation period (a few hours), a jury picked 3 ideas. Once that step completed, the initiators also picked their own teams to implement their idea. From this moment on, everything was under the time pressure.

Every few hours the project managers had board meetings, along with people from their team that they considered relevant for the actual stage of the project. In between, they met mentors who volonteered to help. Each mentor had some unique expertise: programming, marketing, business strategy.

At the end of the first day, the teams had to present an application in a so-called “alpha” stage. A workable proof of concept. At the end of the second day, they must came with a functional “beta”, which means: everything described must work, but bugs are acceptable. During these two days they also had to came up with a lot of related documents: business plans, marketing plans, competition analysis and so on.

The Board

The board members (yours truly included) had to “whip” the project managers, follow the progress, ensure the team is on the right track and even provide answers to critical questions. To be honest, I didn’t feel very comfortable playing this role, I never was the “whip” guy, but I did my best to fit in. As a member of the board I was also designated to host the final presentation. In the third day, all three teams presented their apps to a very picky audience (the event was integrated in NetCamp, one of the largest Internet related events in Romania, and not only). My role was to ensure their presentations will run smoothly and in the alloted time frame.

The Happy End

At the end of this marathon, everybody was happy (again, yours truly included). The apps were functioning, the business model was understandable and some teams even had the time to make a little buzz on Twitter or Facebook. It was a complete success.

Ok, now, what I learned from this event?

1. Working under Pressure Is Not Necessarily a Bad Thing

Looking at how those ad-hoc teams managed to communicate, to share tasks, roles and deal with impending difficulties was enlightening. Many of the team members didn’t know each other before. And yet, they managed to create a functioning unit and deliver a final product. In some way, looking at those teams was like looking at a whole year of an entire company’s life, only fast forward: new people, new ideas, coding, marketing plans, communication, failure, starting over. I will repeat myself, but this whole process was really enlightening.

2. When You Really Believe In Your Dream, Nothing Is Impossible

The project managers were also the “idea” guys. Out of several other ideas presented they have been lucky enough to be picked and to be provided with the resources they need. They were able to make their dream come true. In a kind of “sand-box” way, but still. Well, this is what we usually call “luck”. At some points in our life, we do receive all the resources we need for our goals, out of the blue. The lesson: when this is happening, push all the buttons, do whatever you can to make it happening. Don’t quit and be on top of it. In the end, it will really happen.

3. Focus On What Is Really Important

I will need a book to write down all those magnificent ideas ventured by the people involved, from the board members, to mentors, project managers, idea guys or just simple team members. But the time was too short to implement all of them. If they will implement every single strategy, monetization or technical idea, they wouldn’t have finish it in several months. The team leaders heavily exercised their choice muscles. And, again, this is what we do in real life too: we may have a gazillion ideas but if we don’t focus on something achievable and start doing it, we’ll end up with nothing but a bunch of useless, shiny ideas.

4. Discipline Pays Off

They couldn’t achieve something functional without discipline. No team was functioning at 100% and I really don’t think they could, under the circumstances. But all the people made a lot of effort to integrate and leave away distractions and interferences. Some of the team members didn’t even sleep the night before the presentation. Huge effort pays off. Always. Maybe you’re not always in such a fortunate condition to work uninterrupted for 48 hours and, admittedly, the whole event was more of an exercise, a show off, but still, the result is unchallengeable: discipline really pays off.

I want to congratulate all the people I have interacted with and express my honest admiration. It’s not by chance that I offered to each team leader a wild card to my mentorship program. Technical expertise apart, they were all winners and they proved they can stretch way beyond their limits. Also, I would very much want to thank for the invitation to Cristi Manafu, the organizer of this edition of Launch48 in Romania.

You have clients, deadlines and tons of work to do. You have to deliver results and stay on top of your lists. You have to be productive. Otherwise you’re out of the game. And being out of the game is not fun.

I had an online business for more than 10 years and I pretty much know all the thrills of it. It’s engaging, passionate and filled with action. You don’t have time to get bored. Unless you step out of the game. Which, as I already said, it’s not fun.

Over the years, I created, implemented and launched more than 25 online projects. Each with its own budget, promotion, human resources and logistic. Some of them had 2-3 years projections and even more. Some of them become market leaders, some of them dropped dead after a few months. And despite their success or failure I enjoyed doing them all.

In today’s post I’ll share the process I used to make all those projects alive. It got refined over the years, adding something here, cutting something from there. It aims to be simple enough to be applied to a niche blog, but sustainable enough for the next huge social network hit. Which is exactly what you’re working on right now, of course.

Online Projects In 5 Easy Steps

Every online project would answer to only 5 questions, and those are:

1. what is it?
2. who’s going to use it?
3. how does it look?
4. what does it do?
5. how can I do it?

Each question has its own role and specific implementation techniques. I told you, it’s not complicated. Let’s take them one at a time:

1. What Is It?

This is the cornerstone of your project. It has to be contained within only one sentence. For instance: google is a search engine. DMOZ is a link directory. Mashable is a social media blog.  You got the idea. Keeping it in only one sentence prevents you from starting mutant projects, with overlapping or even opposite functionalities. Usually, the first answer that pops into your head is the correct one, although you can get some improvements if you brainstorm it a little.

From my experience, if the root of your project is not clearly defined, you will have serious troubles later on. Too many times, on a technological, geeky rush, we tend to skip this step and go straight into implementation details. As fun as it may be for some of us, the development part is only the 5th part of this set of questions. Skipping the first 4 points will be like dining out naked: you can be sure you’ll make a huge impression, but you cannot be sure it will be the desired one.

2. Who’s Going To Use It?

The second question is about the beneficiary: who’s going to actually use your product? This is what I call “role playing project management”. Oh, this is the most entertaining question of all, that I can tell you. Impersonating other people is always fun. Trying to actually picture the portrait of a standard user for your project is enlightening. In a mirroring way, finding the fundamental traits of an ideal customer will reveal parts of your project you didn’t even know you had.

Another interesting segment of this step is to identify at least 3 consumer characteristics of your ideal user, regardless of your project. It’s a very fun exercise. For instance, how often does he goes to the movies? Or what kind of car does he drive? What tooth paste does he use? Does he use toothpaste at all? You may think right now: what’s the link between the toothpaste of an imaginary character and my online project? Well, if you can’t imagine the user of your project, chances are he doesn’t really exist.

3. How Does It Look?

This deals with the actual support of your project. An online project is not only a web site. It can spread unto other protocols, like email, or mobile. Most of the time, your online project will have at least web and email as its basic information support, but with the latest deployment in the mobile industry, including iPhone, you will have to include mobile as standard pretty soon.

Also at this level, you start to identify the type of messages you are going to use. It could be text, images, animations, video or audio. This step is mandatory and it will have an important impact in the final step. Many project managers call this “provisioning”, I used to call it “how does it look”. This stage will also be responsible with the logical structure of your project: home page, content pages and the relationship between them. You’re wireframing. And while you’re wireframing, it’s pretty smart to start designing your own SEO strategy before adding content to your product. Identify target keywords and hot content areas.

4. What Does It Do?

Slowly, we’re getting there.The 4th question deals with the flesh of your project. If wireframing means constructing bones, now you’re adding some flesh and blood. In this stage you’re defining your features list. Starting from the simple ones, like “I want a link bar at the top, containing these links” up to something like “this workflow will enhance user experience and make him stick with our product”. Or something in between.

I often found that in this stage of a project you can create some very basic unit tests. Don’t freak out, it’s nothing complicated, just a list of desired actions and expected results. If you create an ecommerce site, one of your desired activities in your estore could be “putting products in the shopping basket’‘. And the expected result would look like ”updating database with new values and showing this on to the user“. It can get complicated, of course, but this approach it’s a gold mine especially if you switch teams a lot.

5. How Can I Do It?

And it’s only in the final stage that we’re actually doing it. And we don’t even start with doing it, we start with planning it. Yeap, so far we didn’t have any plan at all. It’s time to create milestones, chose our technologies, start coding and get on with the launch. This is by far the most exciting stage of an online project and many entrepreneurs are starting directly here. Now you understand why we had to chose around question no 3 the types of messages we will use. Because based on those choices we are choosing technologies right now.

From this stage ahead, you can leverage everything you learned about planing, coding and launching. This is pretty much what you do every day, only you can do it now without constantly asking if you’re doing the right thing. You already decided this. You already answered every question which could potentially become a leak in your planing. And that’s refreshing.

One more thing: after you finally launch the project, getting back to the question number 1 ”What is it?“ would be really interesting. You may have some surprises

***

This project management flow was part of a presentation I did a while ago at a local tech event. If you’re interested, you can download the mind map used for the presentation (a screenshot of it is just below this paragraph) Managing online projects in 5 easy steps (754) - 146.54 KB. Also, feel free to ask any questions about this strategy in comments.

What do you want to happen to you? How do you envision your desired outcome? How do you set up expectations?

In my experience, setting up expectations is one of the most sensitive areas in our lives. Because every time you set yourself up to something, your surroundings are changing. I find this amazing. You start to look at the world differently, because you expect it to behave in a certain way and the world actually start to change. But I find more than often this change to be the result of the way you set up your expectations. To be more precise, the changing speed of the world is directly influenced by the size of your expectations. Aim for less, and your world will change slower. Think big, and your world will explode.

One Step At A Time

Suppose you have a blog. You are comfortable writing, you have a decent posting routine and already started to think about monetization. But you can’t really ask money from your blog, unless you have a decent traffic. So, you set up some expectations here. Let’s say: I want 50 views per article. Not bad for a new blog.

In a certain amount of time, your articles are starting to get that. They are making 50-60 views. Interesting. Your expectations have been met. Now you can start putting some advertising on your blog, you can even try a little bit of AdSense and get a grasp of this entire monetization thing.

Sooner than you think, you realize that 50-60 views per blog post is not enough. It might be good for some peanuts money, but not enough for paying a vacation in Hawaii. So, you raise the stake. You set up higher expectations: 500-600 hits for every blog post.

In another certain amount of time, you get that too. Not only you get 500-600 views per article, but you get some residual traffic too, from your older posts. And that traffic starts to add up. It’s getting better and better. Now you make enough money from your blog to afford a nice two weeks vacation on an exotic island.

But then again, you realize that this can be better. Instead of spending only two weeks on an exotic island you start thinking why not spending half a year there? And the other half on some mountains resort? You have enough experience in blogging and now you know how to do it. So, you raise it again: 5000-6000 views per blog post.

Again, in a certain amount of time, you get there. Now you make so much money from your blog that your entire lifestyle has changed. You live where you want on this planet, when you want. Travel is something natural and your money problems are gone forever. Your expectations have been met, once again.

From the moment you set up your initial expectations, of 50-60 views per article, up to the moment you get 5000-6000 views per article, several years have passed.

Disruptive Approach

Now suppose you have the same blog, you are the same person, only you set up different expectations. Instead of aiming at 50-60 views for your articles, you aim directly for 5000-6000 views. What happens now?

Well, the same thing: in a certain amount of time, your expectations will be met. You will reach that goal. The only difference is that you won’t take those baby steps.

From the moment you set up your initial expectations, of 5000-6000 views per article, up to the moment you get 5000-6000 views per article, a certain time have passed.

But, (yes, there is a “but” here), in my direct experience, this period of time is less than the years in the baby step approach.

And I’m supporting my affirmation with this very blog. When I started it, a year ago, I aimed for 100k visits each month. I’m there now. That was my expectation. I didn’t even care when I had fewer than that. I never acknowledged the gradual increase, month by month. I watched the numbers, of course, but I didn’t acknowledged the gradual, small increase, as a success. Instead, I was focused on the bigger numbers. And I was also focused on writing the best content I can, sharing my knowledge and promoting it. I only did 2 milestones: one at the first 6 months of blogging and the other at the first year of blogging.

So, what’s the difference? Why so many people are setting for those baby steps? Why don’t they start thinking and acting “big” from the first time? Here’s what I think about this.

Fear of Failure

People are afraid of taking big steps because they are afraid of making big failures. Somehow, a smaller failure sounds like something more bearable. I’m puzzled by that, to be honest. A failure is a failure. There is no quality of it. You either succeed, you either don’t. A smaller failure is just a social construct. You’re accepted if you fail under a certain threshold. If you go beyond that, you’re not accepted anymore. Regardless of the fact you failed both times.

Fear of making mistakes was definitely something that kept me away for achieving some of my earlier goals. I was so convinced that if I will fail “small” nothing will really happen to me. Well, I did failed small a couple of times. And guess what: nothing was really happened to me.

Living In Your Comfort Zone

We’re designed to act and evolve in a circle of safety. We call this the comfort zone. Setting up great expectations forces you to leave this comfort zone and act on moving sands. Leaving the comfort zone is difficult. It’s costly. It’s demanding. So, why leave it if you can act from the inside and take only baby steps?

Acting too much inside your comfort zone will make you weak. Setting up expectations too close to your comfort zone will never create breakthroughs. You will reach those expectations and you will be successful, no doubt about it. But in my personal experience, a linear evolution will eventually lead to stagnation. Big achievements require big leaps not baby steps.

Overprotecting Your Self-Esteem

We cannot function properly without self-esteem. We need this as a fuel for our own identity. If we cannot properly identify ourselves with inner models we value, then our acts will start to be confusing. Self-esteem is something we tend to protect with great vigor. It’s deep down at the core of our values. The moment we lose our self-esteem we are literally at lose, embracing any possible and available behavior.

Any disruptive attempt will shake this self-esteem. Both ways. A huge expectation will boost your self-esteem. And a huge failure will bring it down. So, in order to keep our self-esteem within reasonable figures, we avoid big expectations. We put a layer of safety around this core value and try to protect it. Only we can’t really protect self-esteem by avoiding big expectations. It’s like trying to build up muscle by reading fitness books.

Ignoring Self-Discipline

Setting smaller expectations is usually a sign of a short attention span. We cannot focus on long term tasks, so we chose something smaller. After each small victory we set up another small task, and so on. Baby steps are the result of a baby discipline. While there is nothing wrong with being a child, if you really want to achieve your goals, you should aim for something bigger than the living room coach. It’s a perfect goal for a one year old who’s starting to walk, but it’s ridiculous for a grown up who wants to travel the world.

Self-discipline is the ability to do what you have to do, period. Liking it or not is not a question of self-discipline, it’s a question of liking it or not. Doing what you have to do is so simple, yet people tend to mix it every time with this hedonistic approach: oh, well, I might do this, but I don’t like it. Get over it. You’ve set up your own goal, you’ve schedule the tasks, now do it.

The Art Of Setting Great Expectations

Be fearless, get out of your comfort zone, value yourself no matter what and don’t quit.

Yes, as simple as that.

What would you recommend to a complete alien to do on Earth, between his birth and his death? Suppose you’re going to meet a tiny little green man, who will naively ask you: “Hey, mate, what’s the thing with this Earth?”. What are the 25 things that would create for him an unforgettable, yet totally customized (as in specific to you, and only you) experience?

I know you’re used to much bigger lists on my blog, but this one is different. Its’ not a blogging challenge, nor a method to stretch my writing skills. It’s just an honest transcription of the answers to the question: “what do you want to do in your life?”. It may not be spectacular at all, but it is for real. It may not be complete, but you are here to give me more hints. It may not be the only list of things to do in your life on the Internet, but it’s mine. And you can grow your own list from it too.

Here’s what I’d say it’s worth doing between birth and death to a complete alien who just arrived here on Earth:

1. Fall in Love

As often as you can. Experience the abandon of yourself in front of something bigger than you and the object of your love altogether. Don’t actively look for it, but merely be prepared to receive it when it finds you.

2. Climb a Mountain

Everest will be fine. Of course, if you can’t do Everest, any mountain will do. Did it a few times and every time I descended I left a small part of me on that desert plateau. Now all I want is to get back again and rejoin it.

3. Make a Million Dollars

And spend it all. Did both and felt good. For me, this was the best way to get rid of the “money as a number” obsession. After you did this once, things will look very different. You’ll never be afraid of having and spending money.

4. Go Round the World by Plane

Did that too. Bucharest – Rome – Las Vegas – Los Angeles – Auckland – Bangkok – Vienna – Bucharest. Spent more than 45 hours in planes in less than 2 weeks but although I was tired as hell, it felt incredibly rewarding. The world is really small.

5. Fish with Your Bare Hands

Did this when I was a child, in a village in the middle of Romania. My parents used to leave me for the summer at my grand parents house, which was near a creek, 20 cm deep at most. We used to block one of the creek’s ways with sand, and while the other one was slowly drying we were picking small fish with our bare hands.

6. Learn a Foreign Language

Or maybe two or three. Try to depict the world for a few weeks using the new words you learned. In a magical way the world will be enriched just because you describe it in a different way. It’s like you re-create it every time you talk about it using different words in a different language.

7. Sail across the Ocean

Didn’t do it. Yet. But I’d love to be on a boat sailing across the Oceans. Waking up each day only to see the infinite water stretching in front of my eyes. Experiencing the bare confrontation with something hugely more powerful than me, yet able to become my ally.

8. Start Your Own Business

Like an outlet for doing more of what you want and creating more of what you love. I did it out of curiosity 10 years ago and still enjoying the benefits. It’s not only about being your own boss (although it feels incredibly good ) but about taking more responsibility.

9. Have Kids

And raise them. It’s not what you can teach them, but mostly what you can learn from your kids. It seems that somehow along the way we lose the ability to enjoy life the way we used to. Kids are here to remind us that we’re here to enjoy life. Together.

10. Build a House

If it’s yours, even better. Building a house is a powerful maturity test. It’s far more difficult than it seems and it really changes some of your internal values. Didn’t do that yet, only witnessing it at some of my friends, but definitely something I want to do in this lifetime.

11. Take a Year Off from Work

I think they call this sabbatical. I did this after I sold my business, last year. Well, it wasn’t technically a year without work at all, because I started and maintained this blog. But since I don’t really call this work, I think it will do. Your entire life perspective shifts after one year off the hook.

12. Get Married

And the moment you don’t like it anymore, get a divorce. The way humankind is working nowadays, marriage is still a key type of relationship. Even if you crave for a much more open type of interaction, you can’t really get all its benefits until you experience all the joys and sorrows of marriage.

13. Write a Book

Any type of book. Whatever you feel the need to share. May be an ebook if you don’t have the time or resources to go for a printed one, but I think everybody should write a book in his lifetime. If only to let other people that he really lived and how.

14. Run a Marathon

Didn’t do this yet, but I crave for it. I don’t know why, but I feel like this is an important body milestone. Pushing the limits over what you think you can do, knowing that you did it.

15. Share a Dream with Somebody

Maybe it’s a house you want to build with your partner. Or traveling the world together. Whatever it is, if it’s a shared dream is really worth striving for it, even if – or especially if – it’s for your entire lifetime. Shared dreams are most of the time at the roots of our physical reality.

16. Completely Change Your Career

At least once. I did it twice so far, going from being a radio anchor to being an online entrepreneur and then a full time blogger. Don’t spend your precious time in the same boring job until you die, it’s not worth it. Yes, there is risk involved. Which is great!

17. Help a Completely Unknown Person

Have you ever thought how it is to go to someone you never met and help him? Sometimes without even letting him know? This is what I call an anonymous random act of kindness and I’ve done it more than once. Mostly for how it made me feel, I admit.

18. Don’t Talk for a Week

I didn’t do this but I want to do it. We’ve been trained to talk so much that we can’t rejoice silence anymore. Somehow, we replaced the unbiased, direct experience of life with second hand experiences through words. A week of silence should at least make the speaking fun again after you finish it.

19. Attend a Funeral

When I first attended a funeral I was too little so I didn’t quite understand what was going on. Only after I grasped some of the concepts of what we generally call death, I was able to fully understand it. It’s a celebration, not a mourning. This is why Zorba dances at funerals.

20. Live in a Complete Foreign Country for at Least a Week

Did that when I spent 7 days in Japan, without knowing the language and almost without anybody around speaking English. After all the frustration was gone it proved to be an incredible experience. We can interact and live in so many ways without spoken language and beyond it.

21. Plant a Tree

Did it so many times when I was a kid and was spending my summers at my grandparents in the country side. Did it again when I moved into a new house a few years ago. It’s like making a two-ways gift: you allow a life form to exist while receiving all the benefits of its existence.

22. Write a Poem

It’s not about literature here, no need to inspire millions with your words (but if it happens to do that, even better). Just let them flow through your soul and speak your feelings. When I was in my last year of college I wrote several hundreds poems but never showed them to anyone.

23. Climb the Highest Point in Your City

I don’t know why, but I’m addicted to this one. Everywhere I travel I look for the highest point and go there: Paris, Auckland, Tokyo, Vienna, Prague, they all have a tower structure. It gives me a fantastic feeling of freedom and “everything is possible” when I look at the cities from above.

24. Lose a Battle

Let go of something really important for you. It might be a person you love, or a thing you’re hanging on. Just let it flow away and continue to live your life. It will help you understand that your existence is not confined within the boundaries of a single person or a single thing.

25. Swim with the Dolphins

Didn’t do it yet, but I’m obsessed with dolphins. There is an unspeakable feeling of being free and at the same time shared in another dimension in this image, that I can almost get the shivers only by thinking at it. I also think it would become some sort of addiction once I’ll get to it.

What are your 25 things? What would you absolutely, unreservedly and unconditionally would want to do in your lifetime?  Why? Share those dreams here, in the comments, or on your own blog. Just link back so I can discover you.

If you dream about something, let it out and dare do make it real.

A couple of months ago I wrote a blog post about 100 Ways To Live A Better Life. The post got featured almost instantly on Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Since then, it gets a few hundreds hits every day and a new comment every once in while (although it’s more than 2 months old now). But re-reading it the other day I spotted a slight imbalance. Couldn’t tell at first what it was, but it was an imbalance. Like a picture with too much pink.

Then it hit me: life is not pink. It’s rough and challenging and filled with tests and temptations. And this is what makes it beautiful, after all. Living a better life stems most of the time from making a lot of mistakes and learning from them, rather than from avoiding challenges. Better try and fail than isolate yourself in a sea of delusion and non-action. As pink as that sea might be.

So, I realized I know at least 100 ways to screw up your life too. And I also realized that this list would make an honest companion to the first blog post. Like a mirror or something. Oh, and if you wonder, the following 100 ways to screw up your life were personally verified at some point in my life by yours truly. And now I’m pretty happy about that .

Without further ado, let’s start:

1. Regret Stuff

Feel sorry about what happened to you. Spend time and energy on things that aren’t even there, but you feel are “unsolved yet”. Keep your focus on the past and ignore the present. This is what regrets do: they tie you down to things in the past that doesn’t matter anymore. Well, you can’t do anything about them anyway: accept and move on.

2. Accept to Be Lied To

Even if you know you’re lied. Accept to be told lies in the name of something “bigger” than you: a family, a career, anything. Eat it up every day while knowing the truth and still accepting that other, twisted reality, hoping at some point things will go better. They won’t. And there is no such thing as something bigger than you.

3. Stay in the Wrong Partnership

Wrong partnerships may be both personal or professional. You may think it’s just temporary or even “it might be good for you” but you’re just deluding yourself. Wrong partnerships are nothing but swamps: they’ll slowly drag you down. If you don’t get out of them the moment you realize they’re wrong for you, you’ll become one with the swamp.

4. Succumb to Addictions

Make them “bigger” than you. Call it alcohol or just an addiction to fight. Call it work, as in workaholic, or eating much more than you need. Call it drugs or just an addiction to a person (co-dependence). Giving in to addictions is a conscious act of surrender. You accept to lose a battle. And then another one. Slowly, you’ll going to lose the war.

5. Dream Without Taking Action

Daydreaming is good. It opens your heart to new universes and goals. But daydreaming without action is useless. Sitting on your fat ass while waiting for all your intentions to manifest, without taking the smallest action for moving things forward, won’t change anything. Oh, sorry, it will change something: you ass will be fatter.

6. Sleep More Than You Need

Because you’re too tired of doing the same stupid things again while you’re awake. Or because you’re avoiding your real life, searching for a shallow refuge under the pillow. And, of course, lose all the opportunities you could embrace while you’re sleeping. Becoming an early riser, on the other hand, is more than often priceless.

7. Play The Guilt Card

If you did something wrong, instead of a) assessing what was really wrong, b) learn the lesson and c) move on, play the guilt card. Feel guilty for all the bad things you did, until you start feeling guilty for all the things you did. Playing the guilt card is closely related to religion, but it can occur outside religion too. Just get over it. Guilt can’t pay your rent.

8. Victimize Yourself

If you lost something, act like you’ve lost everything. Be a victim. Ask for other people’s compassion. Play like every people you meet makes whatever omelet he wants from you. Victimizing yourself in exchange of compassion is far more common than you think. It’s contagious too. Just remember you may lose a battle, but that’s not making you a victim.

9. Avoid Introspection

As difficult as it seems, every once in a while you should step back and interview yourself. Bite the bullet and ask yourself a bunch of tough questions. Better give a wrong answer now to a difficult question, but move on with your life, than ignoring what’s going on with you and remain stuck. Introspection always pays forward.

10. Work Harder Than You Can

And ruin your health while pretending you’re sacrificing for the good of the … (fill in the blanks: family, friends, boss, career, planet). You have physical limits and usually that’s a good thing. Breaking up your physical limits in the name of a stupid cause will screw up your life faster than you think. And for a long time. Work smarter, not harder.

11. Don’t Play

Because it’s stupid, it wastes your time and energy and it doesn’t give you any measurable results. Don’t play and lose the only divine thing that you get for free. Don’t play and let your inner child become a gray adult with heavy topics to discuss every minute. Don’t play and watch how your life gets seriously screwed up.

12. Stop Learning

Because you already know too much or because what you will learn will not give you any competitive advantage in the narrow niche you’re playing now. Stop learning because there’s so much to discover that you won’t cover it even in a dozen lifetimes. Stop learning because it gets so difficult and it takes you out of your comfort zone. Yeah, why bother? Screw it!

13. Gossip

Talk bad about other people. That’s a 100% sure way to screw up your relationships, your social credibility, your personal values. The way you talk about people often determines the way you act towards them. Gossip is a heavy weapon and, no matter how skilled you get at using it, it always destroys its owner. Do it often. It will accelerate the decay process.

14. Aim To Be Famous

And do all the stupid things other people expect from famous people in the process. Beg for attention, hunt the hype, dress like a douche. Cheat your friends for the sake of some media visibility or discard your personal life. Being famous is not at all a guarantee that you will automatically live a fulfilling life. Most of the time, the opposite is true.

15. Follow The Money

While this could be a very precious advice for an entrepreneur, living your entire life in a continuous chase of money will most likely screw you up. Hunting money is difficult because money is a very volatile concept. A big part of it lives only in your mind. And money can only buy things. See what you can do with a bank check in a morgue. Pretty much nothing.

16. Don’t Make Friends

Stay alone. Don’t connect. Because you’re ashamed of something in your behavior or look. Or because you think you’re too good for them. Whatever the reason, just stay away for people, and, by all means, don’t make new friends. And you will get the most exquisite place at your own drama movie, in which, you guessed, your life eventually gets screwed.

17. Fight Your Enemies

Which comes down to first make and then keep some enemies. Which is all round stupid. Enemies are a mental construct. You can’t have enemies unless you’re ready to give away your power to somebody else. Nobody can really hurt you unless you allow this to happen. Fighting your enemies is in fact feeding your enemies.

18. Be Lazy

Like in not doing any type of work. Totally avoiding responsibilities. Waiting for others to do stuff for you. Staying away from anything that might remotely put you in the position to actually do something helpful for other people. Laziness is a disease in itself. Allowing it to spread into your life is like inviting an illness to take over your body.

19. Don’t Take Risks

Live a cozy life and always keep it into your comfort zone. Don’t get out of there. Taking risks is… well, risky. You can get hurt. You can lose your money. You can fail. But taking risks is also the only way you can grow. There is no real growth without risk. There is no victory without even starting a battle. There is no better life without challenges.

20. Be Selfish

Do things for yourself and for yourself only. Act like you’re the only one in the Universe. Don’t share anything. Aim to be the richest, most powerful and influential person in the world. Selfishness is an incredibly effective limitation factor. You will become the richest person in the world, if you really want to, only your world will become incredibly small: you’ll be its only inhabitant.

21. Gamble

Start fighting with randomness. Hope that one lucky hit will end up all your troubles. Gambling is really funny as an entertainment activity, but once you make it the core of your life, you’re sinking into a swamp of despair. You can’t use gambling to solve your problems, you’re simply not designed like this. You’re designed to create and enjoy the process.

22. Be Stuck in a Job You Hate

Because it pays well. Or because you’re too scared to look for another one. Or because somebody told you when you were a kid that you have to have a job. You spend more than half of your lifetime at your job so if you chose to stay in a job you hate, you’ll surely end up hating your entire life. In my experience, it happens rather sooner than later.

23. Don’t Listen

Pretend you know everything. Or act like you don’t need any advice, suggestion or feed-back. Don’t listen to your partner, to your friends, to your intuition. And lose all the new perspectives you can get, all the fresh answers you never thought of and all the opportunities that could arise. Don’t listen and be prepared to face failure really fast.

24. Lie To People

Because you want to get something from them. Because you find pleasure in deceiving them. Because you think it’s just an innocent play. Or because you can’t stand telling the truth. Lying to other people is an addiction because it gives you a temporary feeling of relief: you passed this challenge, now you can move on. Only you can’t, really.

25. Lie To Yourself

Don’t believe what you’re feeling or experiencing. Avoid facing the truth and delude yourself. Live in a land of fantasies and hope everything will be great (or worse, if you’re a pessimistic by nature). Just don’t listen to your inner voice and succumb to social pressure, bad habits or negative emotions. Lying to yourself is a suicidal activity.

26. Don’t Ask For Help

And live like on a desert island, isolated and alone. It’s ok to ask for help every once in a while. It’s ok to be taken care of every once in a while. Just don’t make a habit out of it and you’ll be fine. But remember: you won’t be able to cope with everything in your life just by yourself. You’ll get by with a little help from your friends.

27. Don’t Exercise

No need to become an athlete but if you’re not taking care of your physical body, it won’t take care of you either. Avoiding physical activities, as small or insignificant they may seem, it will slowly degrade your physical performance and make you prone to illness. And if you just think how easy it is to take a walk in the park…

28. Eat Junk

From the same category as the one above: feed yourself crap and you’ll produce crap. And I’m not talking about the residual crap we’re all producing in the process, I’m talking about the direct result of the process. We’re very much influenced by what we eat and any imbalance in this area will be visible instantly. Junk food creates junk life.

29. Don’t Spend Time in Nature

We’re pretty far from creating a perfectly balanced artificial living environment. Our cities are sucking up our power instead of feeding us energy. We’re still children of the nature. Avoiding nature in the name of a super-civilized lifestyle will subtly deprive us from one of the most forceful sources of energy, slowly weakening our strengths.

30. Don’t Clean Up Your House

How not cleaning up your house can screw up your life? Well, it will not screw you directly, unless you chose to have a date with the love of your life in your messy house, in which case your chances will dramatically decrease. But, generally speaking, it will set up the field for other bad things to happen, like procrastination or just plain, old laziness.

31. Procrastinate

Postpone tasks. Avoid doing stuff. Daydream. Procrastinate and delay everything you have to do. That will surely help screw up your professional relationships, your personal life and your self esteem. If you want to became a master in procrastination, here’s a small tutorial which will even help you procrastinate in a more productive way.

32. Spend More Than You Can Afford

Because you don’t have any idea what money is or just because you want to keep up with the Joneses. Spending more than you can afford will not only sink you in debt, but it will make it really difficult to get out of there. It’s not how much you have but how much you are. Not to mention that spending more than you have will never make you rich.

33. Limit Your Social Life

Stop going out. Isolate yourself in the safety of a job, a limited family life or a perpetual and meaningless daydreaming. We’re social animals, even though sometimes we’re not that good at it. If you stop going out you’re cutting up your feed-back loop, slowly going down in a spiral of self-sufficiency and mediocrity. Get out, see people!

34. Chose a Career Instead of a Lifestyle

Too often we’re planning our life career-centric. We’re making all the necessary steps for acquiring skills, titles and diplomas. We try to fit in a more or less guaranteed career. What we forget in the process is that a career is not identical with our life. At the end of the day we often ask ourselves who was the person who talked with our mouth…

35. Treat People Like Assets

Instead of treating them like human beings, with their own lives and expectations. This is especially true if you live by the one above, judging your own life expectations in business terms. People are not assets, like a computer. They have lives and hopes and ups and downs. Assets are dead, people are alive, with all the good or bad that comes with being alive.

36. Chose (And Stay In) The Wrong Friendships

You know they’re the wrong ones when you have to do things you don’t really want, just to be accepted in their circle. You know, drinking your life every night or just dressing up in a certain way. A real friend will never put any condition on your relationship. If you don’t have the courage to step out of this bad circle, expect the circle to eat you.

37. Reject Criticism

You don’t know everything in the world. So, instead of rejecting criticism, you should accept it. Maybe they won’t be always right about you, but at least you’ll have a feed-back loop. Many people fear criticism but in my experience this fear is not justified. Be thankful for your critics, it means you’re still worth something. And it also means you’re improvable.

38. Buy Your Relationships

Substitute the warmness of a normal relationship with the practical coldness of money. While this will certainly ease your day to day living, it will deeply affect your emotional level. Many marriages are putting so much strain on this aspect that they succeed in destroying any trace of true emotional bond between the partners. Just live and let live.

39. Follow The Rules

Eat everything they feed you, talk like they teach you and, by all means, don’t swear when you feel like. Just don’t exercise your own choosing abilities and you’ll soon become a perfect social puppet, ready to be manipulated with invisible strings by the first puppeteer who finds you. Following rules should always be backed up with your own judgment.

40. Don’t Manage Your Money

We still live in a world where money plays an important role. Several generations from now maybe money won’t be necessary, but, until then, you should be able to manage it now. That means making day to day living up to investing or building a lifestyle. Just pay attention to it and manage it, that enough will save you from some nasty troubles.

41. Promise More Than You Can Do

Because you’re ashamed to admit you can’t do more, or because you hope things will magically get better. Promising more than you can cope with is often perceived as a way to push the destiny to obey your wishes. I think it’s the other way around. The more your promise without cover, the more you piss off your fate.

42. Don’t Keep Your Promises

Not keeping promises is another way to say to the world: “I’m not a reliable person, please go away from me. I may be very good at promises and make you believe I can offer a lot, but instead, I’m just lying to you.” Better not promise at all than not keeping your promises.

43. Overdo

Improve where there’s no improvement needed. Strive to do things nobody really wants. Do more than you have to just to show off. Many people think that going way over what they are expecting to, in order to impress or just hunt for a promotion, will make their life easier. Too bad that when you get that promotion you’ll be too dried out to enjoy.

44. Quit

Quit doing what you’re doing best. Quit your friends when they need you. Quit your partner because you got bored. Just quit. Instead of staying there and do what you have to do, just run away, cover your eyes and pretend it never happened. Being a quitter is one of the most relaxing ways of living. It’s also the safest way to screw up your life too.

45. Say Only Yes

Be submissive even if you don’t agree. Accept others around just because you’re too scared to tell them they are annoying.. And, by all means, don’t you upset anyone. Saying only “yes” it’s incredibly disempowering. You can’t say “yes” to anything in your life. At some point you’ll have to disagree. Be happy about it: it’s a healthy thing.

46. Say Only No

Be a naysayer. Disagree no matter what. Tell them you know better. Or just don’t accept anything around you because you have such “high” standards. Playing the “No” card every time will create higher and higher walls around you. Being a naysayer will be as bad as being a yes-man. Balance your “No”’s and “Yes”’s with your own judgment.

47. Be A Control Freak

Try to control everything in your life. Your happiness. Other people happiness. Your colleagues or employees. Your emotions. The weather. Being a control freak will eliminate any trace of authenticity in your life. It could drastically improve your discipline and self-awareness, but without authenticity you’re as screwed as a robot.

48. Walk Your Life In Somebody Else’s Shoes

Be somebody else. Chose a role model and stick with it until the boundaries of your own personality are melting and you don’t know who you really are. When you answer you will speak his answer. When you chose, you will make his choices. Chose to be somebody else and leave your true life behind. While totally screwing it, of course.

49. Be Cheap

Try to bargain everything in your life. Negotiate while shopping up to the point every salesman will be pissed off and give you stuff for free. Do this for your relationships too. And, in the end, without even noticing, you’ll become cheap too. Things of value requires value. Looking only for cheap relationships will lower your market value too.

50. Abuse Others

Overuse. Dry out. Obtain things by twisting people arms. If possible, make it in the name of a higher cause. Take other people resources. Doesn’t make any difference if the resources are emotional or material, just take them without asking. Only because you can. And before you’ll know it you’ll become the first target of your own abusive behavior.

51. Accept To Be Abused

Be somebody else’s toy. Because you “can’t do better”. Or because “you deserve it”. Or because “this is how it is and it can’t be changed”. I know you won’t agree but accepting abuse is on the same vibration with abusing. Although in certain contexts it seems you can’t escape being abused, you always have a choice. Always.

52. Try To Please Everybody

And lose every single trace of authenticity and originality you have. There are billions of people on this Earth and during your lifetime you will meet several dozens of thousands. How can you possibly imagine you will be able to please each and every one of them? Unless all you need from this life is a perfectly numb mediocrity.

53. Feed The Trolls

At some point in your life you will meet the trolls. People who live to disagree no matter what. People who make a living by talking bad about other people. If you’re up to something in your life, they will spot you. The biggest mistake you can do is to feed them, to talk to them and make them believe they’re important. Don’t. Let them talk and starve.

54. Don’t Look People In The Eyes

Eye contact is fundamental for relationships. How do you feel about people who are talking to you while looking in a completely different direction? Well, this is exactly how they feel too about you, without eye contact. Without looking in the eyes of your conversation partner, you’re talking to the ghosts in your head. Sooner than you think, you’ll talk only to them.

55. Don’t Believe In Signs

The universe is giving you hints. All the time. With patience and trust you can learn how to read them. It’s nothing supernatural, just a way of living in the flow, instead of feeling disconnected and powerless. Ignoring the “signs” it’s like going to a live concert with your ears clogged. You may not get a cold, but you’re also going to miss all the fun.

56. Don’t Travel

Stay at home. Don’t leave your city, your country, your continent. Don’t expose yourself to new situations, to new cultures, to new people. Don’t experience the thrills of discovery, don’t risk your life among perfect strangers. Without traveling, you’re limiting your possibilities and completely screw your life by total and undeniable boredom.

57. Don’t Read Books

No. They’re evil. They can open your mind, challenge your creativity and feed your curiosity. Don’t touch them. Reading books can be extremely dangerous for anyone settling for a boring, limited and tasteless life. So, if you plan to totally screw up your life, stay away from books. In some occasions, they alone can change your life completely.

58. Live by Assumptions

Don’t verify what they tell you or what you think it’s true. Just assume it’s right. Living by assumptions is a sign of weakness and lack of courage. Have the courage to face the things and find out the truth. If you don’t do that, your reality will be affected the same way a house is affected by a faulty row of bricks. At the next earthquake, it will crumble.

59. Be Shy

Don’t express yourself because you fear other people reactions. Shyness is a social disease. And, as any other disease, it may be cured. If you think this is how you are and you can’t be changed, you’re letting your shyness to control your life, your opportunities, your relationships. It takes courage to use courage, so all you have to do is the first step.

60. Live By Habit

Spend your life on autopilot. Don’t get out of routine. Create a new habit for everything in your life, from eating to making love. And then give your consciousness away to those habits. Live outside new challenges. Sleepwalk from the second you wake up to the moment you go to bed. And you won’t even recognize how screwed you are.

61. Avoid Mistakes

Chose the fool proof way. Don’t try something that could potentially lead to a mistake. Because, you know, your position may be compromised, or your career could suffer from it. Mistakes are in fact disguised opportunities. It feels bad when you’re wrong, I know, but it feels even worse to realize that you didn’t learn anything from it.

62. Pay Yourself Last

Sacrifice your time, money and energy in a totally screwed altruism. Ignore your own needs and try to fulfill others needs just to receive some appreciation. You can’t really give something unless you have it first. Becoming an altruist when you don’t even have your own house or income is a sign of delusion. Pay yourself first.

63. Hate

Use all your energy to hate others. Because they have a different skin color, a different religion or just more resources than you. Hating uses the same process as love: it connects you with somebody else. But at the end of the connection hates puts destruction, while love puts union. Whenever you’re hating, you’re using your own power against you.

64. Be A Perfectionist

Try to reach perfection instead of just being better. In the process, screw up everybody around, including yourself. Perfection is a mind concept, it doesn’t exist in real life. Perfection has everything you have, minus real life. All perfect things are dead things. So, aiming to be perfect in what you do or want to become is a dead end too.

65. Sabotage Yourself

Self-sabotage is more powerful than you think. It works in such a subtle way that you may even take it as a normal act of thinking. Whenever you’re close to a big achievement, watch your self-sabotaging reactions: are you ashamed of success? Afraid of it? Do you think successful people are bad? Congratulations, you’re sabotaging yourself.

66. Waste Your Power On Useless Stuff

Ok, you gathered enough power to do something great, but instead, you waste it on meaningless stuff. Welcome to the world of shallowness. Having power is not enough, you got to double it with consciousness and vision. Without these ingredients, your power will most likely diverge and decay, aimlessly pointed at things with no meaning.

67. Be Ungrateful

Like in just avoiding saying “thank you”, or “I’m glad we did this”. Gratitude is a magnet, it attracts a lot of what you’re associating it with. When you don’t use gratitude, you let things floating away in a Brownian motion, totally random and out of your control. On the contrary, when you experiment gratitude, you let things you’re grateful for flow your way. Is that simple.

68. Think Bad About Yourself

Instead of repeating to yourself that you are unable to do this or that, you may as well shoot yourself in the foot. Just by thinking you’re no good, you’ll actually become a person who is not good. You literally are what you think about you. The good news is you can dissolve those negative opinions. All you have to do is to first admit you have them.

69. Fake It Till You Make It

There is this advice of “being in sync” with what you want, largely based on the Law of Attraction. While this is certainly a valuable approach, faking your desired goal will not bring it closer, on the contrary. What you should do is to try to feel comfortable in the skin of you new “you”, not to pretend you’re the new “you”. The Universe always knows when you’re lying.

70. Don’t Manage Your Time

Time is the only non-renewable resource you have. Not managing your time is almost as bad as not managing your money. Only worse . You can make more money later, but you can’t create more time. Each and every second you have is a new chance. But if you don’t stay on top of your schedule, somebody else will use your chances.

71. Solve The Wrong Problems

Keep your focus on the wrong side of the problem. Like in how much you can save, instead of how much you can really gain. Inverse evaluation is one of the trickiest things in our life. We tend to evaluate a thing by its opposite. Like being happy when we eliminate 2 kilos of trash from our house, instead of just keeping it clean day by day.

72. Be Judgmental

Criticize constantly. Focus on the bad stuff. Don’t even think to bring in the bright side of the things. Disapprove, be negative, hypercritical and deprecating. Reject any trace of appreciation or balance. In just a few weeks, your life will be totally screwed. Who wants around a guy who is never, ever able to see the full half of the glass? Nobody.

73. Complain

About everything, everywhere, every time you get a chance. Complaining is another powerful magnet, just like gratitude. But instead of attracting the good stuff, it attracts its subject. Basically, the more you complain about something, the more of that something you are getting. If you want to fail at something, start by complaining about it.

74. Accept Crap

Instead of just rejecting the thing you don’t want, take it up. Instead of making your point, expressing your desires and throwing away everything you don’t really want, accept crap. And you’ll get it. Most of the time the only reason we get crap in our lives is our express authorization: please, give me more. Sometimes, all you have to do is to say “stop it”.

75. Take It Personally

Like you are the center of the Universe and everybody has something against you. Take it personally at the weather, at the politics, at the economical crisis, at everything. Just move forward with this mindset and everything around you will actually start to have something against you. Don’t take more pun than you’re expected to.

76. Don’t Laugh

Be serious. Grave and sober. Don’t smile and, by all means, don’t allow yourself to laugh. Because laughing will bring down your walls, it will crush your entire black edifice of a stony-faced, serious person, preoccupied with important issues. Not laughing is the stupidest thing you can do to yourself. Laugh is for free, everything else in life is not.

77. Envy

Look up to everything other people have and feel bad you don’t have it too. Envy their lifestyle, their richness, their freedom. If possible let them know that as often as you can. Envy is a form of worship: only instead of praising its object it’s diminishing its performer. Every time you envy somebody you’re in fact lowering yourself.

78. Leave The Passion Out

Don’t put your heart in your life. Leave it away and try to get on with cold calculus or with bare logic. Leave the passion out of your life and become an empty carcass, walking only by the law of physics. Passion is the only thing that can completely shift your life. Leaving passion out of your life is living a life of a walking dead man.

79. Be A Follower

Don’t start anything by yourself. Don’t do anything without asking permission. Be a follower and always look for somebody ready to carry your responsibility too. That’s a perfect way to live a dull, gray and futureless life. Being a follower will amputate your bravery and guts, leaving you at the mercy of some mediocre role model.

80. React Instead Of Act On Things

Be always a second late. Don’t initiate. Don’t start. React instead of acting. This attitude, although providing a little bit of safety, will put you at the mercy of events. Too often, people who are acting instead of reacting are successful people. And those who are barely responding to stimulus, instead of jumping ahead, are the self-proclaimed victims.

81. Live Outside The Present Moment

In the past or in the future, doesn’t really matter. Just stay away from the present moment. That will be enough to live a life of no meaning, always in search of something that doesn’t really exists. The present is the only time we got. The past is just a mark in the sand and the future an uncertain promise. All you have is now. Don’t waste it.

82. Be Averagish

Not too much, not too little. Not too talkative, not too silent. Be in the middle. Talk in the middle. Live in the middle. An averagish life is a wasted life. You don’t really live, you’re barely acknowledging a statistical model of the reality. There’s not such thing like the average in real life. You’re either up to something, either not. Chose to be exceptional.

83. Be Revengeful

Wait for the “right” moment and pay back that insult. Carefully plan and implement your revenge. And you’ll soon become a predictable and much too easy to manipulate machine, ready to be used by anyone smart enough to push the right buttons. Revenge will never make things even. It will make things worse. Forgive and forget.

84. Be Resentful

Even if you don’t use revenge, keep some bad vibe about that person who insulted you. Resentment is like drinking poison while waiting for your enemies to die, Nelson Mandela said. And I totally agree with it. No matter at whom your negative emotion is directed, holding it long enough inside yourself will eventually screw up your life.

85. Don’t Create Value

Do something that is either repeating somebody else’s work, either of no use for anyone. Do things that are not valuable. Be a copy cat or a useless clerk. Creating genuine value is at the core of our life purpose. If you chose to create value for others, as small as that value might be, you managed to be in for something. You’re not screwed yet.

86. Avoid Confrontation

Don’t you ever confront your fears, your opponents or your critics. Leave, run, hide and don’t face your phobias. Avoid your rivals. That’s one way to lose the most valuable feed-back you can get. Confrontation requires courage, that’s right, but without it, you’ll never really know what are you up to. Living only in “potential” means not living at all.

87. When Going Through Hell, Stop Walking

And you’ll get stuck forever. Every time you bump into some hard times, just keep going, as Winston Churchill said. If you stop, you’ll get sucked. Every hard time you encounter is a test, as undeserved at it might seem. The only way to get out from it is to keep going, otherwise you’ll get burned. Even hell can be passed, if only you keep going and don’t stop.

88. Don’t Clean Up Your Lenses

Your life could be blurred at times. Happens. Your life lenses got stuck or you have some dirt on them. If you keep them dirty, you won’t change your perspective and will keep stumble until you fall. Cleaning up your lenses should be a habit for anyone who really wants to adapt to change. Because the only real thing we have in this life is change.

89. Fall For “Free Stuff”

There is no such thing as a free lunch, they say, and they say that for a reason. Nothing really worth having is free in this world. We tend to value things based on how much we “spend” for them. Hence, a freebie will be worthless. Anything presented as “free” is in fact a trap, a trap which will require more from you than you are willing to pay.

90. Race Against Others

The only real competition is with you. The others may serve as a comparison at times, but you can only win against yourself. Chasing your goals the same way dogs are chasing mechanical rabbits at a dog race is just stupid. Once the race is over, what would you chase next? Do you really want to live a life of a racing dog?

91. Be An Information Junkie

Live by the news, sleep by the news, wake up by the news. Information is supposed to be useful. How much are you really going to use out of what you’re exposing yourself to? Being an information junkie will give you the illusion of control. You’ll be much better if you master the art of ignoring, instead of practicing information overload.

92. Talk More Than You Have To

And piss off everyone else in the process. Talking should be a way to connect, to express your feelings and creativity. Talking too much, as harmless as it can seem, could really cut off from your social circle, not to mention that it will shift your focus from what you’re doing to what you’re … talking about, of course. Do more, talk less.

93. Be Late

At your job. At your social gatherings. At informal meetings. Show up later and you’ll slowly get out of touch with everything else around you. Being punctual is an art. It’s not too much about reliability and respect, as it is for spotting and grabbing opportunities. A belated person will never catch an opportunity: he’ll be there too late, of course.

94. Accept Frustration

Yes, life can be a bitch. Yes, it can make you want to cry out loud. But there’s no need to give in to frustration. If something went bad, acknowledge and move on. Frustration is from the same family with regret and share one very nasty family trait: it will dry you up and puts you in a no man’s land territory. Don’t be frustrated it went wrong, be happy it happened.

95. Reject Joy

Don’t enjoy because joy is a silly way to behave. There are people who are making a living out of rejecting joy. Because it’s a useless emotion. Because it could make you vulnerable. Yes, it will make you vulnerable. But being vulnerable is the only way to really experiment life in all its dimensions. Life is not safe. But it’s full of joy.

96. Give In To Pain

At some point in your life, you’re going to be hit hard. We all do. Pain is unavoidable. But suffering is optional. If you give in to pain, you’re creating an attachment and from this attachment suffering will grow. I know it’s way more difficult to do this than it is to write about it. I’ve been there too. And I really know that suffering is just another choice.

97. Be Jealous

Do like many other people and think jealousy is a form of love. And totally screw up your life in the process. Jealousy is a variation of the “control freak” syndrome, with a little bit of panic disorder. Controlling the one you love or limiting his or her choices by constantly nagging him or her, will have only one possible end: you’ll get dumped.

98. Think Happiness Is A Goal

Happiness is never a goal. It can’t be your new car, your new house, your new career. It can’t be your family, your kids, your friends. Happiness is a process. It’s a continuous state of mind. Whenever you step out of this state of mind, you transform happiness into an object. And objects are inconsistent, fluctuant and unstable. Happiness is the journey, not the destination.

99. Panic

Give your power to circumstances. Whenever something is out of your normal routine, just panic. Lose your head, follow the crowd and think the world will collapse. Panic is the ultimate form of submission. You let some unexpected events to control your response. Yes, unexpected stuff can happen. Be happy: every unpredicted event in your life it’s an opportunity.

100. Don’t Love

Turn your soul into a stone. Frost your heart. Don’t allow any feeling of love to reach to you. You won’t need months to screw up your life when you do this. You won’t need weeks, or even days. The moment you forbid love to reach to you, your life will be useless.

***

Well, I know what you think: ups, I might be doing a couple of these… That’s ok, nobody’s perfect (yours truly included). So, just to shift your mood, go find some nice ways to start your day and, once you did it, look for some tips on how to get and stay motivated.

December brings in gifts. As of today, until the end of the month, you’ll have an exclusive 25% discount for any Mariner Software. In order to trigger this discount, you’ll have to add a special promo code to the Mariner shopping cart. Here’s the code:

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My long term readers already know about my partnership with Mariner Software. One of the most visited articles in my blog is one about using MacJoournal as a power blogging setup, GTD style. This post proved to be so popular that it even made it in my Blogging101 Workshop and I have to tell you that it was very well received by the workshop attendees.

Apparently, I’m reaching a milestone here: one year of monthly promo codes for good, stable and useful mac software. It’s been a very good year for me, and judging from the number of generated sales, it’s been a good year for many of my readers. If you didn’t realize it by now, I will receive a commission on each sale, so you can keep that in mind if you decide to buy.

In fact, affiliate marketing, as in honest, open and transparent affiliate marketing, was one of the most successful revenue sources in my first year of  blogging. I am always happy to review and recommend products that I find useful and valuable. I find it a very good way to make money blogging because you can chose your products and you can test them before you recommend them.

So, I don’t know what you’re doing here anymore, you should be at the Mariner eStore, buying whatever you think you’ll need: MacJournal, MacGourmet DeLuxe, Paperless, StoryMill, Write or Calc. The discount works on family packages too. Just so you remember, here’s the code again:

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Happy shopping

This week I finished two of my real world events: the first mentorship program and the first series of Blogging 101. Both events were incredibly fulfilling, to say the least. If anybody would tell me in August that by the end of November I will have 2 major live events completed, I wouldn’t believe him.

Mentorship – Take One

The mentorship program started in September had 6 attendees and a total of 10 guests. If you want to know more about the format of the mentorship and the role of both attendees and guests, you can read this post from September.

One of the things I didn’t mention in that post is that I filmed the attendees at every mentorship session, asking for some expectations and conclusions at each start and end. I ended up with more than one hour of footage which still waits to be edited. That will be fun. If they will agree, I will try to make a short clip and publish it here (they speak Romanian but last time I heard, subtitles were still a hype ).

We had a lot of fun during these sessions and the interaction seemed to increase in intensity during the last 2-3 sessions. I think everyone had at least one “a-ha” moments and that includes me. Speaking with young entrepreneurs, listening to their problems, their expectations and their approaches was certainly one of the most fulfilling parts of this event for me.

A lot of people asked me if I will do another mentorship session. The short answer: I will. The long answer: I will modify the format. It will not be spread across 6 weeks anymore and I guess I will squeeze it into a whole week-end. So far, a few potential mentees already agreed with this format. Still a few tweaks to be made but, generally speaking, it will be a full week-end from now on, not a sequence of 2 hours chunks spread across 6 weeks. I will surely make an announcement about the exact date pretty soon.

A lot of people asked me what exactly I do in those mentorship sessions. Well, if you read my blog, you already know the tune. The mentorship puts the words in that tune. Basically, I help people to become better at what they do. If possible, brilliantly better. There is a catch, you have to have an online business. This is what I did for the last 10 years and, allegedly, I did it pretty good. Meaning I’ve been lucky enough to make a gazillion mistakes and stubborn enough to get up after each and every one of them. An important part of the mentorship sessions is about mistakes. Their mistakes as well as mines.

The whole mentorship event created a powerful flow of motivation. At the end of the last session (there will be a final reunion next week for the final evaluation, but, technically speaking, that will not be a mentorship thing) everybody suggested we should do this again. Not in the regular, casual “hey, mate, we should get together sometimes, k-thanks-bye” style. But rather in the “I think this was useful and, if possible, I want some more”.

Which gave me the idea of a new type of event. I already sketched the format and I will make a presentation live at Open Coffee next week.

Blogging 101

The blogging workshop had an unexpected exposure. Some of my old partners wrote about it (as was the case of Doru Panaitescu, [Romanian content] one of the most respected online advertising professionals in Romania) while some of my twitter followers retweeted the workshop announcements for several days.

To be honest, I was a little bit concerned about this workshop. Not only it was the first 3 days event I ever did, but I was completely unaware of the general blogging expertise of my attendees. Turned out that they were all pretty much at the same level, which made things a lot easier for me. The attendees were middle and top managers from automotive, financial, media and human resources industry. All very well respected professional and all very eager to learn. We’ve been able to connect very quickly. They weren’t shy at asking questions and I was extremely pleased about that. Besides being very (and I mean VERY) fast learners they were also very kind and supportive. If this sounds like a fairy tale, imagine how it is to actually live it .

At the end of the first day everybody had his own blog and we were ready to start doing some creative writing exercises as well as some technical tweaking, which gave me the opportunity to give them even some home assignments. I think the fact that they had their own blog for the whole course was one of the key points and made them understand much better the whole concepts. I’m satisfied with the practice / theory balance in the course and, apparently, they were happy too.

The first series ended 1 and a half day ago and I realized I have a ton of things to add, modify or enhance. I’m still browsing my course notes and tweaking my schedules and presentations. The live feed-back made me understand how I can improve certain areas and also realized that very few persons are associating the blogging process with a business process. Luckily, having over 10 years of experience in running my own business, I could easily create, explain and clarify the links between blogging as a social phenomenon and business, as in making real money blogging.

To make a long story short, the blogging workshop will have a second series, starting on December 4th. I already had 4 signups even before this public announcement and I guess this tells a lot about the workshop exposure. If you’re in Romania, Bucharest, and want to attend, contact me for more information and will find a way to do it.

Next Steps

I think I’m start to enjoy doing this. As I already said, if you would tell me in August that I will have 2 live events already finished by the end of November, I wouldn’t believe you. But now I will. So, here’s the deal: I’m telling to myself that by the end of March I will have at least one live event finished abroad. Like in another country. Exactly.

Which means I’m making myself available as a keynote speaker, coach and blogging teacher for the English part of the world, as of… right now. And if you want to know more about me, this is the right place to start. If there’s something in my blog you would like it detailed or presented live in an event, don’t be shy. If you can gather an audience for this type of event, even better. Contact me and let me know. I’m sure we can find a way.

After all, I’ve already done it twice, so I know how to do it.

I will even eat your cookies.

Have you ever heard of the marshmallow test? If not, let me start by saying that this is a famous experiment. Allegedly, the experiment aimed to identify the ability of becoming successful in small kids. In short, four year old kids were given a marshmallow, they were put in an isolated room and they were told they’re going to get another marshmallow in a few minutes IF they won’t eat the first one. But a movie is worth a thousand words:

After a few years, the kids were evaluated and researchers found out that the kids who waited for the second marshmallow were more successful than the kids who didn’t. Out of this experiment, a concept called “delayed gratification” (or deferred gratification, according to Wikipedia) emerged. According to this concept, people who are able to delay gratification for longer periods of time are more likely to become successful in life.

While I do agree to some extent with this concept, I don’t really see how the marshmallow test supports this. I gave it a lot of thought in the last few weeks, and, to be honest, I don’t think the marshmallow experiment is about delayed gratification. I think they got it all wrong.

The Decision

First of all, the test took for granted that the kids would really want the second marshmallow. Like this was something that every kid in the world would do. Something compulsory. Well, I don’t think all the kids are wanting 2 marshmallows in a chunk. They may crave one marshmallow and just won’t care about the second one.

Kids have the ability to decide. If they decide they would really want the second one, then the experiment will challenge their ability to delay gratification. Without this decision, the test is not clear. So, by just implying the kids are all wanting 2 marshmallows, the test is becoming a little blurry to me.

The Promise

Let’s say part of the kids agreed to want the second marshmallow. Now, they got a promise that if they follow a certain path, they will get it. This promise is in fact a prediction. The future was described in a certain way. I think we’re talking about the ability to see things that aren’t there yet.

Last time I checked, this was called vision. The capacity to create the future out of nothing. The kids were promised something that wasn’t there and I think this is amazing: those kids were actually seeing the second marshmallow in their heads. They pictured it before it was manifested.

The Trust

And finally, they had absolute trust that the promise will become true. Trust is fundamental in this experiment. If they wouldn’t trust the promise, they will never waited for the second marshmallow to come. Without believing the fact that the second marshmallow will manifest, they wouldn’t wait.

I think the test would have yelled completely different results if they would have repeat it several times and every other time the second marshmallow wouldn’t manifest (for whatever reasons: they forgot about it, the world crisis, a dishonest business partner, etc). I think the results would have been surprising, to say the least.

What Makes You Successful?

To the core, the experiment proved something fundamentally true, but the general conclusion was wrong, in my opinion. Delayed gratification has little to do with becoming successful. Delayed gratification is a mild form of asceticism: let’s deprive ourselves from some really good stuff now, because we will get some great stuff later. The only way this could work is by  helping you maintain focus on the target. By staying alert and keep the goal in sight. Nothing more.

But I don’t think this is what really makes you successful. The key to that is something that the experiment revealed, but nobody acknowledged so far. The key to success is the ability to take decision (decide you really want a second marshmallow), to predict the future (picture the second marshmallow in your head, before it’s manifested) and trust the future will give you the second marshmallow (if you follow a certain path). In this specific experiment, the path was a restrictive one: just don’t eat your first marshmallow, and you’ll get a second one. But that doesn’t automatically mean you have to restrain yourself in order to become successful.

I find this experiment really fascinating, once you get over the simple layer of pleasure and gratification. The core of the experiment is: decision, promise and trust.

How many times you decided you want something? How many times you pictured in your head that something before it was manifested? And how many times you trusted your own power that you will get that thing, if you follow a certain path? This is what makes you successful and, with all due respect, this has very little to do with delayed gratification.

If I would believe this theory, that would mean every successful man is a type of ascetic. Keep delaying the gratification until they get more. But in my experience successful people are almost always people who enjoy life more than the average. Most of the time they’ll taste life with much more intensity than everyone.

Now, scroll up and look at the video again. What are you seeing? What is your second marshmallow right now? A house? A relationship? More money? If you decided you really want the second marshmallow, make a promise you will get it. In the near future, you will have that thing. It will manifest. Just keep it in your head. Now, just keep your focus on it. Don’t focus on something else, do whatever you have to in order to manifest your second marshmallow.  Follow your path. Stay there.

In less time than you think, the door will open and somebody will give you the second marshmallow.

Productivity is usually a good thing. Usually. Not always.

Too much GTD or too much effectiveness in your life can become annoying at some point. Being highly productive can really help you become some sort of a freak, even if you obviously don’t want that. All those lists, thoughts capturing devices, advanced task processing systems. All those fancy words like “next actions”, “hipster cards” or “mind like water”. All those tasks carefully squeezed into your agenda, well, all that could give you a very hard time in a normal, non-productivity related, social conversation. To be honest, most of the people I heard talking about “mind like water” were doing it mostly like a waterfall, not like a still lake. I think you know the type: hyper-active, super talkative and proud of the last uber cool productivity gadget he bought or the last productivity blog post he read.

The good news is that you can still be productive while avoiding the pitfalls of a productivity freak syndrome. Here are 7 verified ways to help you avoid being left alone in the middle of a vivid social conversation in which you just tried to talk about – exactly! – nothing else but productivity.

1. Don’t Plan the Fun

Do you have items like “go out in the park with the kids” in your to do lists? Or something like “have a romantic dinner with my partner”? Ditch this. Immediately. You can’t really plan the fun in your life. It’s a contradiction in terms. If you plan it, it’s not fun anymore. It’s just another chore. Another task to be slacked from your to do list.. Having fun is a spontaneous activity and cannot be confined into a productivity system. The very thought of productively increasing your fun makes me laugh.

How many times you attended to a party and had no fun at all? Well, I’m sure that behind being at that party there was a productivity “reason”.  Maybe you don’t call it “productivity”, but it was something like “cross out that thing from my agenda”. Mark the task done somehow. Which, of course, you did. Only there wasn’t any fun involved. How many lousy romantic dinners you had? I bet every time you had them you looked up every single detail in advance and made sure everything will be just fine. Only it wasn’t. You had no fun at that dinner.

Planning the fun in your life is the most subtle yet powerful attempt of productivity to kill your spontaneity. Your normal reactions to reality stimulus. You can schedule in advance to DO something, that’s true, but you can’t schedule in advance to FEEL something.

Instead of planning your fun activities, you should just make some time box in your schedule for yourself. If you want to spend time with other people, your friends or your kids, just make some space in your time schedule and be there. Show up. And see where it goes. Don’t plan it, just watch it unfolding ahead. If you want to throw a great party, by all means, do all the preparations. Just don’t expect the party to automatically rock just because you had fantastic food. Likewise, if you want a romantic dinner, just be romantic, don’t plan the next actions. Do something unexpected or extraordinaire. Which, by the way, it’s the complete opposite of being productive.

2. Share Your Learning

Share what you learned about productivity with your friends. Ask for their opinion. The first thing you’ll notice is that all that information is now filtered through your own perceptions and experiences. A lot of what you thought is important is now modeled by your own needs. While you’re talking with somebody else about all those new concepts or ideas you’re slowly getting rid of the initial hype and start to have a better understanding of the system altogether. (Generally speaking, sharing what you’ve learned is  great way to internalize everything you want to learn.)

The second thing you can realize by sharing is to inform your peers about the results you had by using that specific system. No need to talk about technical stuff now, just simple things like: I’ve done twice the things I was usually doing on a Tuesday so far. Watch for their reactions. You’ll be surprised to notice that being productive has little if no impact whatsoever in your close relationships. Yet you unconsciously hope that being productive will enhance your social or intimate life too.

The most important point here is to create a feed-back loop. A way to check out your social status every now and then and see if you’re not deluding yourself. Being productive is meant to do things faster and better, not to alienate you from your friends or colleagues. Don’t use the productivity hype as an identity creator: I’m the GTD guy, or the 4 hours work week guy. The more you do that, the more you’ll be identified with “the productivity freak next office.” Just because you’re updated to the latest productivity news and other people aren’t, doesn’t make you better than them.

3. Listen To Others

There is this cultural norm of associating productivity with pro-activity. Start new projects. Ignite conversations. Initiate new ventures. While this is certainly very important, it also creates a very nasty habit of not listening to other people. Listening is a fantastic resource. How many times you found a solution to something just by listening to other guys? I know I did this literally hundreds of times. Just listen carefully, because your question was certainly asked before and there is already somebody who knows the answer.

Listening is fundamental in identifying problems. Maybe you have the skills to do something faster and better, but if you don’t know exactly what you have to do, then what’s the point? I see more than often those productivity gurus offering ready made solutions to problems far more complicated than they realize. They have a limited set of solutions and they try to apply them to every problem they encounter., regardless of its complexity. Just because they “know” that works. Only, of course, it doesn’t.

Without listening and acknowledging the real problems your productivity skills are worthless. You’re just a talkative guy making more trouble then it solves, while bragging too in the process. Not the nicest personal brand you can build, right? Listening is not a productive activity in itself, although it can be enhanced: there really is an art of listening, you know. But listening, combined with your productivity skills can help you become a useful person too, rather then becoming just a freak annoying people around.

4. Keep Things Simple

The promise of productivity subtly invites you to bring more into your life. You can manage it, right, so bring more. More business, more relationships, more everything. You load yourself with tons of not really necessary stuff just because you can. Well, you could also run on a roof of a running train, with a little bit of training. But why would you do something like this on a regular basis? You could learn how to juggle with 5-6 balls at the same time, becoming better than a circus artist. Ok, but why would you do it?

Almost any productivity system out there puts a big emphasis on how to manage everything in your life. But why would you wanna do that to everything in your life? Why do you want to become productive on all the things in your life, including stuff you don’t need anymore? Instead of trying to manage everything, I think it’s better to get rid of the unnecessary entirely. Why trying to manage something you don’t really need?

This subtle invitation to bring more stuff into your life is the most dangerous thing you can do when you decide to become productive. You don’t really need that extra stuff. It’s like a competition between people racing on roofs of running trains, just because they can run on roofs of running trains. Who’s going to really win such a stupid race? The good side of being productive and effective is that you can do more in less time. Great, now go out and enjoy life, instead bringing more work into the system.

5. Accept and Manage Interruptions

The productivity flow assumes you’re there 100%, 8 hours out of 8, 5 days a week. If you’re a normal person. If you have a busier schedule, it means even more. Well, reality is different. You’re not there 8 full hours. At some point, life will get in the way somehow. You will be exposed to interruptions. It’s called hazard or the unpredictable. And the way you react to interruptions is almost always the key to a productive approach.

Accept them. Manage them. Respond to those stimuli, because there lies your real growth. Planning everything ahead will not make you grow. It will barely create a comfort zone around, but not more. It’s this constant stimulus-response dance that gives you new insights and perspectives. This is where you learn and do your real actions. A day with a perfect agenda is not a day that will make you evolve as a human being. It can give you a tricky sense of satisfaction, but if no “deranging” interruption occurred, you must start asking yourself questions.

“Life’s what’s happening when you’re busy making plans”, said John Lennon and I totally agree with him. Being productive is not always equal with being happy and fulfilled. I really don’t think the goal is to become the perfect business machine out there, but to live your life. A life filled with unexpected, interruptions, change of plans and contexts. Avoiding this by hiding under the “high productivity” blanket will not only make you lose all the fun, but it will surely create an almost visible aura of “freak”-ness around you.

6. Daydreaming Is Not Dangerous

One of the key principles of GTD, “emptying your mind” has become one of its biggest flops. Because when you empty your mind in GTD style, you’re not really emptying. Behind every mental throw up of an idea, of a potential project or task, there’s a continuous, humming thought of being productive. Every time you jot down something, you’re doing it because you want to be productive. So, even if you think you’re emptying your mind, you’re not really doing it: you continuously think about how to be more productive.

A productivity freak is a person who’s always in search of a new gadget or system. His mind is simply obsessed with the whole productivity process. Sometimes, those guys really make a business out of this, teaching other people how to become productive. They’re the lucky ones. They found an outlet for the obsession. But most of the times, the productivity freaks are just circling around, stuffing new productivity techniques in their head until they forget why they wanted to be productive in the first place.

Empty your mind from useless stuff. But do allow yourself to have thoughts that will never grow into a task. Imagine things. Picture new realitites. Visualize new contexts or situations. You may call this day dreaming. And yes, you will be right about that. But day dreaming is one of the most productive ways to empty your mind. To switch its focus from the glitches you encountered and allow it to regroup and find new ways to tackle an issue. One of the core qualities of a dream is its impermanence. Once finished, it will fly away from your mind. Leaving it empty, refreshed and clean.

7. Stay Healthy

Being highly productive is often associated with being a busy guy. In fact, you become productive because you are a busy guy and want to minimize that load. Alas, you end up by increasing it. It’s an addiction. The higher your productivity level, the busiest you become. You enjoy so much the thrills you get from being productive that you start putting more and more on your plate just to trigger that feeling again. Look ma, see how I slack those tasks from my task processing system! Am I the best, or what? Now gimme some more tasks, please! Man, that feels soooo good!

Ok, I’m being sarcastic here, but slacking tasks from your lists can really become an addiction. And just because is associated with productivity doesn’t make it less dangerous or less of an addiction. It’s on the same league with smoking or alcohol. Really. Staying up late to slack tasks from your lists is doing no more good to you than spending the whole night drinking in a bar. You won’t have a hangover in the morning, that’s true, but you will feel the urge to slack them again in the evening. And will do this again and again. The results: you end up stealing time from your sleeping hours, from your social hours, from your family hours. All that in the name of being productive, how ridiculous is that?

Eat well. Sleep well. Exercise. Engage in physical activities and change your focus. Being caught in a constant flow of productive tasks will most likely generate a flow of positive emotions too. You’ll feel good about yourself and that is usually a feeling you want to keep as long as you can. That flow of ego boosting emotions can keep you being productive for hours without a break. But it’s tricky. Just because it feels good doesn’t mean it does good to your body. You need a balance. Pack some time in advance in your schedule and get out of that nice, ego boosting flow of being productive and do some physical exercise. Take a walk in the park. Eat a healthy meal. Take a nap. Then you can get back on being productive, with a fresh perspective.

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To be productive without becoming a productivity freak is an art. The art of living your life in peace and harmony while still doing everything you planned to do, enjoying abundance and feeling happy and fulfilled.

Today I’m going to interview somebody really special on my blog. And that would be you. Exactly, you, the one who’s looking at the screen right now. You are a very important person and it’s an honor for me to interview you. I prepared a list of 33 questions and I’m really looking forward to hear your answers.

Yes, this is an interview. With you. Why? Because you’re important, that’s why.

1. What Do You Do For A Living?

You may not know what you’re really doing for a living. You may think you have a job, but you’re actually just selling your time. And that comes down to selling your life. And that means you’re living your life by selling it. And you may not even know that.

2. Who Do You Love?

Is that your partner? Or somebody else? Do you love many persons at once? Just answer as detailed as you can to this one. We never seem to have enough time do really think at the ones we love. We can’t love someone if we forget to think about him.

3. Do You Have Enough Money?

That’s a very important question. You may have less money than everyone else in your group, but still have enough. Or you may have huge amounts of money and yet not enough to make you feel better. How much money do you need in your life?

4. Are You Healthy?

You may  be able to wake up every morning and go to work, but do you think at yourself as being a healthy person? The way you see your health has a huge impact on your reality perception. It’s like applying filters to what’s happening to you.

5. Do You Think You Are a Good Person?

Have you ever wandered what do you think about yourself from this point of view? Maybe we take it for granted that we are inherently good and all the other guys are wrong. But is this really true? Do you really think you are a good person? Why?

6. How Old Are You?

You shouldn’t just open your ID and do some math. It’s not the number of years since you’ve been born that matter here. But mostly how old do you feel you are. What’s your perceived age. Because, believe it or not, this is your real age.

7. Who’s Your Best Friend?

Do you have one? Is he or she still alive? Write his name and think at that person for a while. Write a short description of he or she. Where did you met first time? What were the circumstances? What makes that person your best friend, after all?

8. What’s Your Childhood Dream?

Do you still remember it? You wanted to travel the world? You wanted to just have a family and raise your kids? Is that what you’re doing right now? Has your dream become true? Or are you drifting away from it with every single day of your life?

9. How Often Do You Laugh?

Try to remember exactly how often do you laugh during a day. Is this a difficult thing? Why? Because you laugh so often that you couldn’t remember when was the last time you didn’t had a good laugh? Or because you simply forgot how it is to laugh?

10. What Makes You Smile?

List at least 10 items. If you can’t find 10 items that makes you smile, we have a problem. Don’t rush, take your time. Smiling is different from laughing the same way walking in the park is different from climbing a mountain. You’re just enjoying the walk.

11. Who’s Your Most Dangerous Enemy?

Do you have one? List his/her name here and a short story about how this enemy changed your life. Friends are making us do things for them, but enemies are making us do things because of them. Either way, they’re shaping our life and we must know how.

12. Where Do You Live?

Is this really your place? Do you feel at home there? How did you end up with it, anyway? The story of your house is deeply blended with your own life. Where do you feel at home is the most important place in the world for you. What makes it home?

13. Do You Think You’re Strong?

I would be really curious to know the answer to this one. I love strong people. They have this power to change their life and to create incredible things. What “strong” means to you? It’s a question of force? Or endurance? Of speed? Or intelligence?

14. What Was The Most Important Thing You’ve Done So Far?

Have you really done something important? Something that changed your life fundamentally? Or something that changed somebody else’s life fundamentally? Why was that important? Answer with first thing that pops out in your head.

15. What Was The Most Stupid Thing You’ve Done So Far?

Do you consider you’ve done stupid things in your life? I think everybody does but not everybody admits that. Most of the people blame the circumstance, the karma, the others, everyone except them. Do you have the power to accept you’ve done a really stupid thing?

16. Do You Love Yourself?

Like really, truly accepting everything about you. Does it happen to hate yourself? Most people do that without even being aware. Just answer the first thing that pops to your head, again. Usually, this is exactly how you feel about yourself.

17. What Do You Fear The Most?

That might be difficult. But also liberating. Your biggest fear is most of the time your escape door, if you face it with enough courage. Can you think at something that scares you really hard? Maybe answering to this question will really frighten you?

18. What Is Your Favorite Word?

You must have one, everybody does. It might be the one you’re saying all day long without realizing or it might be something that really makes you feel good when you’re telling it. Most of the time, there’s an unconscious link between your true self and this word.

19. When Was The Last Time You Cried?

Admit it. Everybody cries. Men, women, kids. It might be something you’re not very proud of, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happened. What was so powerful that really cracked you up inside? Think about it and let it emerge again. Make peace with it. If you can.

20. What Is The Best Thing That Could Happen To You Right Now?

In this exact context, what’s the only thing that could shift your entire existence if it will manifest right now? Many people tend to give a certain amount of money as a number, but in my experience this will only maximize the problems, not making them go away.

21. What Is The Worst Thing That Could Happen To You Right Now?

Again, what’s the only thing that could negatively impact your life right now in a way that you wouldn’t believe it’s possible? Between those two possibilities lies your entire lifespan. How is this lifespan? How large is your road are you traveling now?

22. Picture Yourself In 5 Years From Now

Not really a question, but definitely an interesting answer. Can you see yourself in 5 years from now? How would you look? How would you behave? You would do the same things are you doing right now? Don’t write a full story, a single, concentrated sentence would be enough.

23. Do You Regret Anything?

If yes, what exactly? If not, why not. Regrets are usually strings we didn’t pull entirely from our past, leaving us tied up to a context which is not longer real. Facing your regrets will reveal parts of yourself you thought you forgot. Important parts of yourself.

24. What’s The First Thing You Do In The Morning?

Just after you open your eyes. Is it a thought? Is it a gesture? We all tend to create a morning routine and it seems that this routine is shaping our entire diurnal activity. Have you ever thought what is the first thing you do in the morning?

25. What Are You Thinking Just Before Going To Bed?

Similarly, before you go to bed, you do have preferred thought. What is it? What makes your transition to the sleeping world without any major frictions? What’s your password to the dream realm? What if you would lose this thought suddenly?

26. What Was The Highest Point You’ve Ever Been To?

Was it a mountain? Or a huge city tower? Whatever feels high for you should go there. I don’t want to know the difference from the sea level, but what exactly you experienced on the highest perceived point you’ve ever been? Fear? Exhilaration?

27. If There’s One Thing In Your Life You Want To Change Right Now, What Is It?

Imagine you met a fairy tale and you have only one wish: you could change only one thing in your life. What is that thing? How would you like to change it? If it wasn’t this absolute power you just received, would you still wanted that thing to be changed?

28. What Are You Proud Of?

What is the only thing you’ve done that will instantly make you feel totally and undeniably proud of yourself? When you did that? What were the circumstances? Would you still do the same thing now?

29. Sum Up Your Life In One Sentence

If in the next 10 seconds your life will end, how would you describe it? Just one sentence for your entire life. Can you do that? You only have 10 seconds, so you can consider this a speed question.

30. Name The Thing That Annoys You The Most

Is this a mosquito humming? The sounds of a knife on a porcelain plate? Or is it people calling you in a certain way? Friends breaking promises? Being stuck in traffic? Try to remain calm while answering.

31. What Is Your No 1 Question To God?

Yes, it’s your interview, but if you would be able to address one question to God, assuming He will answer you, what would that question look like? What is the most important thing you want to know from God?

32. Do You Have Secrets?

If yes, why? If not, are you sure? What is your number one reason for having and keeping secrets? Are you afraid of other people reactions? Ar you ashamed? Or you just love to cover things for the pleasure of re-discovering them later?

33. What Makes You Laugh?

You do have something that instantly puts you in a totally laughing state, do you? There must be something that makes you laugh out loud. What is it? When was the first time you bumped into that thing?

Ok, I lied. There are 34 questions:

34. Are You Happy?

***

Now, here’s the deal. If you blog, feel free to copy and paste this article on your blog (with a link back to the original, of course) and answer each question at a time. Feel free to skip the ones you don’t like or don’t want to answer. But do keep the link back so I can discover you. I told you, you’re important.

If you don’t have a blog, maybe it’s time to start one just to answer this interview. Kidding. Or maybe not . Anyway, if you don’t blog, I made an ebook for you. Don’t worry, the ebook is completely free, no obligation. As a matter of fact, you can download it right here, right now, absolutely free:

Just print it out and write the answers at your leisure. Although I wouldn’t know your actual answers, you can leave a comment and just make me aware that you found some time in your busy schedule and completed it. Like this, I know the interview really happened.

Oh, and if you want to offer the ebook as a freebie on your site, feel free to do it, as long as you leave the content completely intact.

So, once again: who can pick this up? The answer is: anyone! You, especially. And you still wonder why? Because you’re important, that’s why.

Thank you so much for your answers. You may not know it now, but you really are an inspiration.