I’ve been using Nozbe for about 8 weeks now and have just paid for my first month of its use. I transferred my workflow and most of my tasks into Nozbe without much of a problem, but a few imperfections with the app kept me from paying for the whole year of service.

Whether I’ll stay with Nozbe or not – I’m not sure, but I can already see that there are things I really like. There are things I really miss too, so it’s just going to be a decision of what’s more important – benefit of new features or disadvantage of not having some basic (in my view) functionality.

Things I really like about Nozbe

Compared to other solutions, Nozbe helped me stay more productive with the following elements of the solution:

• Nozbe desktop app for Mac – this is great if you are offline and would like to add new tasks or sort through Inbox, etc.
• checklists in comments (notes) area for each task – this is a really cool feature. Sometimes it helps a lot to split a particular task into tiny steps. Checklists are perfect for this because they stay within a particular task, they avoid unnecessary clutter in your projects and Inbox area, and they are a great way to keep track of your progression with a task
• universally accessible quick entry dialogue – there’s a global hotkey which allows me to add tasks rather quickly. This is really convenient if you’re working in another application and just want to quickly take note of some future task.

Strangely enough, I didn’t benefit much from Evernote or Dropbox integration. Mainly because at workplace I have a restricted WiFi access (no social websites, no file sharing) and also because Dropbox and Evernote sync would not be very popular with my 3G plan when I’m on the go.

Things I feel could be better with Nozbe

Search functionality

There’s basically two things I miss in the current Nozbe desktop app search implementation: ability to show completed tasks and searching through the notes. There is a perfectly working search that helps you find tasks, but if you keep any notes for your tasks they don’t appear to be searchable at this stage.

There’s no easy way to show completed tasks either – you need to go to the website and use Nozbe online to access them, which most of the time is too time consuming to be useful.

Both features are fully supported in Remember The Milk and it’s only now that I realize that they’re more useful than I originally thought.

Nozbe iPhone app isn’t as useful on iPhone 4 as I thought it was

Adding new tasks – a rather crucial part of my workflow – is only useful in its basic form (add a task into Inbox with no extra information). If you want to set tags or assign a task to the project – it’s so painfully slow that I can’t really use it. With projects assignment the list scrolls slow and then selects something that I clicked when scrolling – so I can’t trust it.

What I quickly noticed is that using mobile client affected my habits and almost made be go back to paper note taking or capturing things in RTM or Evernote to be processed later.

The perfect mobile app should be clean and simple. I can manage my projects on laptop or in my browser, but all I expect from a mobile phone app is to simply show me what tasks are due and maybe allow to quickly capture new ones.

Quick entry dialogue isn’t intuitive enough

Could be just a documentation thing, but I couldn’t find the right syntax to use quick entry box for assigning due dates. When I’m trying to add a task I’d like to use dates in their natural format – like 20/02/2013. I haven’t found a way to do that yet and this means the workflow suffers quite a bit. It’s usually two extra steps because if you specify a project for your task (quick entry dialogue supports this functionality) then your task will skip Inbox and you’ll need to chase it in the project’s folder to change its date.

 Things I really miss in Nozbe (deal brakers)

If I turn to another solution (Things 2, anyone? 2Do?), it will likely be not because of some majorly different or innovative features but down to the following two rather simple requirements for my task management tool:

1. Keyboard Shortcuts

   Apart from the quick entry dialogue, there really aren’t that many in Nozbe’s desktop solution. Most important ones for me would be to mark the task as completed and to erase the task. Some really useful ones would be to set the due date to today and to tomorrow. Moving around tasks and projects with your keyboard would also be really cool!

   As of right now, all such elements of my workflow are pretty frustrating – the amount of scrolling and mouse-clicking is simply unbelievable. The end results (neatly organized projects, beautifully looking tasks lists and so on) are great but without basic keyboard support the productivity suffers a lot.

2. priority settings for tasks – something I quite liked in Remember The Milk: 3 different priorities allowed me to plan my day or week a bit better – sometimes seeing the full list helped me recognize where my focus should be, picking a task or a project instead of seeing/focusing on the next task (starred task) only.

   Obviously, being able to filter your tasks by priority is another thing I really miss for now.

Should you try Nozbe?

Absolutely! It may be perfect for you, it may be less than perfect! And with the free iPhone app and a generous free trial period, you really don’t have that much to lose. Give it a try and let me know how you find it!

Read more in: Productivity, Reviews.

Just in time to celebrate Nozbe‘s 6 years in business, a new Nozbe client for iOS devices (iPhone/iPad) is available as of today!

I’ve just downloaded the app and must say I’m impressed:

• it feels snappy enough on my rather dated iPhone 4 – scrolling through the lists is very smooth 
• there’s fully-featured comments support: checklists, etc! Wohoo! :)
• sync is faster and less visible, just the way it should be
• design makes the most of the available space – in addition to labels, some contexts are shown using icons
• both screen orientations are supported, I haven’t decided yet which one I like most
• best of all: the new Nozbe app is FREE! This means you can now fully test whether Nozbe is the right tool for you without having to pay anything – free accounts have enough features to be useful. Register here!

All in all, it’s a great and welcome start.

Well done Nozbe!

Read more in: Productivity.

Welcome to 2013! :)

I’m really excited to be giving Nozbe another try this year! I’ve been using the much earlier version of the product about 14 months ago and gave up after a few weeks. This time around I am planning to spend at least 2 months using Nozbe, so will be sure to post my findings in the coming weeks.

My requirements for a productivity software

Thanks to the past year of using Remember The Milk Pro, the expectations are quite high. If you haven’t used RTM before, here are just a few things that are implemented so incredibly well that I’ve grown to take them for granted:

• super-easy yet very flexible way of quick tasks entry – for both web and iPhone
• recurring tasks support with multiple notes – this is critical for me as I use it for tracking
• quick and very useful search through your tasks and notes (including the ones I have completed)
• web/iPhone/iPad clients for the solution
• API so that there’s a potential to develop your own software based on the solution

Simply put, Remember The Milk is so elegant and efficient that it’s really hard to walk away from it. For lists-based productivity system this solution is simply perfect. But because I would like to get organised even more I thought there won’t be a better time to try a new solution than first thing in the new year.

My reasons for trying Nozbe

Projects support in Nozbe

I think it’s once again this part of my life that I would really like to get my projects organised. Nozbe has quite flexible support for projects, and after Remember The Milk I think I will benefit a lot by simply having an opportunity to put my tasks into respective projects.

A fairly recently added projects template support sounds like a very interesting feature – I have quite a few projects that are repetitive, so any way of automating their lifecycle will be a benefit.

Nozbe Desktop client

Although online solutions can match desktop app’s feature set and performance quite easily these days,  I still find that native OS integration helps. In case of productivity systems, the desktop version is important because I can use it when traveling. I’ve been flying almost every weekend for the past few months and it will be really nice to finally have an opportunity to work directly with the tasks and projects rather than create temporary copies in Evernote with a view to later import them (copy-paste or type all over again) into web-based solution.

Review (Calendar) functionality in Nozbe

I’ve been a long-time fan of the review functionality found in Remember The Milk, especially the daily reminder you can set up – I get a list of my tasks at 9am every morning and it has done wonders for improving my awareness of the tasks coming up on the day.

Nozbe has a very neat Calendar function in desktop version, it shows you overdue, current (today’s) and future tasks which seems a good way to review things and to get certain tasks completed and out of the way.

Integration with Evernote and Dropbox

I have close to 5000 entries in my Evernote account, and although I’ve been working hard on reducing this number in the past months, I still find quite a lot of information to be put into Evernote almost daily. Not all the things are tasks or projects – there’s quite a lot of reference material that may be used in the future.

With Nozbe’s integration I plan on fully utilising my Evernote account and automatically hooking reference material up with relevant projects.

The same goes for Dropbox – being my primary storage for ebooks and manuals and various cheatsheets, I love the way Dropbox syncs everything seamlessly between my devices. Being able to attach files to my projects or tasks in Nozbe is something I really look forward to. It makes a lot of sense and will potentially make for a very flexible productivity system that relies on various tools for what each one of them does best.

Rich Comments for tasks

Last but certainly not least, comes the comments support in Nozbe. As I mentioned earlier, multiple comments is a must for me because I’m using them for tracking progress within a task. This is especially true for recurring tasks I have for multiple habits I’m working on.

With Nozbe I found that it’s quite easy to add comments. I also notice that there’s a way to turn comments into checklists which may find its place in my workflow, so we’ll see in a few weeks.

Are you a Nozbe user?

If you are a seasoned Nozbe user, please take a few minutes to leave comment and let me know how you’re finding it so far. I’ve tried quite a few solutions in the past few years, so the last thing I want is to try and use Nozbe in exactly the way I’ve learned with some other software.

If you have time-saving tips or simply features that you absolutely love about Nozbe – mobile, web or desktop version – I sure hope you’ll find the time to share with me and other readers. Thanks!

Read more in: Productivity.

Does everyone really need a system to manage tasks?

Depending on the number of daily incoming tasks, you may get away with having no system for managing them. But as soon as the number of tasks becomes overwhelming (you'll be surprised how small this number needs to be!), you'll start forgetting tasks or delaying their completion due to last-minute change of priorities.

A proper tasks management system is an approach that helps you:

1. Keep a list of your daily/weekly/monthly tasks
2. Understand the context of each task (location or specific type of each task)
3. Schedule each task and have a reminder when something is due
4. Be flexible when it comes to changing priorities

You may be surprised, but even in our modern age the tasks management system doesn't have to be software based. There are many apps for smartphones and PCs, and many online solutions. But while some of them are truly great for the purpose, you shouldn't think that the only way to get really organized and productive is by using complex and often expensive software solutions.

Why it's important to have your tasks listed

Perhaps a very basic requirement for any task management system, this is a must have if you're serious about being organized. You can't manage your time or set expectations about when things will get done unless you have a complete list of tasks.

Sometimes just merely having a list will help you understand whether certain tasks or expectations are realistic within their suggested timeframe. In a very similar way, having a very short list will sometimes help you reprioritize your next hour or day by taking some of the actions and agreeing to start working on them immediately.

Last but not least is the advantage of having a historical log of your tasks: whether you get them all done or not, you'll still benefit from knowing what you had or planned to do on a certain day.

It's critical that you trust your tasks management system

I think I've mentioned it in a few of my posts in the past, but one of the most useful advantages of having a tasks management approach is its ability to free up your mind and your attention.

Once you get into a habit of writing all your planned tasks somewhere, once you get truly comfortable with capturing and accessing your to-do lists, you'll start the process of gaining your mind's attention and tasks processing power back.

You see, unless you've captured tasks somewhere where you don't have to remember all the details, your mind still regards such tasks as open loops. Even though the task may be in the past or in the distant future, until you properly capture and file it in your tasks management system it will consume as much of your attention as any active or actively pending task. And yes, you guessed it – each and every open loop will endanger your mind's ability to stay focused on the current, critical and possibly urgent tasks.

Wouldn't it be a real shame to underachieve on your really important task today just because you couldn't (without realizing it) stop thinking about something months and months away from now?

Don't have a system yet? It's never too late to find one!

So, here's that question again: have you gotten a tasks management system yet? And can you really trust it? If you can't – find such a system as a priority, you'll be glad you did! The more comfortable you become capturing tasks and planning deadlines using a system, the more time and focus you will gain back.

If you're out of practical ideas – ask in a comment, otherwise stay tuned – I'll be sharing tips very soon.

Read more in: Productivity.

I have just realized that it's been more than 6 months since I made the decision to incredibly simplify my daily tasks tracking and stick to the amazing Remember The Milk service. Having been one really happy customer of this service, I feel I owe a quick recap of my needs and a review of how RTM helped me meet them in a very elegant way.

Useable online and an iPhone app

For the past few years I've been quite happily using iPhone and that's why one of my pre-requisites for trying any new productivity approach is that it has a decent iPhone app.

Prior to settling with Remember The Milk, I've had a few weeks of testing multiple services – considering both free apps and paid ones. Quite a few of very expensive tools have a lot of functionality offered for an acceptable price, but I quickly noticed that for the first time in my life I wanted to simplify my approach instead of making it more app/process driven.

This was when I stumbled upon RTM. I've read a few reviews online and got really interested but the app (and the website) seemed too simple to be really useful for anything advanced. I already had a way of managing my shopping lists (mostly in Evernote with a bunch of checkboxes, really neat!) so wanted to be sure I won't lack any important functionality.

Turns out, RTM was a perfect balance of simplicity and productivity – you have ways to set up regularly reoccurring tasks, there's an easy way to specify priority and duration of a task. It's very easy to add tags and place a task in a list, so what more can you possibly ask? Add more and the simplicity will vanish, and who knows how this will impact your productivity.

Life without projects

Like many others, I've been avoiding using multiple tools for managing my personal and work related tasks. Keeping track of your tasks adds enough overhead to your daily self-organization effort without having to use different tools for different parts of the day. I've managed to stay faithful to this principle with a number of tools, but many of them were decided because of their built-in support for projects.

Now, if projects are supposed to be different from contexts. If you decide to use contexts for specifying the location where a task is to be completed (like @home, @laptop, @mobile, @work) then projects may be used for additional granularity in grouping your tasks. Many tools will also let you specify priority for the project or indicate a completion progress with a percentage, and it's usually possible to specify the start and finish date for a project.

What I found out is that I almost never used projects the way they're meant to be. For me they were usually nothing but a grouping. I didn't need the time-tracking or time-planning elements usually associated with project management. That's why I slowly arrived at the idea of using contexts as projects. There's no need to specify the location for a project via context, because project name includes a hint at the location anyway.

Within a few weeks I have departed from projects completely. I fell in love with lists in Remember The Milk. You can create as many as you like and they fit my day-to-day activities a lot better than a concept of projects.

For example, I can have a list for my current and future reading. I have a list for shopping. I naturally have the Inbox and Someday lists and keep a few more that really help organizing tasks. For any extra granularity I can always use tags. They're not contexts but act in a very similar way, so once again it's very easy to make them anything you want them to be – location or activity indicator, personal or work related, critical or a nice to have.

Customisable searches in RTM

I really, really like this feature of Remember The Milk: you can search for a task in more than one way, and then save the search conditions to be reused late.

There are quite complex searches possible thanks to the built-in syntax, but I keep it really simple and use search for finding future and past tasks still due for completion. Search queries are really simple, like due:today (for my current list) or due:yesterday (I check this every day to make sure I reschedule any tasks that I did not get a chance to complete in time.

There are whole pages devoted to explaining all ways to search your tasks. Naturally, you can access both active and completed (archived) tasks – no compromise there.

Simple notes for tracking progress

I've used this trick long before RTM (in fact, it was MyLifeOrganized where I saw it first a few years back): if you have a recurring task, it usually allows you to add notes which you will see every time your next task occurrence is due. Editing a single note or, as it's possible in Remember The Milk, to add new notes every day, is a perfect way to track your progress for a recurring task.

For example, If I have to learn/practice new words I can have a daily task which will capture my impressions from each day's practice session.

If I have my daily 30min of reading scheduled as a reoccurring task, it's really easy to see what I've been reading every day because I keep adding notes whenever I see a daily reading task.

The amazing syntax for adding new tasks

Last and most certainly not the least functionality gem of Remember The Milk: the amazing way of specifying all parameters of the new task right in the same field where you're typing your task's name.

Using a simple syntax you can type one expression which will not only name your task but also specify the due date and priority for it, and any tags if you feel like specifying them.

It's hard to underestimate this functionality. This feature was probably the deal braker for me – being someone who loves lean and functional interfaces, I was impressed from the very first few tasks I had created.

That's it, my Remember The Milk story. If you haven't used this service yet – please find 15min to try it today, you'll thank me later!

Read more in: Productivity.

Best Days Ever? That’s easy!

How come we’re so different it’s not even funny?

You (usually) get what you expect

Stay alert for the good stuff

Tips for having the Best Days of your life

Read more in: Happiness.

Dropbox may be a bit pricey for syncing large amounts of data, but for most things the free 2 GB account is more than adequate (click here to get your account setup).

Here are just a few things I’m using Dropbox for:

• Research notes for blog projects – there aren’t that many files that one would usually need for preparing the next blog post or a summary page. Dropbox helps a lot cause I can store all the photos/images/PDF docs/doc files in folders named after projects.
• eBooks on the go – GoodReader app for my iPad supports many cloud storage solutions, Dropbox is one of them. This means reading any book on iPad is always just a few clicks away. Just drag-and-drop the file into the Dropbox folder and it will appear on iPad upon next sync
• Passwords and secure notes – I’ve been a happy user of the 1Password tool which I highly recommend for storing passwords if universal access matters – 1Password has clients for iPhone/iPad and also desktop clients for both Windows and Mac. Since adding Dropbox support the password sync became even easier.
• Study notes and assignments – because I never know where I might find next half an hour to spend on one of the assignments for my college, I use Dropbox to store all the current study notes and active assignments – this way I can review or update documents during my lunch break at work or from any of my home computers.
• MyLifeOrganized synchronization – although I’m not using Dropbox for MLO sync anymore (I’ve been using MLO Cloud sync feature for quite some time now) – it’s been a valid option to sync MLO files for the last few years and I’ve never had any issues (and if I did there’s always way to roll changes back).

Are you using Dropbox yet? If not, you should really consider! If you decide to sign up, please use this Dropbox affiliate link so that I get some free space as your referer. If you ever need help with Dropbox on Windows or Mac I’ll be happy to help – just leave a comment or drop me an email using the contact form.

Read more in: Productivity.

Being sick, no matter the illness, is never fun. Instead it’s scary, or worrisome, or annoying, or painful. You likely also feel out of control, both of your body and over the Medical Billing that may be yet to come. Unfortunately, there’s no way to eliminate all those negative feelings, besides getting healthy. But this doesn’t mean you can’t be positive – or at least as positive as possible – as your illness runs its course. Not only can doing so make you feel better about yourself, but it can also help you get better in the first place.

Here are a few approaches I’ve taken in the past when dealing with an illness:

Appreciate Those Who Care for You

Whether it’s a friend, a spouse, a family member, or a nurse, the person helping you through your illness cares about you, is there for you, and wants you to get well. For this, that person should be appreciated. You can also take it a step further, and consider all those people who care about you all the time, even when you’re healthy. While your illness may bring out their support and concern, it’s always there under the surface. Use your illness as a way to stop taking that for granted.

Contextualize Your Situation

No matter your illness, there’s a good chance it could be worse. There is someone out there in worse pain than you, with a worse prognosis than you, and receiving care that is inferior to yours. While this may seem like a morose way of staying positive, the ultimate aim is to focus on yourself. Think about what your body is doing right, how hard it’s working to fight the illness, and the ways in which things could be worse. If we don’t value our bodies enough when we’re healthy, we can still appreciate how they fight for us when we’re sick.

Try to Relax

When you’re sick, there’s a lot that is outside of your control. You can’t develop a new medication or go inside your body and battle an infection, and it’s easy to get regularly caught up in these uncontrollables. The best approach, for both your mind and your body, is to try to relax. Get rest, read a book, and don’t attempt to stress yourself back into good health. Trust your body and the medication to do its job, and work to tune out your mind as much as possible. It’s not always an easy task, but I’ve found that it’s worth it.

Whatever your approach, it’s important to stay as positive as possible when battling an illness. Being sick is difficult, but all of us are better off with some sanity and peace of mind. To those of you out there suffering from an illness: stay positive. And get better soon.

Read more in: Motivation.

The reason I decided to mention MindMeister now is because there’s currently a great promo on their website: 20% off all premium MindMeister upgrades!

This probably means you have to sign up for MindMeister free membership, but with great features like online collaboration (practically live mindmap editing)  and embedding support (you can include online interactive mindmaps into your posts or website pages) I’m sure you will not regret.

Give MindMeister a try and you will never look back!

Two options for you to join MindMeister

Affiliate link

If you sign up as a premium member, I get a month or two of MindMeister membership for free. Just click this banner and follow instructions:

Direct link to MindMeister website

If you have any concerns about clicking the link about or simply don’t want me to benefit from sharing this tool with you, just click the link below – it’s an absolutely affiliate-id free direct link straight to the MindMeister website. Like I said, I’m sure you’ll love this online tool:

MindMeister

Read more in: Problem Solving, Productivity.

There are many things in life that may seem out of reach now, but it must be realized that you never have to stop growing.  You must ask yourself what you want most in life.  Then set out to get it.

Appreciate Failure

It’s important that you understand and accept that you will fail many times when attempting to achieve any major goal.  It is the goals that are most difficult to attain that are most worth achieving.

Failure is merely a stepping stone on the path to great success.  However, it is up to you to decide whether you will take that next step beyond failure or go back to your humble beginnings.

Failure offers the opportunity to growth.  It brings with it wisdom.  It shows you a way that does not work and offers suggestions of ways that might.  Failure is a gift to the determined.  It is a gift that offers insight to a new world and a new reality.

Failure sheds light on a new area in your life that few would dare enter.  You must have courage to carry on in spite of initial failure, for subsequent efforts lie outside your comfort zone.

Stay Hungry For Success

While failure will discourage the average person, it offers new hope to those who are hungry for success.  This new hope lies in new-found wisdom.  Your failures are your greatest teaching tools.  They show you what you did right and what you did wrong.  By fixing some things that you didn’t do adequately enough to succeed, you will grow your power.

Your power is your ability to succeed.  With each failure, this power is tested.  The weak will turn around and yield to the power of failure.  The strong, on the other hand, will seize the opportunity to increase their power by adding to their knowledge and their character.

Build Strength in Character and Keep Growing

Carrying on with a mission after initial failure takes a strong character.  It takes someone with an inspired vision and an unyielding passion.  If you are going after your goal with a purpose, you will keep striving for the right path until you find it.

Remember, each incorrect path you take brings you one step closer to the correct path, as long as you don’t go down that same wrong path again.

Ultimate success in life is all a matter of allowing yourself to keep growing.  Keep adding to your wisdom.  Keep experimenting with new ideas.  Keep creating new visions.  Keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and challenging yourself to experience all that life has to offer.

Though your greatest goals may seem out of reach now, you have the ability to keep growing in order to reach them.

About the Author

Matt Maresca is a motivational entertainer and creator of My Life Motivation, a self improvement website dedicated to helping people discover their true passion to live life with a purpose. Matt’s focus is on beginning with building self esteem and self confidence to improve your life from within.

Read more in: Motivation, Personal Development.

The One Surefire Secret That Can Help You Succeed

Everyone wants to be successful in life but only a small percentage of people manage to become successful, why is that?

Is it because people don’t work hard? No, some people work really hard and they never reach what they want

Is it because they didn’t try?
No, lots of people tried to succeed and failed

So what is the secret to success?
And how can you become successful even if you face lots of obstacles in your daily life?

Ask any successful person about the secret of his success and he will tell you the same thing. Success is all about trying enough number of times until you manage to find out the right way that works

Need a proof?

If this sounds weird or if you want a hard proof that reaching success is all about trying enough number of times then read the following real life examples:

• Thomas Edison failed nine hundred ninety nine times before he succeeded in inventing the lamp On the 1000th trial!!!, right after doing that people asked him, how did you manage to bear all that criticism and keep going? He answered each time it didn’t work I never said “I failed” but I only said I discovered a new way how to not invent the lamp
• Henry Ford lost all of his fortune 6 times and each time he bounced back and rebuilt his empire.
• Walt Disney’s idea of creating a cartoon character called “Mickey Mouse” was rejected more than 5 times until he managed to find someone who supported the idea and then Mickey came to life.
• English novelist John Creasy got 753 rejection slips before he published 564 books and became a famous writer!
• Most people know that Warren buffet the richest man in the world made his money from investments but what the majority of people don’t about Buffet is that his tutor recommended that he chooses another career other than finance because he believed that it doesn’t suit him!

Maybe those people were exceptions?

Do you think that those people were exceptions and that you can’t be as persistent as them?

No they weren’t, because you did that too long ago! Remember when you were learning how to walk? How many times did you fall? Why did you keep going? Because it this point you believed that its possible and that’s why you never stopped trying

I want you to watch any child trying to hold a door knob for the first time, you will find that the child will hold the objects incorrectly many times before it manages to find out the right way.

That’s how the learning process works, we learn through negative feedback which means that we have to do wrong things in order to learn how to avoid our mistakes the next time

So why do people fail to succeed?

Those who fail aren’t the ones who don’t try hard enough
They aren’t the ones who are pessimistic
They aren’t the ones who don’t try

But they are the ones who give up after few failures because they don’t understand that reaching success is only a matter of trying and tying until something works for them.

If Walt destiny lost hope long ago Mickey, Disney land and the Walt Disney corporation wouldn’t have came to life and I wont have even mentioned his name in this post

Now imagine the kind of things that would never exist in this world if you gave up too soon!!

Success is all about the number of tires!
And if you need any more proofs just ask any successful person

Written by M.Farouk Radwan
The founder of http://www.2knowmyself.com, The Ultimate source for self understanding

Read more in: Guest posts, Personal Development.

Once a wise man asked another man: “Can you keep a secret?” The other man eagerly replied that he could: “Then observe!” said the wise man: “So can I”

Personal self control can make the difference between a life well lived with plans and dreams realized and a sense of regret and waste.

Research stretching back years showed that children as young as four who could exert self discipline by controlling an impulse to have a sweet now so that they could have two sweets later (1) were more likely to have successful happy lives as adults. Self discipline doesn’t just make us successful it makes us happy it seems.

But self discipline isn’t just about the lottery of genetically inherited luck; something we’re either born with or not. We can all learn to control even master our immediate wants and impulses. So how do you do this? How can you purposefully strengthen your self discipline?

Step one: Exercise your discipline muscle

Just think about the language we use to describe self discipline: We talk about it being “strong” or “weak” just like a muscle. And research (2) has found that just like a muscle the more you exercise your self control the stronger it gets.

But it gets better. Exercising will power in one place (such as making ourselves work on our cherished project for a set time every day) will start to strengthen self discipline in other areas such as being able to say no to that tempting social invitation when you’d previously promised your pal you’d sit and listen to their marital problems. . So exercising self discipline specifically can strengthen it generally. But alas self discipline behaves like a muscle in another way too…

Step two: Don’t overdo it!

Exercising all day every day, lifting weights for hours on end won’t make you stronger in fact overtraining will start to weaken and waste your muscles (3)

Likewise people who have a New Years’ Resolution frenzy deciding to exert massive amounts of self discipline all over the place all at once will likely end up feeling less able to exert self control. When we exercise a muscle we deplete it of stored natural sugars (glycogen) and eventually the muscle weakens which means we need to rest. It’s the same with self control. Amazingly when you exert self discipline you actually deplete glycogen stores in your body just as with physical exertion! (4) Its even been found that ensuring your blood sugar levels are stable helps strengthen self discipline. So decide where you want to focus your self control, don’t overdo it all at once and build it up slowly.

Step three Beware of perfectionism

Having to do everything absolutely perfectly may, paradoxically, over use your supplies of will power needlessly making you less fulfilled and effective. Remember exerting self discipline drains glucose levels from the body and the perfectionist feels they have to exert their will and attempt to control everything. Feeling compelled to control all kinds of things that you really don’t need to (such as what other people say or think) is a waste of will power where it could be reserved and focussed on where you really need it. Being to perfectionist can make us give up earlier and stop trying or bothering because of the thinking error that: “If it’s not exactly as I feel it should be then it’s not worth bothering with at all!”

So remind yourself that you are only human and that you can make mistakes and you’ll actually find greater levels of self discipline.

Step four: Strongly imagine the consequences of your actions

The children in the self discipline research who were able to forgo having a marshmallow treat immediately by waiting (and thereby getting two treats!) were able to do this because they used their imaginations constructively. This is a good example of how one of nature’s finest human tools, the imagination, is meant to be used (one way it is commonly misused is through needless worrying) When you need to exert discipline and lead your own impulses really imagine the positive consequences later of being strong now. I use hypnosis with my clients, a very powerful way to access the imagination to strengthen resolve in this way.

Step five: Remind yourself who you are

When we feel like being weak we become trapped in the present (sometimes “living in the moment” isn’t so great) But it’s been found (5) that when we feel like giving into temptation stating to ourselves or even out loud our core values can give us an injection of immediate self discipline. Doing this can snap us out of tunnel vision and illuminate the bigger picture which in turn weakens the impulse. So next time you feel magnetically drawn to those doughnuts you might tell yourself: “Health and the welfare of my body is important to me!” or if someone felt compelled to treat someone else badly they might state to themselves: “Being a decent human being is important to me!” Try it.
And finally I’m reminded of the words of the ancient Roman poet Horace “Rule your mind or it will rule you.”

About Author

Mark Tyrrell regularly exerts self discipline to ensure he produces his prodigious output of articles, downloads and training, including a recent download on self discipline.

References:

1. C. and Mischel, W. (1976). Effects of temptation-inhibiting and task-facilitating plans on self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33 (2), 209-217 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.33.2.209.
2. See: Gailliot, M.T., Mead, N.L., & Baumeister, R.F. (2008). Self-Regulation, In O.P. John, R.W. Robbins & L.A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research (pp. 472-491). New York: The Guilford Press.
3. See: Doug McGuff’s excellent book ‘Body by science’ 2009
4. The mind-body response of exerting willpower literally fatigues us (Tice et al., 2007). It depletes physical power, as shown in one study that looked at the effects of mental self-control on physical stamina (Bray et al., 2008). In this study, trying to control one’s thoughts decreased muscular endurance, as measured by performance and EMG activity. The researchers who conducted this study called the effect ‘central fatigue’. This all provides another reason why it might be a good idea to exercise first thing.
5. According to research conducted by Schmeichel and Vohs in 2009.

Read more in: Mastering Habits, Motivation, Productivity.

One of the main ideas behind talent management is that we all have talents. By definition, being part of a talent management process makes you a talented person. You may need help and time to identify and perfect your talent, but that’s exactly why your company has a talent management process.

If you’re new to this topic, I think you will really like the Wikipedia article on Talent Management” – it provides a great introduction to the many processes involved, and gives you a few really good pointers. If you’re looking for software, there are many vendors providing solutions to address every imaginable aspect of managing talent with your company.

There are usually a few processes under the umbrella of talent management and today I would like to show you how you can employ the same processes in your own personal development.

Performance Management

As I always say: that which is measured, improves. That’s why it’s important to set goals, to track them closely and to take time to acknowledge your progress or lack of it.

If you look at various approaches to goal setting and to getting things done, most of them assume some kind of progress review – the time where you tick your checklist items off or update long-term goals with next steps.

In large companies, you have to set your goals regularly and to be a consistent achiever – completion of your goals is measured through self-appraisals and reviewed by your management to ensure the goals are aligned with your company’s vision.

In personal goal setting, measuring and managing your performance is just as important.

Learning & Development

It is never too late to pick a book or to watch an educational video, to read a scientific journal or to carry out a quick online research to expand your knowledge.

In big corporations, you are required to submit your learning and development plans on a regular basis, with the expectation that you follow them up. Usually every half a year, you get a chance to point out the areas of expertise which interest you most, and to suggest some possible ways to gaining such expertise.

When you’re planning your learning and development on your own, you don’t have to follow such a formal approach. And you don’t have to wait for half a year to set a learning goal, either! Your are completely free to identify the gaps in your knowledge and to immediately start your development.

Compensation

Usually part of a focal review, your compensation is most often based on your performance. If you had a successful year (set good goals and achieved them in a timely manner and up to or above expectations), you’re likely to get a financial reward. If you or your company weren’t successful enough, there is a chance you will not get rewarded. Such an approach ensures there is an additional motivation for you to be an achiever.

With personal development and your own personal goals, you can use something very similar: agree on a reward for each of your major goals. You don’t have to make each reward a financial one – it can be anything that can motivate you to achieve results.

If you learn to encourage and compensate yourself for all the major achievements, you can even become an inspiration to others!

Why would you need talent management at all?

We all have talents. Some of these are more obvious than others. Some talents are with us since the day we were born, others become obvious only after many years of mastery. That’s why it is very important for you to manage your own talents. This doesn’t only mean nurturing the things you believe yourself to be best at. You can simply decide on what you want to be great at and plan your strategy for getting there. Sure enough, your expectations should be realistic, but practice makes perfect – this means that doing your own talent management may give you just the advantage you need.

I hope this short article will manage to deliver its message – set your own goals and manage your own talents, because no one will do it better for you.

Read more in: Goal Setting.

Happiness

This is a guest article by Willie Horton, www.Gurdy.net

Websites like Gleb’s are a superb resource for anyone who has decided to embark on life’s most exciting adventure – the journey of personal development and self-discovery.  Why?  Because personal development is a lifetime’s work, it’s an ongoing journey that will take you to places that the normal mind cannot imagine.  Too often, people are under the false impression that, once they embark on this journey, their lives will be changed immediately and irrevocably – as if struck by lightning.   Unfortunately, even if you are struck by lightning, its effects will eventually wear off.

On the other hand, I have seen people “struck by lightning” where, having decided that they wanted to change their lives, their lives changed for them very quickly – they immediately saw real and concrete benefits from being more focused, more mindful, more tuned in to the opportunities that life is offering you and me today – if only we had eyes to see.   But, even for these people, the effects wore off and they found themselves gradually return to “normality”.  And normality is a dangerous thing because decades of psychological research prove that to be normal is to be mad.

Here are a few key facts that you need to know if you want to progress along the path to effortless happiness and success.  So-called normal people pay about 1% attention to what is actually going on in the here and now – so, it’s pretty difficult for them to rise to today’s challenges effectively and it’s even more difficult for them to notice and recognize an opportunity when they see one.  The greater part of the normal mind’s attention is focused in the dim and distant past – what we call our formative years, when we were young and impressionable, when we learned our beliefs about the world and our place in it – and the normal subconscious thinks that all the things that made us feel good or bad about ourselves way back then are actually happening today!   That’s why we automatically feel shy or nervous, confident or inadequate –  it has nothing to do with now, a now to which we’re not really paying attention.   Which leads me to the most important fact:  your happiness, success, peace of mind and well-being is directly correlated with your ability to pay attention to the here and now.   As we’ve already seen, this is simply a task that the normal mind isn’t up to.

So, to change your life, you’re going to have to start living it, one moment at a time, in the here and now.   That’s why those people that I mentioned earlier, those people whose lives changed dramatically, drifted back to normality – because they stopped paying attention to the moment and drifted back into what is, for all of us, our normal, inattentive adult default state of mind.   Unfortunately, the normal mind is a little like a piece of crappy software that you download from the internet.  It loads up with default settings, which you change to your own settings.  However, when you wake up the next morning, the old crappy default settings are back – your inattentive default state of mind has to be reset every single day of your life if you want to progress, if you want more out of life.  The good news, however, is that, once you learn how to reset your mind to pay attention to the present moment, changing your “default settings” only takes a few minutes each day.

I said that happiness and success is a function of how good you are at paying attention.  You have to become an expert.  This is done by coming to your senses –  I literally mean that – you have five senses, pay attention to them.   Start by finding a quiet place first thing in the morning, close your eyes (it’s easier to pay attention to your senses one at a time for a start) and you’ll notice that someone’s turned up the sound!   They haven’t, of course, you’ve just started paying attention.  Notice the feel of your clothes against your skin – that feeling’s always there, but now you’re noticing.  If you build, day by day, on your ability to observe, notice and pay attention, you will suddenly find yourself being more tuned into what’s going on in the course of your daily life, you will suddenly become more effective and more efficient, because you’re more attentive.

But, you’ve got to take these little steps every single day – otherwise your default state of mind will kick in and, being surrounded by all the other normal mad people, it will be the easiest thing in the world to be normal all over again.   It has been said that there is never a single step wasted on the journey to self-discovery and self-fulfilment – no matter how small.  Every single step you take, each day, every time you sit down to “smell the roses” will be rewarded, little by little – or you might even be struck by lightning.  Sooner or later, the pennies will drop for you – you’ll realise new things about yourself, you’ll be alert to new opportunities.  But, just like the old “Penny Falls” in the amusement arcades when I was growing up, you never know which penny that you put in the slot will make loads of pennies cascade over the edge – you’ve got to put your penny in the slot every single day.  And, believe you me, it’s worth it.

About Willie Horton

Willie Horton has been enabling his clients live their dream since he launched is now acclaimed two-day Personal Development Seminars all the way back in 1996. His clients include top leaders in major corporations such as Pfizer, Deloitte, Nestle, Merrill Lynch, Wyeth, KPMG, G4S and Allergan together with everyone from the stay-at-home parent to sports-people. An Irish ex-banker and ex-accountant, he lives in the French Alps from where he travels the world as a much sought after motivational speaker and mentor. In 2008 he launched Gurdy.Net where is self-help seminars are now online. For more information visit Willie Horton’s Personal Development Website Gurdy.Net

Read more in: Happiness.

What is Generally Thinking blog about?

Maintained by a psychology student Warren Davies, Generally Thinking is a blog with two major areas of focus: identifying your personal strengths and being happy. I am interested in both topics, and it’s been great so far to see Warren’s view of how strengths are identified and cultivated and why some people are happier than others. I’m a very happy person myself, but reading some of the articles on Generally Thinking helped me understand why I’m happy and to therefore plan some of my future steps in a way that they allow people around me to be happier as well.

Great articles on happiness

Here are just some of the really good posts I’ve found:

• Happiness and genetics – who would have thought there’s a relation between the two?
• How to be happier – 10 scientifically supported ideas – if you need solid reasoning for feeling happier, you’ll love this article
• Does marriage bring happiness? (yes, it does)

Articles on identifying and developing your core strengths

• What to do with your strengths – surprisingly enough, for many of us it’s a valid question even after we got the strengths identified
• You can do anything you set your mind to vs Stick to your strengths – there are successful examples backing each of these statements, this article explores the topic

Generally Thinking is a young blog, but I really like how Warren always refers to other sources of information – this isnt’ a common trend in most of personal development blogs. Sometimes we all really need this extra bit of scientific proof that something works and something doesn’t.

Let me know if you like the blog, and stay tuned for more!

Read more in: Website news.

Happy For No Reason

I’d like to offer you an review of a course I’ve recently gone through – the Happy For No Reason course by Marci Shimoff. As you know, being happy and motivated are some of the strongest features of my nature, and so it gives me a pleasure to suggest something you might really use to be happier.

What Happy For No Reason is about

The name of the course kind of gives the idea away – you can and should be happy, and there shouldn’t be a certain reason for that.

For some people this is more obvious than for others, but happiness is one of the basic things you have been given in this life. You don’t have to earn it (however it’s a popular belief that you do), it doesn’t need much effort to be truly happy (again, many people just refuse to accept how simple being happy really is), and making someone else happy doesn’t mean you’re giving your own happiness away – instead, you gain back just by seeing how your smile and attention can make somebody’s day.

Marci had done a great job of analyzing the most common reasons people feel unhappy, and results of her research are presented in a simple to follow guide. All the material is presented on audio CDs, but you need to work with the guidebook to record your thoughts and track your progress as you get used to being a happier person.

Seven Steps to Being Happier

Without giving too much away, I’d like to touch briefly on how Marci can help you.

All the material is organized into seven major steps to your happiness. These steps combine a few lessons each, helping you to take care of your mind, heart, body and soul and achieve a true transformation. There are happiness habits offered along the way, 3 for each of the seven steps. To help you gain an even better understanding of the material, Marci has taken interviews with her friends and colleagues on topics relevant to each of the seven steps. Some of the names you can easily recognize, while others may not mean much to you if it’s going to be one of your first courses – but either way the interviews are great because each one of them is an inspiration on its own.

If you had been reading books on personal development and had taken steps towards improving yourself and changing your views on life, you will probably recognize a quite familiar pattern of a complex, organized approach to becoming a happier person. Like all the other aspects of your well-being, happiness requires changes in everything you think and do, even though some of the changes may not follow the desired direction right away.

What to expect from the course

Marci’s work had been the best course I’ve taken so far (and the first one from Learning Strategies I’ve looked into), and I’m pleased to be able to recommend it.

I’m quite a happy person myself, so going through the course didn’t help me change overnight (especially since its’ advised that you take plenty of time, about a week for each step) into the happiest person on the planet. Still, it was great to learn a few new habits and to simply take the time to think more about being happy and making it possible for my family to feel happier too.

Even though the course focuses on all the improvements and positive changes, it invariably helps you address the negativity which prevents you from enjoying life as it is.  It is very important to firstly recognize the things which make you unhappy, and then to reassure yourself that hardly any of these things can prevent you from being happy in the long run. If you choose to be happy and agree with yourself to maintain your happiness, it will quickly stop being a task and turn into one of your most natural states.

So here’s what to expect from the Happy For No Reason course:

• if you’re unhappy or even plan miserable, you’ll feel better and learn the ways to gradually rediscover the joy and happiness once again.

• if you’re doing okay but lack the happiness spark in your life, you’ll certainly get an idea or two to go from feeling not-too-bad to a really-good kind of experience

• finally, if you’re mostly happy already – you’ll draw new inspiration from the interviews and get ideas on how to make happier someone who means a lot to you

I had spent a few weeks working on this course and definitely enjoyed it, especially the interviews. I’m not sure if it’s going to change your life and I can’t promise it will make you a happy person, but if you’re ready to take a few steps in this direction – who knows how far you will get? Good luck!

Read more in: Personal Development, Reviews.

Treasure Hunting - Coins

Sometimes your hobbies don’t make much sense to others, but still prove to be immensely helpful and entertaining for you. Today I’d like to explain why it’s the case with one of the more recent hobbies I’ve acquired.

My approach to treasure hunting

One beautiful morning a few months ago I was walking across my company’s parking lot in the morning. It was an unusually sunny day, we don’t get that many of them here in Ireland. I was happy and ready for the challenges of the day, almost anticipating a quick scan through corporate email and immediate start with daily technical chores. As I was walking, I stumbled upon a coin. A brand new, shiny 2c coin. I picked it up and realized that it immediately improved my day by a tiny bit. That’s how it all started.

Since mid-summer 2008, I must have picked around a hundred coins – 2 coins a day on average. First, I’ve found the obvious treasure which was waiting for me on my way from the car to the office entrance. A few weeks later, I started changing my walking route slightly, by just a few steps a day. Yet another few weeks later, I developed a habit for always being on the lookout for more coins wherever I walk.

Benefits of my treasure hunting

Finding new coins is one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life: it’s really fun! I don’t do it for money, but every coin picked up makes me feel a bit better. I’m still to figure out what one can buy with all these coins, but for the moment it’s just great to realize how my treasure fund slowly grows cent by cent. Long gone the days of easy finds on the parking lot – nowadays I discover new coins everywhere I go – on streets, in shops and at airports.

Some coins have quite a history attached – I found one coin at 2am in Frankfurt as I was walking along some empty street, for example. I’ve got few coins brought from Munster, a great little town in central Germany. I’ve found coins in Dublin city center and in pretty much every local shop I go to in my area.

My treasure hunting hobby is a great financial mindset trainer, too. It has reassured me of a few financial basics:

• every little helps
• you too can be a money magnet if you want
• money is everywhere and sometimes all you have to do is to literally stop and pick up a coin
• the more you find, the easier it gets
• once you learn a skill, it can be applied everywhere
• if you receive money easily, it’s easier to give them away

Suddenly I see

You know the way people say you see what you focus on? Well, that’s what happens to me with coins. I feel like there are lost coins everywhere! I never thought there are so many of them out there just waiting to be picked up – but now that I developed a habit of always looking for them, I find new one almost every day even if I don’t get out much.

I suddenly see coins which have been around for weeks, months and sometimes even years – nobody noticed, that’s all.

It’s all about having fun

Like any hobby, finding coins is nothing but another way for me to have fun. I’m a cheerful person by nature, but some extra entertainment on a daily basis can never hurt. I have many other hobbies, some are cheap and some are expensive. Treasure hunting fits in very well – no setup hassle and plenty of immediate benefits.

See also:

• 3 Ways to Be Happy Here and Now
• How to Be Happy
• Do What You Like

Read more in: Happiness.

It’s hard to find a person seriously interested in personal development and not familiar with Steve Pavlina’s blog. Now that Steve has his first book out, I would like to share with you my thoughts on his work.
Personal development is a challenging topic to cover. It’s so vast that rarely an author manages to pick the right angle to present you with new possibilities and to suggest solutions for your real-life challenges without making it all seem either too simplistic or overly complex.

In this regard, Steve Pavlina’s book have really lived up to my expectations: clear and focused material stayed on a topic at all times, although every chapter has a few examples from Steve’s personal experience, examples generic enough for many people to relate to.

I think Steve managed to maintain his original style of writing throughout the book – guiding and suggesting, but always making it clear that there are no rules which work for everyone. However many options there are, it is your own task and responsibility to pick the right tools and choose the direction for your own development.

Live consciously

If you read Steve’s blog, you know that living consciously is the main theme of his life. Although many reasons behind this are obvious from blog posts, I only realized how conscious Steve’s approach is after reading the book.

There are two parts in the book: introduction to the core principles of personal development and a practical guide to applying these principles in real life situations.

Such a structure ensures you have all you need to get started with your own conscious living: you learn the principles, and you are given examples of how to make use of them.

I enjoyed both parts of the book, but would like to read the book again in a few months time. The way material is presented, you are encouraged to start making changes right away. Practical examples give you an opportunity to pick the few steps for starting immediately changing something in the way you act. However, it will take time for the fundamental principles to settle in your view of your own development, so reading the first part of the book again is highly recommended.

Seven fundamental principles of personal development

There are seven fundamental principles of personal development, and first part of the book explains in great detail each of them. Apparently, every aspect of your personal growth, every conscious effort in self-improvement can and must be aligned with the core principles.

Here are the seven principles you will discover:

• truth
• love
• power
• oneness
• authority
• courage
• intelligence

The beauty of these principles is in their nature – as I read the book, none of them felt like they should be enforced and re-introduced into my life. Instead, I was surprised to discover the presence of each principle in my everyday actions. I felt real joy as I was explained why each principle mattered and how I can benefit myself and those around me by further aligning with the fundamentals of personal development.

Learning these seven principles was quite a revelation. None of them are completely new to me, yet it is the first time I see someone present these fundamentals in such an obviously interconneted way.

The first three principles – truth, love and power – are the core principles of personal development. Everything that you do and experience in your life is a result of applying these principles by either yourself or people around you.

The next four principles are secondary in a sense that they are derived from the core ones. Oneness is truth plus love. Authority is truth plus power. Courage is love plus power. Intelligence is the combination of all three core principles: truth, love and power.

Why you should definitely read this book

It gives me a great pleasure to be recommending Steve’s book. This is easily the best book on personal development I have read so far – it’s easy to see how some of the views Steve developed are a direct result of reading hundreds of other books.

It’s a great book to finally make sense of why some actions and feelings seem natural and some don’t. It’s a chance to improve your own understanding of the fundamental principles of living a better life.

You will not find false promises of easy changes that happen overnight. You will not discover any magic secrets of becoming an instant success upon the completion of the book. You will not learn any weight loss tactics or one-liners to save your relationship.

What you will get though is an opportunity to realize how closely related are all the aspects of your well-being and personal growth. You will get a chance to start living consciously and gradually make the changes you always wanted.

Sounds like a book you want to read? Get it here! Enjoy!

Read more in: Book Reviews.

It was a great lecture, and I enjoyed it a lot. I have heard about Tony before, and did read quite a few articles and posts on mind mapping. Finally, I really like the approach and use a software version of it for some of the creative processes of mine. But I’ve yet to read a single book by Tony, so it was great to hear all his most known sayings in person with vivid examples and explanations.

On creativity

Studies prove that babies and kids up to 3-5 years are the most creative individuals among most of us, they are 95% creative in solutions and reactions to life. As we grow, our creativity somehow drops. By the time we are students graduating from a college, we’re only 25% creative on average, and most of the adult life we’re only 10% creative.

Now, this is what many people say is normal. But I really liked Tony’s point of view when he said: normal is not natural.

Naturally, human creativity only grows with age. It is true! If we look at our history and culture, there are countless examples of people who created most important and influential works of their lives in their last, not first, years. Da Vinci, Verde, many others- they all spent their lives perfecting their art and their mind, only feeling ready for their masterpieces by the age which most people consider to be a hard rock bottom of their creativity.

On human brain and our activity

A revelation for the audience was that on average we use less than 1% of our brain’s abilities. Tony asked everyone to guess the percentage and we all had a quick discussion about it. I was the most pessimistic of my group with 3-5% activity range. I must say, less than 1% was a shock even to me!

So why not spend a bit more? Why not use this amazing tool available to us – our mind?

We take for granted the common limitations like the degrading memory or inability to constantly come up with creative solutions to our challenges. But once again, this normal situation shouldn’t be considered natural: if we only spend some time developing our mind’s abilities, consciously concentrate on getting better at creative thinking and writing, our mind will flourish and keep amaze ourselves and everyone around us with incredible results.

What it takes to be a genius

Not much, really! We all are quite equal when it comes to out potential for becoming the next world-famous genius.

Here are the two distinctive ways to tell geniuses apart from everyone else:

1. A genius has great and big daydreams.

Think and plan to make it big, don’t limit your future achievements by agreeing with yourself what’s possible and what’s not in your current situation. Your brain follows the images it sees or gets through self-affirmations, so unless you have big daydreams and plan to produce something incredibly powerful and useful for as many people as possible, you won’t achieve much.

Humble thoughts will get you even more humble results, so prepare yourself for achievements of your lifetime by daydreaming something massively good.

Example: Thomas Alva Edison  didn’t just dream of inventing a light bulb, instead he put all his knowledge and persistence together to invent a whole system of electric lighting to be used by all the mankind: light bulbs, electricity generators, electrical wiring and a range of sockets, plus much more. His vision of providing the light to everyone at any given time helped him make it through thousands of failed experiments before he finally made a breakthrough.

2. Genius works to make daydreams come true, to make them real

This is another thing not many of us pay attention to – it’s not enough to just have a vision, an idea which can potentially be useful. You have to be prepared to work on this idea, to make mistakes and face failures, to resist opinions of others and to persistently make progress towards your ultimate goal.

When you think about it, it does take a lot to be curious and unstoppable in a genius-like way – quite possibly, this is what makes some people successful and others unsuccessful – just their being faithful to their own daydreams!

Your brain needs a diet to stay active and healthy

If you want to make sure your brain stays active throughout all the years and increases its activity and potential instead of slowly degrading as you age, here’s some of the things you should include in your daily life:

1. Plenty of oxygen – this essentially means regular exercise

2. Sensory stimulation – be creative and re-discover your own senses – touch, smell, taste and see things as if you suddenly became a different, much more curious person

3. Lifelong learning – never stop discovering new subjects and expanding your knowledge – even if something is not directly related to your career, pick a topic every year to read a book about or watch an educational TV series on

4. Take plenty of rest – enough sleep, regular showers and relaxing physical activity when your mind gets distracted from its everyday worries – running is a great activity for this.

5. Friendship and love – be friendly and kind to people; make new friends regularly and try to stay connected with all the generations and not only your own age group; fall in love and enjoy this wonderful experience

6. Eat healthy food – nutrition is very important for your body and brain in particular

That’s it. Tony spoke of many more things which fascinated me, and I’m sure I’ll learn more as I read his works in the future (I’ve brought a book in mind-mapping which he signed for me during one of the breaks!), but these notes above is what I’ve taken home from that evening. Hope you enjoyed the article and will use some of the advice, I can see how even some of it can really make a long-lasting positive change in our lives.

Read more in: Personal Development.

• DLM: How To Get Better Sleep While Spending Less Time in Bed
• Whakate: What is Wrong with GTD?
• Whakate: The Closed List: Regaining Control Over Your Day
• Zen Habits: Sound of Silence
• Mark and Angel: 22 Tips to Increase Productivity

Hope you like these too, and if there are posts you enjoyed last week and would like to share – just post links in the comments area!

Read more in: Personal Development.

I’ve never seen anything like it before, nothing less than amazing!

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Read more in: Personal Development.

It was bound to happen: I’ve joined Twitter! Some of you probably know that it’s a micro-blogging platform with tiny (up to 140 characters) updates you can leave through your browser or many specialized applications.

It would be great to get connected, so look me up:

http://twitter.com/PerfectBlogger

Please leave your Twitter name in comments below as well!

Read more in: Personal Development.

New Personal Development Blog look

Welcome to the brand new, shiny Personal Development blog!

Starting today, this blog will sport a new design reflecting a chance of my focus.

Things you’ll probably notice right away are less ads and less clutter, fewer main menu options and a second-level menu highlighting the four categories of posts I spend most of my time on:

• Goal setting
• Productivity
• Motivation
• Happiness

There’s more to come in about two months time, but until then – enjoy your stay and let me know if there’s anything else I can do to make this website even more useful.

Read more in: Website news.

I’ve been meaning to write about Evernote Web for quite some time now. Being a fan of the original Evernote application and having used it for managing all sorts of personal notes for the past few years, I’m really excited to see that Evernote Web has finally arrived: it now takes only seconds to get started with using one of the most useful online services on the web.

What is Evernote?

Evernote is an information organizer. Coming from the world of standalone applications, it started as a Windows app, but is now available on a number of platforms. The most useful thing about the current Evernote service is that it’s an online repository – so all your information is available instantly on any of the devices – including Apple iPhone.

I’ve waited for a service like this for quite some time. Surely, there’s been quite a few around which allowed you to grab text and images from websites and store it online (I’ve used Google Notebook for a while, for instance), but Evernote brings a very powerful search. One of the most unique features is the image recognition, which means you can scan your to-do notes, business cards or any printed material and Evernote will recognize all the text and help you later find it using the keywords. It all happens automatically, and the quality of image recognition is really impressive.

What I use Evernote for

I like the web clipping functionality – it’s a button on the bookmarks toolbar of my Firefox browser which helps me instantly grab information from whatever page I’m currently on. You select the text (can be images or tables, anything really), then click the Clip to Evernote button and voila – the information piece is in your online Evernote repository.

I really like the way it saves me time with my scribbled notes – previously I had to allocate time to re-type them. It’s much quicker now – I simply make photos of whatever I need to capture and store it online. I haven’t even started using the image recognition feature properly yet – even having my scanned/photographed notes centrally available online is already a productivity boost.

Are you using it yet? Let me know how you find it. This isn’t a paid review (isn’t even a review, really), but a sincere recommendation – check Evernote out if you haven’t done so. There’s only a few apps I truly like, and this one does seem to be one of them.

Let me know, and good luck with staying productive and organized!

See also:

• Evernote Downloads
• Evernote on iPhone
• 7 Ways to Use Evernote – Lifehack.org

Read more in: Productivity.

Sharing your knowledge, especially if it’s useful and unique, isn’t always easy. There are plenty of reasons why you should do this, but somehow it’s very easy to get stopped by negative assumptions. In today’s post, I’d like to share my opinion on sharing knowledge, and ask for yours in return.

Naturally, most of us feel competition. Even in your own team, you’re bound to think now and then of how good or bad your performance is compared to that of other team members. While this is absolutely natural, you shouldn’t let such a competition spirit get in the way of you sharing the knowledge with others.

The Truth About Sharing Knowledge

One of the worst things you can do is to refuse sharing the knowledge with your team. When you do this, you may have your own reasons, but even if you tell them, your peers would get their own, very different ideas.

One of the most common reasons for not sharing is the fear of losing your unique advantage. I used to think that it’s always best to have a unique skillset within a team, and never share any of the knowledge with others. The more you know of things nobody else knows, the better. Boy, was I wrong in such thinking!

The truth is, all the knowledge must be shared. If you think a bit longer, you will understand that no matter how good you are, if you work for a company and act on behalf of a certain team of people – this implies that everything you know or learn must be shared. You are paid for achieving collective results, and if this means teaching others how to do everything you’re capable of, then do your best and show them. You are not paid for making life harder for other team members just because you’re not feeling like sharing something.

Being open with your team and freely sharing anything you know is one of the major signs of you being comfortable where you are. Being a great team player depends on your comfortable participation in every process of such a team, including knowledge exchange. In addition to this, shared knowledge ensures your team stays safe should anything unexpected happen to you – even if you’re temporarily unavailable, your team members will be quite comfortable covering for you with the information you had previously shared with them.

There is a certain point in your professional life, when you suddenly see how most of your fears were really amateur. In fact, I’m sure that every fear you have about your job becomes silly at some stage of your career. Every single one of your fears can and will be smiled upon one day – you’ll look back and laugh how you were afraid of doing something so simple or easy. It’s just a matter of time and a subject to your ever-expanding experience.

Common Fears and How to Overcome Them

With this in mind, I’m going to save you the trouble of figuring out most of the competition fears which stop so many people from sharing their knowledge. I’m giving you the false statements similar to the ones I myself had once believed to be true.

Before we start: Using this opportunity, I’d like to apologize for my behavior to some of the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with in my career so far. I also thank you, for if it wasn’t for the support and guidance from some of you, I would have never changed for the better.

Here they are, the statements which you should never accept, long with my advice on how to act in every situation:

Fear of Not Having Unique Skills

False statement: If you don’t have a unique skill, you will no longer be needed in your team and will probably be fired.

Yep, that’s exactly how I looked at sharing knowledge at some stage in my life (the first years of my career, to be precise). Now, I admit that some companies support and promote such a behavior among their employees, but without cooperation and shared knowledge it’s impossible to have people function as a team.

My advice: Skills, not matter unique or not, can’t really be shared. They are your own ways of doing things, of applying the knowledge the most effective way. Your knowledge can and should be shared, but skills are always going to be yours – there will never be two people on a team with exactly the same skills, so you shouldn’t worry about it. If you explain everything you know to others, you will only gain wider acceptance as an authority.

Losing Your Roles and Positions Within a Team

False statement: If I give away everything I know, my services will no longer be needed as other team members will be doing everything themselves

My advice: if you have so much knowledge you worry about sharing it, you’re probably an avid learner. This means it will never become possible for you to give everything away, because you’ll be learning something new almost every day. If others start doing more based on the knowledge they get from you, this will give you a chance to work on new and perhaps more exciting projects.

You know what? Eventually there comes a time when you want to move on. When you’re no longer feeling like you’re giving most value by staying in your position and doing what you currently do. And guess what – until you have your knowledge properly shared, you won’t be able to leave your functions behind!

Another common way this happens is that you become so unique and so good ad your particular functions, that everyone else in your team wants you and only you to keep doing it! Sometimes your colleagues won’t let you work on other things just because this will mean you’ll have to abandon some of the common functions you’ve been doing so far. For them, it can be an unnecessary risk – nobody knows how good you’ll be at new things, but everyone knows you’re really good with your current functions. So, before you decide that you want to move on to something new, be sure to get into the habit of sharing.

Shared Knowledge Reducing Your Chances to be Promoted

False statement: If I share everything, I will never stand out enough to be promoted

My advice: you never get promoted based on the knowledge you possess, it’s always to do with your experience and results – both measuring your ability to apply the knowledge.

You can get hired partially because of your vast knowledge, yes. But promotions usually happen because you grow out of your position by accepting more responsibilities and doing more. This happens not because your professional knowledge grows, but because your become more aware of processes in your organization and recognize the potential for improvements. The higher you are in your career, the more personality-based your success is, and the less it is dependent on your professional skills. The value you bring to the team or organization is rarely based only on your knowledge of the processes, it’s increasingly more to do with how comfortable you are doing what you do and taking on new projects and challenges.

Sharing Knowledge To Be Successful

Sharing knowledge is one of the best things you can do to become a great team player and ultimately a leader. It is essential not only for the success of people around you, but for your own success in the first place. The more you share, the more people respect you. The more respected you feel, the more you’re willing to share. The more you give away, the more new opportunities come your way.

Perhaps my advices won’t cover every possible situation you can find yourself in, but they’re drawn from my own experience. I know how hard it is to learn from somebody else’s mistakes and not your own ones, but my advice stays the same – learn to share the knowledge, and you’ll thank yourself later.

Finally, if you recognize the common fears of sharing knowledge or have some of your own – leave them in a comment, I’m sure it will help someone.

Read more in: Mastering Habits, Personal Development.