The wrong route is the one that you took yesterday, and the day before and the day before that.  You keep taking the same route because it is the easiest route, or it is the quickest, or because you are used to it and you don’t have to think about where you are driving.

Your Commute is a Routine

When you do the same thing too many times in a row, you build a routine and your mind goes into autopilot so that you don’t have to think about it.  Remember the movie Click with Adam Sandler?  

Sometimes routines and habits are good for you because you shouldn’t have to make meaningless decisions when you don’t have to.  Meaningless decisions just weigh you down mentally and that’s why Steve Jobs was known for always wearing the same clothes, but that’s a whole other post.  

Open Your Eyes

By changing up your routine and specifically (for this post) changing your route to work, you will automatically pay more attention to your surroundings.  

When you are paying more attention, you notice more about what is going on around you, what is new, what has changed and if you train your brain properly, you see many new opportunities.  You may notice a new business in the area, a fun attraction for the weekend or even a potentially faster way to get to work.

Make Your Commute Fun

However long your routine is, it becomes a pain, tiring, a necessity and sometime frustrating.  By taking a new route, you have new entertainment.  You see new areas of town, new people and get to daydream about new opportunities.  

Think of an Apple Orchard

Professor Richard Wiseman gives the example of an apple orchard.  When you have an orchard, full of apples, no matter where you go, you will find plenty of apples.  If you keep going to the same section each day, eventually, the selection will run dry.  To find more apples, all you have to do is move over to a new section of the orchard.

Do You Commute by Train?

Changing up your way to work is not just for drivers.  I used to take the train to work I found that just by arriving a few minutes earlier or later can make a big difference.  The traffic changes and different people will be waiting for the train.  During busier times, you get to see how people act being squished together and during slower times, you can see the designs and ads on the walls, and find less stressed out people to start a conversation with.  

New York City has Some of the Best

If you are lucky enough to live in New York City or many other major cities, you can also enjoy all of the entertainment that the subways have to offer.  5 year old break dancers, talented musicians and even comedians who claim that the subway car is their home that they rent for $2.75 per month.  Complaining that people are hanging out in his house and putting their feet up on his chairs.  

Tourist Bring Luck

Major cities get a lot of tourists and tourists bring a lot of luck.  They come from different cities and cultures with different perspectives and if your speak to them, you can rip of your blinders and realize that there is a world outside of your city.  

Conclusion

Taking a different route to work or changing up your travel schedule can take you out of autopilot and open your eyes to a lot of luck.  So, if you take the same route to work every day, it’s the wrong route!

Action Steps:

To get lucky, you can’t just read articles and books.  You have to take action and get out of your comfort zone.  

1. Change your route to work – try doing this once per week for the next month and see what it does for you.
2. Change the time that you leave for and from work – different flows of traffic get your creative juices flowing.

Let me know if you tried this “action item” and what your results were in the comments below.

Unlucky people look at failure as an end, a dead end. If you fail, that part of the journey is over and you might as well try something else because you just found one more thing that you’re not good at. You might get depressed, sleep and eat a lot, listen to depressing music and then finally come to a point where you decide to either move on or to declare yourself a failure.

Lucky Failures

Lucky people are very different. They look at failure as a step closer to success. Peter Kash, author of Make Your Own Luck: Success Tactics You’ll Never Learn in B-School as well as a professor and an investment banker who is an expert in luck (or what he calls the “Web of Life”) says that every time he hears the word “no”, he knows that he is one step closer to hearing “yes”.

Kash describes the difference between persistence and stubbornness. When there are 10 doors, persistence is trying each one of them until you find the right one. Stubbornness is trying one door and when it doesn’t work, trying it again and again.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

Lucky People Push Through Failure

A lucky person will try every possible route until he gets to where he wants to be.

History Tells Us Who Got Lucky!

Looking through history and even people I respect in my lifetime, there are so many examples of failure leading to success.

When I was growing up, I loved to play basketball. I still do but back then I was on my school’s basketball team and now I am lucky if I play a game of pickup every once in a while.

My favorite story was that of Michael Jordan. I watched him 3-peat for the Chicago bulls, I watched his videos and incredible moves which were all unbelievable but the most incredible story was that he got cut from his high school basketball team. He was told that he was too small and not good enough. Jordan worked harder than anyone at his school and probably anyone at all and became one of the greatest professional athletes of all time.

Some More Lucky Failures

Here are a few more stories of people who used failure as a step towards success:

Seinfeld and Cheers were both among the greatest television shows of our time and they were both supposed to be canceled after the first season.

Walt Disney, the creator of Disney world, Mickey Mouse and many other famous characters that children grow up with went bankrupt with his first cartoon.

Glenn Paul (thanks for the correction Fatma) Cunningham was burned badly and his parents were told that he would not live. He survived and started to recover but the doctors said he would never walk. When he started to walk, the doctors said he will never run. Paul Cunningham turned out to be the first American ever to run the four minute mile.

Kurt Warner was a Super Bowl MVP. Not many people know that he started his career throwing paper towels down the aisles at the grocery store he worked at.

Steven Jobs was rejected from Hewlett Packard. He told them that he was willing to take any job, even in the mail room and they can have his idea for a new computer for free. They did not want to know from it. Steven Jobs created the Apple computer.

The Beatles were one of the greatest music groups ever but Decca recording Co. rejected them and told them they have a sound that no one will listen to.

The business plan for FedEx got a “C” grade in Yale because the teacher thought it was not feasible. I’m sure that professor regrets that, now that it is one of the most successful businesses of its type.

Mary Kay was one of the best encyclopedia salespeople in her company but they would not promote her to a management position because she was a woman. She decided to leave them and start her own very successful cosmetics company.

One of the best examples of failure being the next step towards success is one of the United States’ greatest Presidents ever, Abraham Lincoln. He tried business and failed. He tried politics and failed. He tried each of those again and again, failing each time until he finally became President of the United States. He was quoted as saying “You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.”

Conclusion

As you can easily see from these stories, if you keep trying, you will get lucky. The road to success is paved in failure (that just popped into my head and I’m not sure if I made it up or stole it from somewhere else… if you know where I got it, leave a comment and let me know).

Action Steps:

1. Go to a mall or a public area with lots of people.
2. Ask people one at a time if they will take a selfie with you.
3. If the first person says “no”, rinse and repeat until you get a “yes”!  Trust me, you will get that “yes” if you keep asking.
4. If the first person says yes, GREAT, but for the purpose of this exercise, keep trying to get a few “NO’s”  It’s good for you!

Bonus:

1. Try asking people that you wouldn’t normally speak to.  It’s always easy to speak to a security guard or a store clerk who is paid to speak to you.  Approaching a stranger takes more confidence but is more rewarding.

Let me know if you tried this “action item” and what your results were in the comments below.

Facebook generates 4 new petabytes of data per day.   That is 1 million gigabytes per day! You think you go over your data with 8 gigs or whatever your cell carrier gives you?

60 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube and 4 billion videos are viewed per day. 

There are about 2.5 billion snaps per day on Snap(chat).

That is not including Twitter, Instagram, blog posts, news and all other social media.  Google alone has 30 trillion pages indexed.  
Everybody is fighting for a piece of your attention and if you have ADD like me, you have almost zero chance of survival.
There are marketers who spend most of their days trying to figure out how to cut through the noise and distract you (guilty as charged). There are platforms such as Facebook that not only give these marketers the tools to do it, but on a deeper level, they are using all of these marketers and others, including your closest family and friends, to keep you away from what you should really be doing.
Here are a few ways that you can tame your ADD (or ADHD in my case) so that you can get things done:

Clean up your space

Clean up! I know I am not your mother but take it from me, it is good advice. Clean your room, clean your house, clean your office. Every single little thing that is out of place is a distraction.
Oh look, an old gift card from Amazon. I wonder if it has any money on it. It will only take a minute to go check it out. www.amazon.com – type in gift card number… oh wait, there’s the book that I was thinking about getting. I wonder what the reviews have to say. Some of the reviews say it’s like some other book… I should check out that book, lots of people buy both of them together.
Three hours later (no exaggeration… or maybe a little exaggeration) you have ordered 2 books, added others to your wish list, noticed that notification that someone posted something on your wall, spent 30 minutes scrolling through your feed, had a few ideas, pondered them and we’re back. Mentally drained from all of that jumping around and now we are ready for work… actually I am hungry. I can’t do my best work on an empty stomach…

Turn off notifications

Turn them all off. Yes, email too. It doesn’t matter if a fire breaks out and you are the only one that can put it out. Notifications kill your productivity. You may think that you can handle them but trust me, they eat away at your mental energy one drop at a time and before you know it, you are drained and done for the day.

Turn on Airplane mode

People nag me that I am always on my phone. “What did you do before phones?” I always respond the same thing. People used to read the newspaper, carry a camera to take picture, call people from a landline, read physical books, carry a calculator (or have one on your watch if your were cool), use a flashlight, listed to radio to learn about the latest news, traffic and weather, go to a bank to pay their bills, go to a course to learn something new, ask everyone they saw when they needed to know who that person was that played that part in the movie that came out 2 years ago… and on and on and on… I do all of that and more from one little palm sized piece of hardware.
Phones (why do we even call them that? The phone app is only the 6th most used app) are extremely useful. A little too useful when you need to concentrate. They have every possible distraction known to man all rolled up into one.

Set up a work zone

When I say “zone”, I mean it. You need to make it yours so that you can be in the zone getting shit done. Make it a quiet place with no distraction.

Wear headphones

It doesn’t matter what you are listening to, if anything at all (white noise is great), but just having the headphones on helps keep you in the zone. It also discourages (some) people from coming over to chat (read distract). One thing that I have found very successful is playing one song that you know really well, on repeat.

Designate specific times for work, only work and nothing but work

These times can be any length that work for you.  I suggest experimenting to see what works best for you. You can start with 30-45 minutes and work your way up.  Don’t push the limits though because you don’t want to burn yourself out and kill the rest of the day.  In between each of these work periods, take a break.  Go for a walk, go to the bathroom, exercise, scroll through your favourite social account, read a book…

Many people have found success with 42 minutes on and 18 minutes off.  You can adjust based on your preference and ability.  Just remember, when you are in your zone, you need to be distraction free.

Don’t multitask

So many companies try and hire employees that can multitask.  Someone who can juggle multiple projects at a time.  That’s probably not the best skill to look for.  Very few people can multitask well and each task usually suffers because of the others.  I can’t remember who says this but I like it and will use it anyway:

It’s better to whole ass one thing than to half ass two.

Determine the most important thing you can do today

Write it down.  Place the note in front of you.  Then do whatever it takes to get it done.  If you need the Internet and other potential distractions to complete the task, find ways to get around it until it is no longer possible.  For example, I am writing this article without Internet.  At the top, I made notes for myself such as “(find out and fill in how many social posts are created each day on each network)”.  I also left finding an image for this article to the end.

Whatever you do, make sure to get it done.  With only one thing on your mind, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

Make a list of 3 more things that you want to get done

Write down three more things and put them on a different list that you only look at when you are finished your first item.  To do lists and task lists can pile up quickly.  It’s not hard to create a list of 20 things that you want to get done today.  Once again, too many things will distract you.  One is very doable.  Three will give you more tasks without overwhelming you.

It’s been years but I once heard a story of a guy who went over to a very wealthy man and told him that he will sell him the best piece of advice that he will change his life.  He asked for $20,000 which took the wealthy man off guard but he didn’t get wealthy by throwing away thousands of dollars on advice so he negotiated.  “first give me the advice and if I think it is worth it, I’ll pay you the money.”  The guy gave him the following advice “each day, write down 5 things that need to get done today”.  The wealthy man laughed and walked away.  A week later, he came back with a check for the full $20,000.

Keep a list of all your ideas and things you want to do

Only write the items down. Don’t browse through your list except at the end of your day when preparing for the next day or work period.    If you are like me, you have millions, no billions (had to exaggerate for effect) of ideas every day.  Business ideas, blog post ideas, fun ideas, parenting ideas… You also get curious.  Very curious and curiousity kills your productivity as much as the distractions above in your messy space.  A quick Google search can suck you in to hours of brain drain.

Take time off

Regularly take time off.  You need it.  I’m not saying take weekly vacations, unless you can and that would be awesome.  I’m saying take time off between work periods.  Take enough time off to enjoy your evenings with friends, family or a good book.  Take enough time off each weekend.  The point is, you need time off in order to recharge and be able to use your next work period to your full capacity.  Thing of yourself as a battery.  If you don’t recharge fully, you won’t be able to last as long during your next work period.  You will be slower. You won’t be able to think as well and basically, you’ll just end up wasting a lot of time.

If you have anything to add to the list, leave me a note in the comments. Then go get some work done!

Messy Office Pic Credit

Mitch Hedberg was famous for saying “when I think of something funny, I either reach for a paper and write it down or just convince myself it wasn’t funny.  For years I have been writing down my ideas when I was in the mood or motivated and other times, I just convinced myself it was a bad idea.

I know that many of my ideas probably suck.  That being said, I am sure that some of them are decent, good or even great.  I also know that ideas are a dime a dozen and it is execution (read: thousands of decisions executed properly) that turns an idea into a business.  I know that I don’t have the time, energy or motivation to execute on all of my ideas but, maybe you do.  That’s why I am putting my ideas out there and letting anyone use them if they are interested and motivated.  If you do use one of my ideas or get motivated to do something based on one of my ideas, let me know.  It will make my day.

I’m not sure how I am going to post my ideas yet.  Maybe as their own posts and maybe just by updating this post with new ideas as I come up with them or as I feel like it.  In the meanwhile, I am just going to get started here because the best thing you can do is the right thing, the second best is the wrong thing and the worst thing you can do is nothing.  Remember: ready, fire, aim!

I’m happy to expand on any of these ideas and discuss them in more detail. Just shoot me a message.

Ideas:

1. Luxury showers in business districts, airports and malls.  – the most relaxing, refreshing, energizing experience.  Like a car wash for people with a choice of water pressure, treatments, lotions, soaps, shampoos, conditioners, etc.  Just choose your preference and enjoy.
2. S-Hit List – People love to complain about companies that they hate.  They also like to tell the world about companies that they love.  Hit List/Shit List (or whatever you want to name it) will allow people to choose from all the companies in the world and add them to one of their lists to let the world know what they think and why they think that.  It can be based on Facebook pages or some other database of companies.  It can be a Tinder like swipe right for “hit list” and left for “shit list”.  After a while, you can rate the worlds most loved and hated companies with lots of stats to back it up.  Lots of data and opportunities to work with companies within the system.

More ideas to come…

Enjoy!

I find that there are so many things that I want to accomplish or start doing and my list is a mile long. If you have too many things to think and worry about or to try and change, you will not accomplish any of them. That is why I am introducing and following my new goal accomplishing system for New Year’s Resolutions and encouraging you to do the same.

The New Year’s Resolution Goal System

The system is very easy and makes you wonder why you never tried something like it before. Here are the steps for the New Year’s resolution goal system:

Make a list of all of your goals.

1. Make a list of all of your goals for this year from major feats that you would like to accomplish all the way down to little changes you would like to make (like reading for 30 minutes instead of watching one of the TV shows in your routine). Try to come up with at least 12, one for each month. It takes 30 days to build a habit so 12 habits or goals should work perfectly into this system.

Organize your goals.

2. Organizer all your goals in order of importance.The most important at the top and the least important (or the “it would be nice if I did it”) goal at the bottom.

Start working on your first goal.

3. On January 1, start working on your number one, most important goal. Work hard at it as if it is the only goal you need to accomplish this year. Each day in January do something that will bring you closer to your goal.

Evaluate your progress.

4. At the end of the month, evaluate how well you’ve done. Did you accomplish your goal? Did you get close? If not, what can you do to help yourself achieve your goal over the next 30 days? If successful, skip to number 6.

Evaluate your goal.

5. If you didn’t succeed, try and figure out why you didn’t. Was it too hard and should take longer than 30 days? If so, keep working on it for as long as it takes. Just make sure you evaluate your progress at least once a month and don’t give up.

Sometime you may find that the goal isn’t even right for you and that there are more important goals to focus on. If that’s the case, over the next 30 days, try the next goal on your list. It’s ok to decide that one or two of your goals were not right but if you find this happening with too many goals, try and figure out why and how you can make better goals that you can achieve.

Move on to your next goal.

6. Once you’ve accomplished one goal (or are comfortable enough with your progress), move onto your next goal. Work for the next 30 days to accomplish your next goal while maintaining your progress of your first goal (unless there is nothing to maintain since the goal was a one time thing).

Evaluate once again.

7. Go back to step 4 and repeat the steps over and over each month.

Keep doing this until next New Year and see how many goals you can accomplish. Next year try adding more goals and shorten the trial period. You can always assign different amounts of time to goals of different difficulty. Challenge yourself each year to see how many goals you can accomplish.

Over time, you will get better at disciplining yourself and maintaining your progress. Last year, without even noticing, I started using this system. If you look back to my first blog post, I wrote about starting my New Year’s resolution of blogging about “luck” on December 4^th. On December 31^st, I wrote about starting my next goal of creating personal financial statements every month, which I have also accomplished. Throughout this past year, I have started and accomplished many personal goals such as moving to a bigger place to live in a new city, quitting my job and starting my own company, spending more quality time with my family and many more. Looking back, it took about a month or so for each of them.

You will never accomplish all of your goals overnight but if you take baby steps and do them one at a time, you can be successful. Just remember, it takes 6 years to become an overnight success, so start working toward the future you in 6 years.

Good Luck and Happy New Year!

Editor’s note: This post was just too good to leave buried in my archive so I refreshed it and posted it again.  The content is just as applicable today as when it was originally posted.

If you already know that you want one, click here to order your own Fitbit Charge 2.

I was super excited to put it on, sync to my phone (which was really simple) and get started tracking.  In future posts, i’m going to give you the back story on why I decided to jump in and order my Fitbit.  I’ll also be posting my thoughts along the way and my before and after stats, so that you can see if these fitness trackers are effective and if so, how effective they really are.

Stay tuned!

You can own your own Fitbit Charge 2. Or buy it in the USA Fitbit Charge 2.

This blog has been overgrown with all sorts of weeds and one of these weekends I am going to make blogscaping a project. Update some of my info, maybe the look and feel of the blog, maybe more. I want to get back to writing regularly, or at least semi regularly and that will hopefully start now. It’s been a long time and I have a lot to tell you so stay tuned and wish me luck!

-Amir

Photo Credit

 The System

I was shocked at how easy this was and how much time it has saved me over the last 2 weeks. 

Step one: Create a label for all of your unimportant mail.  I called mine “Not Important”.

1. a.      Click on the little gear in the top right corner
2. b.      Click on “Settings”
3. c.       Click on “Labels”
4. d.      Click on “Create new label” towards the bottom
5. e.       Enter a name and click “create”

Step two: Every time an email comes in from one of these places that you care “very little about”, filter it to skip the inbox and get labeled “Not Important” or whatever you called your new label.

1. a.      Click the checkmark next to the email that you want to mark.  It could be many at the same time.
2. b.      Click the “More” button at the top (middle) of the page
3. c.       Click “filter messages like these”
4. d.      Without changing anything, click “Create filter with this search” (blue text at the bottom)
5. e.       Click “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” and click “Apply label” and then choose the label that you just created.
6. f.        Click the bottom checkbox as well “Also apply filter to other matching conversations”
7. g.      Click “Create Filter”

Step three: Repeat step two every time that a non-important email comes in.  It takes very little effort but after a while, your inbox will be clean and you will only receive important emails.

Step four: Check your “Not Important” label as often as you feel necessary.  I check mine when I am done working and then just glance through the subjects to see if there is anything I care about.

Step five: After glancing through the non-important emails that came in and realizing that you don’t need any of them, delete them.

Don’t get me wrong, many parents rock! My parents are awesome and I am now one of those parents who knows an infinite times more than my kids (for the next couple of years at least). I think that the moment that you realize that your parents are not always right and there are some things that they don’t know is the moment that you can start growing up and becoming the person who you need to be.

Have your parents said any of the following?

Don’t talk to strangers – It may be good advice for a 3 year old but it is that advice that trains us to shut ourselves into our little boxes as we grow up. Speaking to strangers, meeting new people and networking are some of the most important ways for a person to grow.

Go to school, get a degree, get a job – School is still important and education is probably the most important thing you can ever invest in but the way that the advice was given to us by our parents was coming from a different world. It was a world where getting a degree would guarantee you a great career.

If you cross your eyes like that, they will stay that way – I’m not even sure where this came from but it is not true.

You are different than your parents. You are growing up in a different world, with different technology, different options and different challenges. You also have different ideas and different passions and you should follow them.

One piece of advice that I learned a while ago and live by is “don’t take advice from anyone who hasn’t successfully done what you are trying to do”.  There are many good intentioned people out there that want to help you out and give you advice but unless they have successfully done what you are trying to do, they don’t know enough to give you good advice. Think about it, would you take business advice from someone who has never started or run a business?

When you are really young, your parents may have all the answers because your life is not that complicated and everything you are learning is pretty general. As you grow up, you start to specialize and you go places where your parents haven’t necessarily ever traveled before. For example, the math you learn in first grade is teaching you the basics such as addition and subtraction. Most parents should be qualified to help you out with that.  As you get older and start specializing in algebra, trigonometry, calculus and model theory, unless your parents are mathematicians, they probably can’t help you as much. The same goes with every field and everything else in life.

Your parents want the best for you and based on their knowledge, try to give you the best advice.  Unfortunately, it is not always the best advice to follow.  So, love your parents, appreciate all that they have given you but if you want to get lucky, take any advice after your 13th birthday with a grain of salt.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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.