When I was growing up, I used to love the song “Oh La La” because of the lyrics “I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger”.  At every stage of growing up, I used to think, “if I only knew this a few years ago…”.  If you think about it, it makes perfect sense that you will be better off with more information so it’s pretty obvious that if you add life experience into the equation before you actually have it you will be much better off.  Imagine all those things that you regret doing or the mistakes you made being wiped away because you knew better before you did them.  Wouldn’t that be nice?

Now that I am a little older, I don’t think so and here is why:

1. You end up regretting not doing more things in life than you regret doing.  - If you ask any old man or woman what they regret more, the things they did or the things they didn’t do, most would answer the things they didn’t do and the lost opportunities.

2. Life is made up of all our mistakes - We learn from our mistakes and we shape ourselves by our mistakes.  People who don’t make mistakes are pretty boring people who will have nothing to show for their lives when they look back.  It is all the mistakes that you look back at and laugh about years later.

3. Some things are too hard to do - Life is hard and it is full of hard learning experiences.  Just look at a baby learning to walk.  They pull themselves up and keep falling down.  They can’t balance themselves, yet they keep trying to take that first step.  They look around at everyone around them and think to themselves “hey, everyone else is doing it, it should be pretty easy”.  It is that ignorance that helps them push through each step so that they eventually learn to walk.  If you could tell a baby and explain to them in a way that they would understand how hard life is, do you think they will still try the way they do.  The many long years of really hard work that they will have to put into schooling just to get a job in the real world where they will have to work even harder and longer.  The same goes for marriage.  Imagine explaining to a man or woman in love that just got engaged how much work a marriage really is and how hard it will be.

Personally, I have seen this over and over with starting a business.  It looks easy before you start and then you start to realize one step at a time what is really involved.  Right now I am working on Temphunt and after many lessons learned (and many more to come), you can check it out at Temphunt.

4. Young people see what is possible and Old people see what is not possible - Ask a kid what he wants to be when he grows up and he may tell you an astronaut, a doctor or movie star.  Ask an adult what he’d like to do and he’ll tell you, well, I can’t be an astronaut, I don’t have the training to be a doctor and I’ll never be a movie star.   If kids could actually comprehend how much work really goes into each of these professions, they would be standing around with the adults.

Steve Jobs in one of his most famous speeches tells Stanford University graduates to “Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Pearl S. Buck said “The young dont know enough to be prudent, therefore they attempt the impossible & achieve it, generation after generation.”

If we actually ever knew what we were really getting into, we would never get into it and what a loss that would be for us and for society at large.

Here’s a video of Oh La La just for fun. 

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I had a friend in high school who was  proud of himself because every time someone told him that he should quit smoking, he told then that he wasn’t a quitter.  We all grow up learning that quitting is a bad thing and that you should stick things through.  If you think about it, that’s pretty bad advice.

When you ask a kid what he wants to be when he grows up and he says Superman or a Garbage man, do you push him to keep to his plans?  Absolutely not!  So why do we put so much emphasis on not quitting?

Quitting can be one of the greatest things in the world.  Quitting bad habits, quitting bad things in general that just aren’t working or quitting things that don’t really apply any more.  If you start doing something because of a goal that doesn’t exist anymore, then you could be wasting your time if you continue just to finish.

Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and many other very successful business people quit school because they realized that it didn’t apply anymore and would be a waste of their time.  High school is designed to give you a foundation for your education and college or university is designed to give you the tools to build a career. If the potential career that university can offer you doesn’t compare to a business that you built while in school, there is no reason to stick it out and lose out on your business just to say you finished school and you didn’t quit.

You have to make goals for yourself and plan around them.  Create short term goals, medium term goals and long term goals and work to accomplish them.  At a certain point, you’ll probably look at one of your long term goals and realize that you don’t want it anymore or it doesn’t apply anymore.  At that point, you have to take a look at what you were doing to move towards that goal and re-evaluate whether you should still be doing it or quitting it.

If you are working on a project and nothing is working out for you, you have to be very honest with yourself about sticking to the project.  By quitting, you free yourself up to new potential projects.  If you stick to it, make sure it is because you believe in the project and you believe you can succeed.  If not, you’re just being stubborn.

Lastly, if you continue to do things just because you’ve always done them, chances are that you are missing out on a ton of luck.  You need to take a look at everything in your life on a regular basis and figure out what needs to stay and what needs to go.

Job – I enjoy it and I’m building my career – Keep it.

Smoking – making me sick – Quit it.

Family – I like them and see the benefit of having them around forever – Keep them.

Bad Friends – They bring me down – Quit them.

By taking this look at your life, you’ll see more opportunities to get lucky.  By quitting the things that are bad or don’t belong, you are freeing up more time and energy to get lucky.  It’s a win-win.

Image: tungphoto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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I just wrote an article on Temphunt’s Blog where I threw out a thought about where formal education is going.  I mentioned that in the 1950’s, parents (and others) gave kids the advice to “go to school and get a degree so that you can get a good job”.  In the 1970’s parents started adding “getting a bachelors degree” to that advice.  Today, a graduate degree is equivalent to what a bachelors was back then and a high school diploma was in the 50’s.

Steve Jobs just resigned as the CEO of Apple and I was really disappointed with the headline that the Montreal Gazette chose to use for their feature on him.  The headline was something to the effect of “from college dropout to visionary”.  They said “dropout” like it was a bad thing and he was a visionary even when he was in college.

I’ve been thinking about the value of formal education and I believe that there is value in it but I don’t think that it is the end all and be all.  College can be a place where you learn about yourself, find out what you want to do in life and study to get a degree which will hopefully open some doors for you.  I’ve had several arguments recently where people were so adamant about how important it was to get a college degree.  I feel that they’re just missing the forest because all the trees are in the way.

Think about it.  Why should you get a degree?  The answers you will get are probably, “to open doors”, “to get a good job” or to “get a career”.  You always hear stories about athletes in college who consider dropping out to play in the professional leagues.  There are always naysayers who criticize them for dropping out of college but if making money and opening doors is the reason for the degree then why would they consider staying if they are offered a position on a professional team which will give them a better job that will make more money than anything they can possibly make with a college degree and they will be doing something that they love.   You may say that they might get injured and then be stuck with no options.  That’s not true because professional athletes buy disability insurance that will take care of them for the rest of their lives if anything ever happens to them.  Besides, if anything happened to their career, they can always go back to school and start where they left off.

Not everybody is professional athlete material but finding a career that doesn’t need a college degree is not limited to athletes.  Some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time are college dropouts such as Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple Computers), Michael Dell (Dell Computers) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook).

I see the value of a college degree but I also see that if a college student can start a business or find a career that will get him closer to his ultimate goal than the degree can, he should probably drop out.  Sticking around would probably just be wasting his time.  If your goal is making money, there is no reason to stick around college if you found a career or started a business that is already making you more money in college than you can make at your highest earning potential with a degree.

What I am saying is think about your ultimate goals and work backwards from there.  Don’t just follow advice because everyone tells you to do it and everyone else is doing it.  Wake up and focus, if you look hard enough, you’ll notice that the trees are part of the forest.

Do you agree? Disagree?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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What’s your first reaction when you stub your toe? Do you yell? Do you scream? Do you blame someone?

Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University wrote a whole chapter on “long term effects of short term emotions in his latest book The Upside of Irrationality (affiliate link). The gist of it is that when we make decisions while in an emotional state, the emotions will pass but the decisions we make can stay with us and set our behavioural patterns for a long time.

Had a Bad Day at Work?

Imagine that you have a really bad day at work. Your boss dumps all of his problems on you, your co-workers leaves on vacation and you are responsible for picking up his mess and you spilled your coffee all over your desk. After your long commute home, you are greeted by your kids fighting with each other, as kids do. Your reaction is to yell at them and unintentionally, take out some of your frustrations. Although this is a common reaction, what you are doing is setting a behavioural pattern to scream at your kids if they are not behaving.

Had a Good Day at Work?

On the other hand, you may have a great day at work, you get that promotion that you’ve been working toward and to top it off, your favourite sports team just clinched a playoff spot. When you get home to find your kids fighting, you deal with them calmly and set the behavioural pattern of not yelling when your kids are misbehaving.

Blame Someone, Anyone!

When I was a kid and would fall down, people told me to “make bad” to the floor, which would cheer me up. As I grew up, whenever I got hurt, my immediate reaction was to blame someone, usually the closest person to me. I eventually caught my behaviour and worked hard to change the pattern but it wasn’t easy.

Rewards don’t Work Like That!

I had a similar experience with my study habits. I would reward myself for certain amounts of studying for school. Sometimes, I would reward myself a little early because I deserved it, which led to me expecting the reward earlier the next time and not being able to study properly without it.

Predictably Irrational

It’s irrational but it’s how we work. The upside is that if we are conscious about this and work at it, we can condition ourselves to be better people.

So the next time you stub your toe, give someone a compliment. You never know what it will do to your character down the line.

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Do you every have a great idea that you’d love to implement? Do you ever get inspired to do something? Anything? Clean your desk, write a blog post, organize your files? And then, instead of just doing it, you add it to your “todo” list and watch it clutter up your list of things that you really need to do. Once it makes it to the todo list, it’s as good as dead.

People live for little accomplishments and they love to reward themselves for a job well done. For some reason, these people feel that adding a task to a “todo” list is an accomplishment in and of itself. News Flash: It’s not!

Inspiration has an expiry date and it’s usually less than the milk in your fridge. If you don’t act on inspiration, your inspired idea will never get done. Go ahead and change your reward system from rewarding adding items to your “todo” list, to actually doing the items. Trust me, you’ll be much happier and much better off. When a “todo” list gets more than a few items on it, the lister becomes considerably less productive the more the list grows.

Do yourself a huge favor and act on inspiration and when using a “todo” list, only keep the most important 5 items on there at a time.

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Negotiations can seem really scary because most people going into a negotiation feel that they are the underdog.  The other person has the product and they can hold back for as long as they like.  The first step to successful negotiations is knowing that it’s not true!

They Want it as Badly as You Do!

Negotiations are always two sided.  They want the negotiation to be successful just as much as you do.  The only reason anyone is willing to negotiate is because they want to come to an agreement.  The reason that the negotiation often seems one sided is because the other side is informed and experience.  If you want a fair negotiation, you need to be informed as well.

Get Informed

I was recently in the market for a used car.  Before going to a dealership, I researched the types of cars available, found the car that I wanted and researched what the cars were selling for.  When I walked into a dealership, I knew approximately how much the cars I was looking for were and how much of a profit the salesman wanted to make after negotiations.  If I would have just walked in blind, I may have gotten the short end of the deal.

You can use the same strategy when signing up for a cell phone service.  Every company has their set rates but at the same time, every company wants your business.  Before signing up for a service, ask your friends and do some research online about what others are getting in their cell phone contract.  You can usually squeeze in some extra features, more minutes or a cheaper phone.

Don’t be Afraid to Walk

If you are prepare for a negotiation and the person on the other side is not being reasonable, don’t be afraid to walk.  There are plenty of people that are more than willing to negotiate with you.  You give up that freedom when you emotionally attach yourself to a specific product.

Don’t Get Too Attached

When looking for a car, there are many dealerships that you can visit.  When looking for a venue for a party, there are plenty of venues around.  But, when you get emotionally attached to a specific venue and your party “must be here”, you give the other person in the negotiation the upper hand and he can pretty much charge you whatever he wants.

Don’t be Persuaded Towards Something Else

When you are buying a new flat screen TV set, you walk into a store and speak to a representative.  The rep may push you towards a certain product because he makes a better commission on it or has some other reason to push it on you.  By knowing what you are looking for and being educated, you won’t get pushed around by a salesman with an agenda.

These are just a few ideas to get lucky in negotiations.  If you have more, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Picture Credit: US Mission Geneva

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You look at your watch and with great excitement you notice that it is 5:oo PM and time to leave the office to head home to relax for the night.  You’ve got a whole bunch of new shows and movies waiting to be watched as you eat your dinner and down a few beers.  You get up from your desk, stretch and head out the door.

Wait a second.  Before you head out the door, play a little matching game with yourself.

Round One

Take out a piece of paper and a pen and fold it in half, directly down the middle.   On the left side, write down each activity you performed that day.  Then write down how long it took you to perform each particular activity.  When you are done, move over to the right side of the page and write down a list of the activities you were supposed to or wanted to perform that day.  Then write how long each of the activities should take to perform.  When you are done, try and match up the tasks on the left and right sides and see how many matches you get.  Good job, you just finished round one.

Round Two

From all of the matches that you have on your sheet, try and match up all the times (the amount of time you wrote down next to the task) between the left and right sides. If the right side is a lower number or equal to the left side, consider it a match.   For more advanced players, feel free to use accomplishments instead of activities performed.

The more points you get, the better you did.

Obviously this game will only work if you are 100% honest with yourself.  You can also play this game at home to see how much time you spend being productive and how much time you end up wasting.

Once you have played this game a few times, try playing the game in reverse by writing down the tasks on the right side before starting your day.   How do you think your day will turn out?  I’m guessing a little more productive.  What about you?Similar Posts:

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Getting lucky is often about getting out of your comfort zone and opening yourself up to new and different opportunities.  You can get lucky by listening to different people’s points of view and then looking at the situation from their perspective.  You can also get lucky by putting yourself in situations and locations that are different from your norm. The internet, along with interactive maps, news from around the world and social networks that can connect you to people in countries across the globe has given us the tools to really jump out of our comfort zones but according to Ethan Zuckerman in the TED Talk below, we’re really missing out on this opportunity as a nation.

The talk is a little long but worth watching when you have the time.

According to Ethan’s talk, in the 1970′s, 35% of the news American’s consumed was international compared to only 12% in the 2000′s.   He showed a picture created by Alisa Miller that portrays the world according to the news that we consumed from each country in July of 2009.  I was able to get a similar version from February 2007 below.  Alisa claims that today, we want to know more about the world than ever before and yet, the media is showing us less and less.  In other words, the media is luck blocking us and trying to dumb us down.

The picture sort of reminds me of the old “World According to America Poster”.

With all the tools available online to reach people from around the world, people choose to spend the time with their local friends and other people they meet that share their interests.  Even when people use social networks to discuss world news, they mostly discuss it with their friends and people with the same or similar perspective.  You don’t see people friending strangers from other countries to hear their perspectives on what happens to be their “local” news.  This leads to us discussing our own thoughts and what our media wants us to know.  This can be very dangerous as we end up thinking that we are worldly and up to date but really we have no clue about what is really going on in the world around us.

Zuckerman feels that it is unfortunate that more people in North America don’t speak Chinese.  After all, it is one of the leading and most important languages in the world. He points out a Chinese organization that devotes their time to translating news and information into Chinese and feels that America should do the same.  Ethan is a co-founder of Global Voices, which aims to share news and opinions from locals in nations across the world in many languages.

Lucky people are the ones that take the road less traveled and in a world that we have the tools to reach the corners of the world, we should push through the media’s wall and pave a lucky path.  Not many people are doing it so here is your lucky break!Similar Posts:

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They say that the world can be broken up into two types of people, “talkers” and “doers”.  In the online world, there are the talkers and the people who are too afraid to talk.  Everyone has something to say.  I’m almost positive that not a day goes by that you don’t have something to say at all.  You comment on the news, the weather, business, travel, friendships, advice and almost anything else under the sun.  When it comes to the online world, too many people are afraid to talk.  It’s as if there is a barrier that won’t let people talk online.  In the real world it is the difference between speaking with a few people versus public speaking or presenting to a few people.

As part of the transition from the 1900’s to the 2000’s and more specifically the last few years, we all have to get over a major obstacle in order to move forward.  The major obstacle as made famous by Adam Sandler is the fear that “they’re all going to laugh at you!“.  As individuals, many have been held back because they were afraid of consequences, they were afraid of what people would think and they were afraid that people would laugh at them.  It may not be those specific fears but pretty much, they were afraid that what they produce would not be accepted as well as they would hope.  Growing up, we have all heard the saying “better to remain quite and looked a fool than opening your mouth and removing all doubt”.  We are trained to keep quite until we are certain that everyone else will agree with us.

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Unless… you just want to “waste time”.  But, if you’re reading this blog, you probably don’t want to waste time.  This blog is about getting lucky and finding opportunity in everything that we do.  You can’t find opportunity when you keep doing the same thing over and over.  As the Albert Einstein so eloquently put it, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  When we turn on the TV, we end up watching the same types of shows, often while zoning out.  When we spend time on social networks, we end up spending time with the same friends and sharing the same type of content with each other.  If you want to get lucky online, participate in new conversations on open networks like Twitter or finding new types of content through sites like StumbleUpon.  Just make sure that before you log on, that you decide what you will be doing and for how long you will be doing it.  Otherwise you just get sucked in.

If you have an agenda before starting something, even as simple as checking your email, you will end up saving yourself a lot of time that otherwise would have been wasted.  Then you can squeeze more activities into your day, be more productive, accomplish much more and get really lucky.

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