Personal Power Now

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so

2022-08-14T16:45:00.000+01:00

There is a story, Sufi in origin I believe, about a poor farmer who saved for years to afford a horse to help with his farm work. His fellow impoverished villagers were incredibly impressed when the horse arrived and, with just a little bit of jealousy in their tone, observed how good it was that his and his family’s life would improve. Surprisingly to the villagers on hearing this the farmer did not entirely agree, and simply said “Not good, not bad, just is.”

Only a single day passed and the horse somehow managed to run away. Aware of the money invested in this fine animal the villagers were shocked by this turn of events and attempted to console him for his loss. The farmer however once again said nothing more than the simple statement, “Not good, not bad, just is.”

A couple of days later the horse returned with another horse following, which remaining unclaimed, became the farmer’s property. The villagers could not believe this farmer’s good fortune. Once more the farmer simply assured all those he spoke to with, “Not good, not bad, just is.”

Just a few more days passed and the farmer’s son fell off the horse and broke his leg – preventing him from helping to bring in the harvest. Who would have seen that coming, thought the villagers, what bad luck! The farmer of course simply stated his perspective, “Not good. Not bad. Just is.”

The very next day, the army recruiters came to town, drafting every young man from the village, except the son of the farmer – who, of course, could not walk as he had just broken his leg …

It has to be said however that there is a difference in hearing a fictional parable with a lesson to share and understanding the point being made on an intellectual level, and, on the other hand, actually integrating that learning into one’s own life. Fortunately, in my case, I was given the opportunity to do so, and not over a number of days, but over a couple of hours. What follows is a true story. Note also that I am not saying, “a true story”, in the Hollywood sense of “based on a true story". All of the following happened exactly as described. I will allow the reader to interpolate “Not good. Not bad. Just is” as they read along, at the appropriate junctures.

Many years ago I travelled overland to India. Along the way I found myself in Eastern Turkey about to board a bus to the Iranian border. Apart from the fact that we all knew there was an upcoming Iranian revolution at the time, what was really bad was that I had an exceedingly dire case of diarrhoea. Although I did not know exactly how long the bus journey was going to be, I suspected it would be at least an hour, and possibly a lot longer. The good news was that I manged to get hold of some loperamide to control the diarrhoea. We set off towards the border post. I should add that I was travelling at this point with some English guys that I had met in Istanbul making the same trip. One hour passed and there was no sign of us getting anywhere near the border post which was not great. However it was at this point that I realised the really bad news that the loperamie had in fact just bunged up and backed up some intensely insistent diarrhoea. So I had ended up with diarrhoea and constipation simultaneously. Another 20 minutes passed and I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked up to the front of the bus and fortunately managed to convince the driver to stop and let this crazy foreigner off in the middle of nowhere. Since I had constipation as well as diarrhoea I knew this would not be quick so I had no choice but to let the bus driver know just to drive on and leave me there, hoping that my travelling companions would look after my bags stowed in the baggage compartment once they arrived at the destination. Did I say fortunately? Did I mention that this was Eastern Turkey where, at that time at least, the countryside was known for having the odd bandit or two to be roaming about. Maybe not so good.

For the next 10 minutes or so I had the opportunity to admire the beauty of the open countryside around me, squatting at the side of the road. There were beautiful snow-capped mountains in the distance which reminded me of Switzerland. The road beside me was straight as far as the eye could see in both directions. Other than that, there were just some open fields on either side of the straight road. Perhaps some of them were used for agriculture because the ones directly across from where I was had furrows, made solid by the lowering temperatures as autumnal weather was taking hold. It was good when I finally manged to do what I had to do and could get back on the road. Back on the road, to hitchhike in bandit country.

All the time that I had been at the side of the road I had not seen any traffic which could reasonably considered to be not so good news. However, not long after I started standing there I was fortunate to see a flatbed truck coming down the road going in the direction I wanted to go. And the really good news was that it stopped and I was told to jump in the back. As well at two guys in the cabin there was already another guy sitting on the back of the truck and I jumped in to join him. Looking around the best I could make out was that it was a road maintenance crew. Given the possible really bad scenarios that had entered my mind as I had been standing there at the side of the road, this was a really good break. However this thought lasted only 5 minutes as, after the truck had continued its journey down the road for those few minutes, it suddenly veered off the side of the road and started crossing the ploughed up field. Given this was no longer the way I wanted to go this was not so good. And exactly where were we going, juddering across these fields away from the road? After a couple of minutes the truck stopped and the driver’s mate got out of the cabin. I have to admit at this point some of the bad scenarios did once more crowd into my mind. Fortunately the next thing I saw was him stepping down into a gulley – to gather firewood. Ok, breathe, that’s good. It was especially good to see the truck turn round and drive back towards the road again. What happened next however, was that, half way to the road, the driver suddenly cut his engine. And the next thing I see is the driver’s mate emerging from the cabin once more, but this time holding a shotgun, and I notice for the first time the belt of shotgun cartridges hanging across his body. This was bad, really bad.

Did time slow? Maybe. There did seem to be a frozen moment where the entire focus of my being was on the sight of this guy emerging from the truck and then crouching with a shotgun a few feet away from where I was sitting. Wait a minute. Crouching? Why was he crouching? It was at that point that I saw the ducks flying up and away from the side of the field, flying away to live another day. As was I. The driver’s mate turned and climbed back into the cabin, muttering at the driver – probably complaining that he did not stop quickly enough or something. The truck continued its journey back on to the road. It was really good to see that the truck turned once more down the road in the direction I wanted to go. But then, after another 10 minutes had passed the truck stopped again. This time opposite another truck that had come up the road in the opposite direction. At least this time the turn for the better had lasted all of 10 minutes. Not so good, once more, was that I was not making progress to my original destination and my bag with all of my possessions that was accompanying me on my journey to Iran and on to India. It was however good for my truck mates. They manged to exchange some unused cartridges for 2 ducks from their colleagues in the other truck. And only for a handful of cartridges, which might speak to the accuracy of their shooting when they do get a chance to take aim.

Once more fortunately the stop was brief and off we went again – only to once more veer off the road shortly afterwards to stop just by the side of the road. The ducks came out. The brushwood came out. The retsina came out. It was picnic time! While it was really good that it was made clear that I was invited to join in on the feast, the down side was that this would keep me from getting back to my travelling companions and my baggage. So somewhat reluctantly I had to take my leave and get back on the road to continue hitchhiking. Once more fortune was on my side and another truck stopped to pick me up and this time, without interruption, took me to where I needed to go and a re-union with my belongings and my travelling companions. So that was good. With all that had transpired, at this point it occurred to me that the latter had just experienced yet another boring, not so good, lengthy bus journey while I, on the other hand, had undergone a short but intense real life adventure. And maybe had learned some personal lessons along the way? In conclusion, not so bad after all?

At the start of this tale, I made a reference to Sufism, a mystic branch of Islam, so let us conclude with another one. A famous Sufi teacher called Rumi once said, “From books and words come fantasy, and sometimes, from fantasy comes union.” In this case the fantasy is the phrase “Not good, not bad, just is.” So here is a question for you. Could this fantasy become a universal truth for you too, beyond the intellectual, beyond the rational? A truth that you could integrate into your life from this point on? That would be good, wouldn’t it?

Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 5

2016-01-03T01:00:00.000+00:00

By Steve Pavlina

Take command of your life

As an entrepreneur you decide which goals, projects, and opportunities to pursue. You don’t have to waste your time working hard to achieve someone else’s goals.

If you have ambitious dreams and if you like working on your own projects, you’ll probably enjoy running your own business. There’s nothing quite so sweet as spending decades of your life setting and achieving your own goals — and getting paid to do it.

As an entrepreneur you can guide your business to help you achieve your personal goals. Many years ago one of my goals was to write a book and to see it selling in bookstores. Thanks to my personal growth business, that goal pretty much fell into my lap. The business made the goal easy to accomplish, much easier than if I’d tried to accomplish that goal on a purely personal level. It was as easy as saying yes when a publisher offered me a book deal. No agents. No submissions. No rejections. That offer only happened because of my business.

Another personal goal was to travel in Europe, which included subgoals like exploring Paris, London, Berlin, and Amsterdam. What does that have to do with my business? Very little at first glance. But thanks in large part to my business, I’ve visited at least a dozen European cities in eight different countries. Thanks to my business, I get invitations to speak at other people’s events in Europe, and they cover the travel expenses. Once I’m in Europe, I usually stay for a while and explore. I could have achieved this goal on a personal level, but it would have been more costly and difficult. With my business it’s as easy as saying yes to an invitation.

You won’t always be able to align a personal goal with your business, but at least as an entrepreneur, you can prevent your business from getting in the way of your other goals. My computer games business didn’t help me run the L.A. Marathon or train in martial arts, but at least it didn’t get in my way. If I wanted to train in the morning, afternoon, or evening, I could do that.

If you’ve never had the freedom to pick your own projects, let me tell you that it’s even more wonderful than you realize. It’s easier to do your best work when you can pick your projects. You can favor projects that you’re motivated to do, that fit your strengths, and that align with your personal growth interests. Many people find themselves working harder as entrepreneurs than as employees, and one reason is the motivational boost that comes from picking your own projects.

The freedom to choose your own work gives you command over your life. No one tells you what to do… or if they do, you can ignore them. This may seem like a lot of responsibility, and it is, but this isn’t Spiderman. You’ll get used to calling the shots within the first year or two. Then it will just seem normal to have command over your time, and it will probably bother you when you don’t.

When your motivation and energy is surging, you can hit the accelerator and work longer hours. At other times when you’re feeling too distracted to work productively, you can intentionally take time off to recharge and renew.

Many entrepreneurs don’t work steady 40-hour weeks. They may put in 60+ hours one week and less than 25 hours the next. Entrepreneurs often adapt their workflow to suit their energy and motivation. Some love to maintain steady pacing week after week, but many enjoy working in powerful bursts of enthusiastic effort followed by extra downtime for rest and rejuvenation. Many entrepreneurs like to switch things up for extra variety, sometimes working with a steady pacing and other times cycling between bursts and rest.

When you’re in command, you no longer have to follow anything resembling corporate rules or standards. If you want to work in the middle of the night, you can do that. If you like sipping martinis while you work, put a bar in your office. If you want to exercise in the late morning or early afternoon, go ahead. If you want to work every other day, every other week, or every other month, enjoy yourself. You’re in command.

If you like variety, you can select a business model that lets you work wherever you desire. If you feel like working at a coffee shop, grab your tech and go. If you want to climb a mountain in the morning, work on the mountaintop, and climb down in time for dinner, you can do that.

If you slack off and mess around too much, you’ll hurt your business. Otherwise if you can find creative ways to be productive, it’s all fair game. There are many ways to be productive that you’ll never find in an employee handbook. If you have such a handbook, burn it before you start your own business.

After you’ve been an entrepreneur for a while, being in command of your life will seem so normal and natural that you’ll wonder how you ever could have taken orders from someone else. You may even want to rescue more people from that fate. Or you could enslave them to come work for you instead. Your choice.

Get paid to grow

Business pays you to grow. The smarter you become, the more you can apply what you learn to your business, so your own learning and growth can translate into higher income.

If you want to give yourself a raise, you can do that, but you’ll probably need to grow your business to make that possible. This usually means that you’ll have to grow too, such as by gaining new knowledge, skills, and habits.

What’s especially wonderful about this is that since your business benefits from your personal growth, your business can justify covering many of your personal growth expenses, such as your educational and training expenses.

I can’t say what the tax laws are like in other countries, but in the USA the general principle is that your deductible expenses must have a reasonable business purpose. If you’re spending money with the intention that it will eventually help your business, such as by reducing costs or increasing revenue, then in many cases that expenditure will be deductible. There are many nuances to this — business meals are only half deductible, for instance — but if you spend a lot on personal growth already, it’s downright foolish not to have your own business. Even a small side business could be deducting those expenses, meaning that you’d be paying for them with pre-tax dollars instead of after-tax dollars. This is like receiving a permanent discount on your personal growth expenses for the rest of your life. What growth enthusiast wouldn’t want that?

One reason I decided to run a personal growth business is that I was already spending significant sums of money on my growth and learning each year, such as by purchasing books, audio programs, seminars, and training programs. By creating a for-profit business that could financially benefit from these ongoing investments, I turned a lot of otherwise personal expenses into tax-deductible ones for my business. This also allowed me to justify spending more money on my personal growth since much of the time, those expenses could easily be justified as being financially beneficial for the business.

Even if I spend hundreds of dollars on supplies and materials to research and write a single article for my blog, the extra traffic and income generated by that one extra article will likely justify the expense, even if the article isn’t directly income-generating itself.

What are you already spending money on now? Technology? Travel? Fitness equipment? Please tell me you’re not spending thousands of dollars on purchases with after-tax dollars that you could easily be deducting if you had a small business aligned with your hobby.

Do you realize that your business doesn’t even have to be financially successful for you to make these deductions? You do have to try to earn a profit, so your business can’t be a sham, but if you try to make money and don’t earn as much as you’d like, you can still deduct many more expenses than you could without a business. Even when you have a bad year and lose money, you can typically punt your loss to a future year and use it to offset your income during a good year.

Tax laws can be extremely biased. In the USA you’re going to be penalized with extra taxes for earning regular W2 employee income. As an employee, you pay the highest taxes and enjoy the fewest deductions relative to your pay. Running a business makes it easier to redirect some of the money that would otherwise be going to taxes and to reinvest it back in yourself.

One reason for these biased laws is that governments generally want to encourage more people to start businesses. Another reason is that businesses have the resources to lobby governments to bend the tax laws to favor businesses (sometimes just big business, but often to the benefit all businesses). If and when your business makes money, you’re going to generate a lot more tax revenue anyway, especially if you hire other people. And hopefully your business will create other positive ripples for society as well.

Another unfortunate reason for this bias is that regular employees are generally the least financially savvy group in the business world, so they get beat up the most by the tax code. They pay higher taxes than necessary because they don’t know any better. The game is rigged against them, and they don’t even realize it. If these same people did nothing more than start a side business, they could run many expenses through it and save a lot of money on taxes every year for the rest of their lives.

Explaining what you can and can’t legally deduct is beyond my ability. In fact, it’s beyond the ability of even experienced accountants and IRS agents. That’s because the U.S. tax code is so ridiculously labyrinthine that no human being actually understands it. Even when you ask qualified experts, you’re going to get different answers. Why such complexity? An overly complicated tax code benefits large businesses that have the resources to mine it for endless deductions, so they can deduct almost everything they buy — a private helipad, massage therapists, launch parties, alcohol, etc.

I decide what to deduct and what not to deduct based on following the law as best I understand it (such as knowing that business meals are only 50% deductible), and then within the law, I apply the standard of reasonableness. I ask, “Is it reasonable for the business to cover this expense based on the expected benefits to the business?” Every year or so, I discover new things that I could have been legally deducting, if only I’d known better.

Another simple rule of thumb you can use is to ask, “Would a big corporation cover this expense for their employees?” If a big corporation would deduct it, a small business can often deduct it too. This isn’t always true because some deductions only kick in for businesses of a certain size, but for smaller purchases it’s often a reasonable standard to use.

With the right business model, you’ll surely find a way to expense that helipad you’ve always wanted.

Explore your strengths

Many people have unusual combinations of skills that make them less desirable as employees because employers don’t know how to extract the value from those combinations. A hospital that wants to hire a doctor might not care that the doctor is also an accomplished musician and architectural engineer; the hospital only cares about the medical subset of the doctor’s skills. Real human beings aren’t usually so mono-skilled, but many corporations treat us as if we are.

As an entrepreneur, you’re free to pursue opportunities that leverage your unique package of strengths as far as you can push them. The same qualities that might be useless as an employee could be turned into business advantages.

I know a lot about personal growth, but so do many other people. I’m an author and professional speaker, but that’s commonplace in my field. What’s less common is being proficient in writing, speaking, and computer programming at the same time. Sometimes being able to code my way out of a problem is really helpful, and I shudder to think of what a pain it would be to solve certain problems if I didn’t know how to program.

There’s a tendency in business to try to run your operation the same way everyone else does, which is generally a mistake because then you aren’t differentiating yourself much. It’s more intelligent — and often more lucrative — to draw upon your other strengths to give you an edge that others don’t have. This can be difficult to do as an employee, but entrepreneurs have the flexibility and freedom to do this well. A good example is Steve Jobs using what he learned in a calligraphy class to give the original Mac different fonts, which helped differentiate the Mac from other personal computers.

As an entrepreneur you’ll connect the dots between your skills in surprising ways, thereby gaining access to opportunities and experiences that would otherwise be inaccessible. This can enrich your life tremendously.

Explore your values

Building a business is like creating a work of art. As you paint your business, you also paint yourself.

Obviously it’s good for your business to turn a profit. But for an experienced entrepreneur, making money is often the easy part, not to mention one of the most boring. The bigger question is: What do I really want to build?

Lots of people will tell you what you should build. You may have some shouldsof your own. But you’ll still have plenty of freedom to choose your own brush strokes.

If you want your business location to be filled with unicorns and rainbows, you can decorate it however you like. If you want to run a carbon neutral business, make it so. If you want to create an all-vegan version of Costco, please invite me to your grand opening.

You can design your business to focus on making money above all else, or you can create a purpose-driven one with a mission statement that makes you cry.

You can build a business that’s an island and work alone, or you can go poly and build a network of partnerships.

You can use your business to learn, grow, create, and explore as much as you want and in whichever direction appeals to you. You can floor the accelerator when it feels good, and you can hit the brakes when you need to slow down.

Business is full of value-based decisions. You’ll need to decide when to work hard and when to rest, when to pursue a timely opportunity and when to stick to your original plans, when to seek help and when to solve problems alone, etc. Facing such decisions in seemingly endless variations will help you explore, understand, and refine your values. After a few decades as an entrepreneur, you’ll have a strong sense of what it means to be you, and you’ll probably like the result.

www.stevepavlina.com

Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 4

2015-12-27T01:00:00.000+00:00

By Steve Pavlina

Overcome limited thinking

When you run your own business, you’ll see how your thoughts and beliefs impact your business results. Your personal limitations will limit what your business can do. The motivation to grow and improve your business helps you get your own beliefs in line since it can be painful to see your own beliefs holding your business back. Once you have some customers, they’ll encourage you to push through your personal limits.

Last week someone who’s been reading this series asked me if it’s possible to start a business when you’re broke.

Is it possible to travel to another country? Is it possible to learn to drive an automobile? Is it possible to read the entire Harry Potter series?

If you’re asking “is it possible” for people to do something that’s been done millions of times before, then I would have to say yes.

How many millions of times have people started businesses while broke or in debt? Being broke can be one of the best times to start a business since you have little or nothing to lose. If you fail, you’ll still be broke, and you can try again.

In some ways business is the great equalizer. Your potential customers probably don’t care how you started. They care about whether your business adds value to their lives. They may care about the impact you’re having on the planet. I’d say you’re more likely to receive extra praise for starting your business while broke than if you started out wealthy. People like seeing underdogs succeed.

Entrepreneurs get busy solving problems. If you like solving problems, your business will provide you with an endless stream of interesting problems to solve.

To think like an entrepreneur, take all your “can I…” questions, and put the word “how” in front of them:

How can I start a business while broke?
How can I overcome a weak education?
How can I motivate myself to work hard?

“Can” questions make sense when you’re referring to things humanity has never done before, like Can we safely send humans to Mars? or Can we build a teleportation device? or Can we make two good James Bond movies in a row?

It doesn’t make much sense to ask such questions for things we’ve already done millions of times before, like starting a business while broke. You can start a new business in an afternoon.

Learn to spend wisely

Business is a great teacher of money management skills. As an entrepreneur you’ll get to buy and sell more often, so you’ll train up faster in this area.

When you first start out as an entrepreneur, you’ll learn that you’re either too loose or too tight with your money.

Being too loose is usually the more common problem, especially if you have some funds to start with. During your first few years as an entrepreneur, you’ll probably make some questionable purchases by justifying them as good investments. I once bought a new $700 photocopier for my office, and we probably made less than 1000 photocopies per year. It’s easy to buy wasteful luxuries when you’re flush with cash, but when you go through several cycles of boom and bust, you’ll learn to be a little more conservative at the high points instead of spending money just because you can.

Being too tight with your money is also risky because you’ll pass up good opportunities to increase productivity. Some expenses that may seem unnecessary can actually pay nice dividends. Upgrading a sluggish computer is often a wise investment.

Earlier this year I replaced the lighting in my home office after stumbling upon some research suggesting that light in the bluish part of the spectrum is better for productivity. At first the results looked unnatural to me, like something from a sci-fi laboratory, but after several days I got used to it. The more bluish light makes me feel more awake, alert, and stimulated than the yellowish halogen lighting I used before. What seemed like a fluffy purchase turned out to be a worthwhile investment.

One of the most important lessons you’ll learn is how much to spend to get your business up and running. I recommend starting out very conservatively. It usually doesn’t make sense to spend much money until you test your business idea in the real world. Once you start making money, you can scale up your expenses as needed, but until that happens, treat every dollar as precious.

Having to make business purchasing decisions again and again — and dealing with the consequences of bad purchasing decisions repeatedly — will help refine your spending habits. You’ll learn to make wise investments without being wasteful.

Enjoy the light side, but protect yourself from the dark side

Generally speaking there are two ways for people to do business together:control or trust.

If you can control someone, you can simply dictate your terms, and they’ll do business with you.

There are two primary ways to control people: silver or lead. You can bribe people with silver, or you can threaten them with lead (bullets).

The promise of a reward or the possibility of becoming a bullet-ridden corpse can be very motivating. Once the silver or lead has been delivered though, the motivational effect fades. So the offer must remain active for business to continue.

Of course you can use silver and lead together. And of course there are many variations on this style. A company may try to control its employees by offering stock options for good performance combined with disciplinary measures for poor performance. That same company may use entirely different methods to motivate its customers, such as discounts or late fees.

The second way to do business is with trust. If you cannot control someone’s behavior, you can still do business with them on the basis of trust. This approach can work well in high-trust cultures where enough people have business-friendly values, such as believing that fair exchanges are good and that theft is wrong. In cultures with such values, business can flourish on the basis of trust.

In practice many small businesses begin with a trust-based model and then apply control-based strategies to the problem areas. More savvy entrepreneurs will anticipate where controls are likely to be needed and establish them early.

Suppose your business sells products online. You may offer products that provide good value at reasonable prices. You may present those products honestly. You may design the ordering process to be simple and straightforward. If all of the people who connect with your business are honest, you’ll probably do just fine. In the real world, however, such a business may attract a lot of fraud as well. Some people will try to devise ways to steal your products without actually paying for them, such as by using stolen credit cards. You’ll eventually learn to taper your optimism with some practical control strategies, such as by taking steps to reduce fraud.

How does this type of learning experience benefit your personal growth? Your business will give you more frequent exposure to the light side and the dark side of humanity. This can help you release some naiveté and develop a more realistic understanding of human behavior, which can save you a great deal of trouble elsewhere in life, such as in your personal relationships.

The more successful you become in business, the more you’ll expose yourself to the best and worst of humanity. Because of my business, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with some wonderful and amazing people, including my girlfriend since she and I met at one of my workshops. Simultaneously, my business has also increased my exposure to some of the worst aspects of humanity, such as receiving threats of violence from people I’ve never met.

The challenge is to mature beyond your child-like innocence without descending into paranoia and cynicism. Can you learn to protect yourself from the worst of humanity while still being able to access the best of humanity? That is no easy balancing act.

Understand human behavior

In business you can learn a great deal by running experiments that you can’t easily do in your personal life. In fact, such experimentation is expected, and people are generally pretty accepting of it as long as you don’t go crazy with it. You’ll learn a lot about human behavior along the way.

Business often rewards experimentation. Your first attempts at any policies or procedures will be guesses, and many of your guesses will be wrong. Once you have some customers, you can test other possibilities, and pretty soon you’ll improve upon your early guesses. You’ll discover better ways to generate sales, reduce expenses, prevent fraud, increase your productivity, and more.

I love to experiment in business because the results sometimes surprise me, and those surprises can give me deeper insights about human nature.

In my computer games business, I decided to test a money-back guarantee on all game purchases, which was unusual in the industry during the years I did it. It also seemed redundant since my games had free demos anyway. But I tested the idea and found that it worked well. Even with a money-back guarantee on downloadable games, refund requests were negligible. What surprised me was that this policy also significantly reduced fraud because people who might otherwise try to get games fraudulently would instead buy them with the intention of returning them later, but most of them never bothered to ask for a return. I liked this policy because it didn’t hurt the honest customers, and it helped reclaim some positive business from potential customers who might otherwise have hurt the business with extra chargeback fees.

Another friend from that field devised a special “hacker discount.” When his software caught people trying to input stolen registration codes, he’d refer those people to a special web page offering them a 50% discount to actually buy the software instead of trying to steal it. He got some positive feedback and some extra sales from people who appreciated the creative approach.

I often find that experienced entrepreneurs are socially savvy in ways that non-entrepreneurs usually aren’t. Running a business gives you frequent exposure to aspects of human behavior that you might not otherwise see very often. Through business you’ll come to understand many behavioral nuances that defy simplistic labels such as good or evil. In the long run, this can help you become a more functional human being, partly because you’ll understand other people better and also because you’ll deepen your understanding of your own behavior. Such understanding can yield major payoffs. Imagine how much you’d gain if you could learn how to consistently motivate yourself, for instance. Do you already know how to do that? If not, the lessons of entrepreneurship can teach you.

www.stevepavlina.com

Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 3

2015-12-20T01:00:00.000+00:00

By Steve Pavlina

Learn the pain of indecision

Indecision hurts.

When you have a business, you’ll be punished for indecision. You’ll lose customers, miss opportunities, and struggle with lower sales if you don’t get your act together. Many would-be entrepreneurs can’t even get their first venture going because they waffle in indecision.

The consequences of indecision can shred your self-esteem. It’s easy to get down on yourself for not making clear, committed decisions.

I like that the rewards and punishments of business have trained me to make efficient but careful decisions. This skill benefits me in all areas of life. Even when I have to do something as mundane as buying a new appliance, I can leverage the decision-making muscles I’ve built from thousands of business decisions over more than two decades.

Many experienced entrepreneurs develop simple processes for making decisions efficiently. Usually they have a process for making low-priority decisions and another process for making important decisions.

The process for making low priority decisions is often just to rely on one’s gut instinct or intuition. Some people use simple heuristics, such as “Buy the best quality I can afford” or “When in doubt, sleep on it” or “Make the decision after exercising.” This works fine when the consequences of making a mistake are low. For some decisions like this, you could also ask the advice of a friend, check online reviews, or use a few other simple processes for making a decision.

In your personal life you probably use simple heuristics for making a variety of everyday decisions. As you gain experience, you’re likely to upgrade your heuristics as well. If you need a new appliance, you could walk into a department store, talk to a salesperson, and make a purchase based on his/her recommendation. Another heuristic would be to go online, research models in your price range, check customer reviews, select a model based on your assessment of customer satisfaction, and buy it from an online store.

What about big decisions? You could fill a library with the books people have written about how to make important decisions. What matters here is finding a process that works well for you under real-world conditions.

It’s easy to get caught up in analysis paralysis. As an entrepreneur you’re going to feel some pressure to make decisions quickly and get into action because opportunities have a limited lifespan. If you wait until you have perfect data to make a wise decision, the opportunity will be long gone. The real skill here is to get used to adjusting your decisions dynamically.

Big decisions are often not a matter of being correct or incorrect. They’re value judgments about which option is better. You get to define better.

A major reason for indecision is being unclear about what matters to you. If you don’t know what matters, you’ll waffle a lot because your priorities will shift too much. Conscious decision-making can be very powerful because when you make a decision consciously, you use essentially the same set of values each time. This gives your decisions some consistency.

For big decisions I normally use the core principles of growth — truth, love, and power — as my guideposts. I favor decisions that will help me grow. Since the nature of my work is to explore personal growth and share what I learn, my own growth experiences eventually become lessons and insights that I share with others. One of my best decisions was to align my work in such a way that working on my personal growth (which I love) also creates a lot of value for others, thereby producing a viable business model.

Note also that this means I’m frequently going to turn down so-called business opportunities that might be counter-productive for my own path of personal growth. I got into business because I wanted to grow faster. Whenever I’ve lost sight of that, I’ve made poor decisions that often lowered my motivation to work.

To make decisions based on truth, love, and power is fairly straightforward.

First, I take a step back and try to see the truth of a situation, as if it’s someone else’s decision. I put on my Vulcan cap (only metaphorically — I don’t actually own a Vulcan cap) and pretend to be Spock analyzing the details logically. I look at the external truth by going over the known, measurable facts involved. Often I’ll write them down. I consider the predictable consequences of potential decisions. If I decide A, then B and C are likely consequences. If I decide D, then E and F will probably happen too. Then I look at the internal truth, which includes my own thoughts and feelings related to the decision.

I try to be as objective as I can here. I think about the immediate consequences of a decision, and I also try to imagine what additional ripples might occur as a result of those decisions.

Yesterday Rachelle and I were at Starbucks with a friend, and we tried to predict some additional consequences of self-driving cars. Some seem obvious, like taxi drivers becoming obsolete. But what isn’t so obvious? A diner at a popular truck stop may go out of business because self-driving trucks won’t need to stop for food. A company that sells software to truck driving schools may suffer because we won’t need more truck drivers. Demand for artificial hearts will increase because self-driving cars will cause fewer fatal accidents, meaning that fewer human hearts will be available for transplants, so a parts supplier for artificial hearts may see its business improve, at least until we have android bodies.

It’s like a game of chess. Sometimes a move that looks only so-so at first can look brilliant a few moves later, and vice versa. To make more intelligent decisions, favor the decision branches that lead to desirable long-term outcomes and which have short-term consequences that you can live with.

Second, I look at the love aspect. What do I want? What would I love to experience? How do I define desirable? What do I want to move towards? What do I want to shed or avoid? What excites me?

I delve into the subjective side. I try to gain clarity about what it would be like to experience the full consequences of a decision. Usually I do this part by lying on my couch or going for a walk and visualizing possibilities. I pay attention to my inner reaction to each scenario. The key here is to visualize each major decision branch as a whole new world I could enter. I often refer to these as different quantum realities. I imagine what it would feel like to experience each quantum reality as if it were already here.

For a while there’s a negotiation between the truth and love sides. I go back and forth between these, looking for an option that satisfies both sides.

Third, I use the power principle. When I feel I have an option that looks good objectively and subjectively, I move into that new space. I immerse myself in the new decision. I tend to slam the accelerator at this point, which is often necessary to overcome inertia and get moving.

What if I’m not sure? I’m never totally sure. But when I catch myself waffling too much, I use some simple heuristics to make a decision. One heuristic is Embrace the New. All else being equal, I favor going in new directions. But the more important higher-level heuristic is to embrace learning and growth. Usually the newer path will yield new lessons, so it’s a decent short-cut to use.

Another heuristic I use is to explore and experiment. Sometimes the only way to understand the possibilities is to test them.

Last year I was gung ho about going nomadic. It seemed like a wonderful idea, and I felt reasonably committed to it. I took a test trip in January, traveling through Europe for a few weeks. I’ve done that before, but this time as I was traveling, I imagined living on the road long-term as a digital nomad. Instead of approaching the trip as a temporary vacation, I imagined that it was my primary lifestyle, just to see how it felt.

I didn’t like it, which surprised me. Socially and experientially it was fun and engaging, but I found it difficult to be productive on the road — or to even want to be productive during those weeks. I enjoy travel best when I do it as a temporary accent to my life, as a way to soak up new experiences. I’m happiest on the road when I don’t try to be productive.

I’m sure there are good ways to be productive from the road, but at this time I still want to immerse myself in the more focused productivity I can experience in my home office, where the environment is stable, quiet, and neatly organized and where I can use a large monitor instead of a laptop screen.

When I got home, I experimented in the opposite direction to see if that felt better. I upgraded from a 24″ desktop monitor to a 27″ 4K model to make my home office even better. I decided not to travel and committed to staying home for most of the year, so I could complete more projects in one place. That felt great — much more congruent than going nomadic — and I’ve loved the results thus far. My 2015 home office productivity has been terrific.

Many entrepreneurial decisions are like this. You’ll be gung ho about them at first, but give yourself permission to change your mind as you gain experience. When you’ve made a mistake, admit it and adjust course.

If you find yourself at a crossroads, don’t just stand there like a hapless dolt. If the correct path for you isn’t clear, then walk a few miles down one path, backtrack to the crossroads, and walk a few miles down the other. This will give you more information to decide.

Once I’m in motion towards a new direction, I make a lot of turns. I continue to assess and evaluate as I go. I sometimes do daily or weekly TLP check-ins (truth, love, power) to adjust course. If things go south, I’ll often quit and make a different decision.

It’s usually easier to make good decisions when you’re in motion. When you’re standing still, you have no data coming in, which makes it harder to decide. Making decisions from a standstill can lead to a lot of waffling because you’ll keep second-guessing yourself. In those situations it’s usually better to just embrace the new and go forward into something you’ve never done before. Learn by trial and error. Don’t even expect to be right. Just try to learn.

Which approach is better?

Waffle about starting a new business for a year. -or-
Start a new business, try to make it work, quit after three months, and repeat a total of four times in a year.

Obviously you’re going to learn more from the second approach.

If you stick with the first approach for too long, eventually it’s going to get under your skin. You’re going to tire of missing so many opportunities. You’re going to get sick of being broke all the time.

Sometimes you need to feel the pain of indecision to start building your decision muscles.

Learn the pain of perfectionism

If you’re a perfectionist, entrepreneurship will teach you to stop being one, unless you’re also a masochist.

I’ve received emails from people who’ve waffled for a year or more over which domain name to buy for a new online business they wanted to start. Since they couldn’t decide what to name their website, they didn’t start the business. They let that one simple step stop them.

Maybe this is an important decision, but clearly it would have been better to pick just about anything, such as I-have-no-clue-what-to-name-this-site.com, instead of doing nothing for a year.

How much does a new domain name cost? How difficult would it be to change course if you screw up? Sure, you may lose some links if you switch domains, but it’s still better than doing nothing.

It’s okay to make a mistake and change your mind later. It’s not okay to do nothing for a year.

Look at the names of the Fortune 500 companies. Why is the top tech company named after a piece of fruit? Does the name Walmart make you excited to shop there? When you drive a car from General Motors, fueled by gas from Exxon Mobil or Chevron, does their amazing branding give you a titty hard-on?

What’s really going to annoy you in business is when you see people making fast, dumb decisions and passing you by. Other entrepreneurs will pick lame domain names for their websites. They’ll make ugly websites. They’ll pick the wrong technology to use. And they’ll make more money than you.

If you’re a perfectionist, let me give you a simple process for making decisions:

Have a meal to get your blood sugar up.
Select an option for your decision that you know is bad, such as naming your website StevePavlinaIsMyMaster.com, going out naked, or hosting your website with Hostgator.
Now see if you can improve upon the decision from step 2 by coming up with an option that’s better. Use whatever option generating techniques you like, such as brainstorming lists of possibilities, asking people for suggestions, or consulting a Magic 8-ball.
Keep repeating step 3, trying to progressively improve upon your previous best options.
You can waffle as much as you want until you need to eat again.
As soon as you put any food or drink (other than water) into your mouth, your last best option becomes your decision.
If you cannot identify your last best option before you need to consume something other than water, then your decision is to go with your worst option from step 2.

If you can’t do this process without cheating, then maybe what you really need is to be told what to do. If you stubbornly refuse to make decisions for yourself, you can always work for someone who will decide for you.

I like that business rewards quality but punishes perfectionism. The ongoing pressure to make good decisions quickly can push you to grow much further than you otherwise would. I have made some truly horrendous decisions in my life, especially during my late teens, and being an entrepreneur has refined my decision-making skills far beyond the impulsive recklessness of youth, but without losing the edginess and stimulation I find so rewarding.

Learn the pain of denial

The rapid pace of technological innovation forces us to keep reinventing ourselves and our businesses if we are to survive and thrive. But when we’re faced with new opportunities and threats, it can be difficult to shift directions. Changing course often requires a tremendous amount of work with no guarantee of success. It seems easier and safer to keep doing what we’ve been doing.

As the saying goes, old habits die hard. But to succeed in business, sometimes old habits need to die, even when it seems like they still have a lot of life left in them.

Maybe Encyclopedia Britannica could have become Wikipedia. Maybe Kodak could have owned digital photography. Momentum can be deadly if you can’t get your business to turn when it needs to.

If you’re a taxi driver today, do you see that your business model is going bye-bye? Your customers are being snatched up by ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, and within a few more years, you’ll have competition from self-driving cars as well. Do you really think that any sort of collective action can stop this? This would be a great time to start retraining yourself for a new line of work.

Entrepreneurship punishes denial and clinginess and rewards flexibility. If becoming more flexible, adaptable, and nimble appeals to you on a personal level, entrepreneurship can help you calibrate and fine-tune these qualities.

Change can seem threatening, but change also means opportunity. The forces that hurt many established businesses simultaneously spawn wonderful new business models for other entrepreneurs.

Does the rapid pace of change in the world worry you or excite you? Perhaps it’s a bit of both. The skills you’ll learn as an entrepreneur can help you see change as exciting and thrilling, even as you know that you’ll have to work hard to keep up.

Stop being a technology dunce

Technology in particular is becoming an increasingly important part of business. Some of the rippling changes we’re seeing in the world are unlike anything we’ve had to deal with before.

I cringe when I hear an entrepreneur say something like, “I’m just not very good with technology” or “I don’t really understand computers.” The worst part is when I hear this from someone trying to start or build an online business.

You don’t stand much of a chance competing in a world where technology is infecting every business if you think it’s okay to claim technological duncehood. Technology dunces get eaten, chewed up, and spit out in today’s world of business.

If you’re an entrepreneur today, you cannot afford to be a technology dunce anymore. Those days are gone. You may have been able to coast up until now, but the situation is rapidly changing. If your outdated business model isn’t under attack yet from other entrepreneurs with superior tech skills, it soon will be.

It’s important to recognize and accept that technology and business are married now. If you want to go into business today and succeed, technology will surely be an integral part of your roadmap.

After the invention and refinement of the steam engine, the whole world changed. No longer were we held back by the biological limits of muscle tissue. Horse power was replaced by horsepower. Many entrepreneurs rode this wave of change to great wealth and success. Many businesses that stubbornly resisted these technological shifts were trampled and forgotten.

What the steam engine did for our muscles, computer hardware and software is doing for our minds, and communications technology is doing for our voices. Once again, we’ve pushed past the limits of our biology.

If you want to be an intelligent entrepreneur today, then get with today’s program. Ride this wave of change for your benefit and the benefit of your customers. Enjoy the fun and excitement of being swept up in it. Don’t wallow in horse dung.

If you understand the tech side of your business well enough, you can leverage technology to great effect. You can make your business do things that would be otherwise impossible. And you can free yourself from a tremendous amount of drudgery that is simply no longer necessary in today’s world.

If you have strong enough tech skills, you won’t need a job to cover your expenses. You can still get a job if you want, such as for personal growth reasons, but you won’t need one. You’ll be able to leverage your tech skills to earn all the money you need to survive and thrive financially.

Almost all of the money I’ve earned in my life has come via the Internet, most of it in the form of passive income that continues to flow whether I keep working or not. I used my tech skills to solve the income problem, so I didn’t have to waste my life working for someone else just to pay for my rent, food, etc. Computers and software handle most of the marketing, distribution, and income generation aspects of my business. I mainly do the fun and creative parts. When I don’t want to work, the business largely maintains itself, and income continues to flow.

Did this require some kind of extraordinary genius? Of course not. Among people with strong tech skills, it’s commonplace. Many people have been doing this since at least the 1990s. I started on this path in 1995.

If you don’t know how to get today’s technology to solve the income problem for you, you can learn. It’s even easier today than it was when I started. Today’s computers and software are much more powerful, and the Internet is a whole lot bigger and more accessible.

I love, love, love that business rewards good tech skills. This encourages me to keep learning and growing. New tech knowledge is exploding and recombining much faster than my ability to keep up with it, and that’s wonderful because everyone else is in the same boat. We’re all dazed and confused by the pace of change, and that’s why there are so many opportunities and possibilities out there.

To solve the income problem without getting a job, you only need to find one combo that works. And when it breaks down, there will be countless other combos that will work even better.

Business will punish you for being technologically lazy, ignorant, or confused. The game is always racing ahead, and if you fall behind, you’ll be left behind.

One reason to participate in the game is that you want the extra pressure to stay close to the front of this wave of change, and you dislike the idea of falling behind. Another reason is that you like using technology to take care of your needs instead of having to work so hard to meet those needs yourself.

During the summer I toured the largest data center in the world, which just so happens to be located in Las Vegas, only 15 minutes from where I live. Apparently Nevada has the least natural disasters of any U.S. state, which makes it a great place to host a data center. I got to see the actual servers running major Internet operations, including eBay, Amazon, Disney, Microsoft, and more — rack after rack of servers processing millions of transactions in a climate-controlled environment. The place had multiple redundant air conditioning units, each one the size of a small house. It had redundant power systems. It had two metal roofs, each one capable of withstanding 200 mph winds. It had armed guards and security checkpoints.

It was great to see so much modern technology in person. It struck me that every server was an automated money-making machine. Thousands of businesses were leveraging these servers to do their bidding. Only decades earlier such operations wouldn’t even have been possible.

My business is nowhere near that level, but it still inspires me to see what’s possible as an entrepreneur today — and to think about what will be possible in the years ahead. Even my tiny little business does things that would have been impossible a generation earlier. Thousands of people all around the planet will read this article only hours after I finished writing it, with some of them starting to read it only seconds after I click “Publish.” How cool is that?

If being an entrepreneur today doesn’t make your heart sing now and then, then stop wallowing in the technological dung heap, and do whatever it takes to bring your tech skills into the modern era. We all have to learn this from scratch as babies, but if you remain an ignorant tech baby, you’re like that black stuff in The Matrix — you know, the slime that’s created when dead bodies get recycled and fed back to the living intravenously.

I love the evolving relationship between technology and personal growth. Many years ago, you could say that personal growth was married to psychology. But today it’s fair to say that personal growth has already divorced psychology and is now engaged to technology. Pretty soon personal growth and technology will be married. You should attend that wedding.

If you’re an entrepreneur today, don’t be a technology dunce. It’s not cute. It’s just stupid.

www.stevepavlina.com

Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 2

2015-12-13T01:00:00.000+00:00

By Steve Pavlina

Develop a broad base of skills

Starting your own business can push you to learn a variety of skills you may not otherwise learn, such as:

business law
contract negotiation
accounting
marketing
sales skills
presentation skills
recruiting
management
strategy
crisis management
customer service

General business skills that you learn in one business can readily be applied to another, so your early business lessons give you a head start in any future businesses you may build.

In my first few years in business, I didn’t know anything about contracts and spent a few thousand dollars each year to have experienced lawyers help me draft, understand, negotiate, and edit contracts, such as for game publishing deals. Eventually I learned enough from those lawyers to be able to competently draft my own business contracts and negotiate my own deals, which saves me time and money. I also learned that I wanted to spend less time dealing with lawyers.

I can learn a lot about a business by paying careful attention to their contracts. A contract is a treasure trove of information if you know what to look for. I’ve rejected a number of deals outright when a business contract made me suspicious of someone’s intentions or gave me doubts about their competence. A sloppy contract is a sign of a sloppy business. A sneaky contract is a sign of a sneaky business. A confusing contract is a sign of a confusing business. I favor contracts that are fair, direct, thorough, and simply worded.

When I had to negotiate event contracts for my Las Vegas workshops, it was easy because I already had lots of experience with business contracts from a previous business. I’ve done 11 events so far at various hotels on the Vegas Strip and downtown, and I never needed to use a lawyer for any of them.

Now I only hire a lawyer when I’m doing something unusual or where a mistake could be very costly, and I only use them selectively for the parts where I need help. I hired a lawyer in 2007 to help me with my book publishing agreement with Hay House because it was my first book publishing deal, and I was ignorant about some aspects of book publishing, such as what the royalty rates for different media should be. That lawyer helped me make enough beneficial changes to the agreement to more than cover her fees, and I was able to keep the legal costs reasonable by handling most of the contract negotiation myself.

When you’re new to business, you’re going to have a lot to learn — much more than you expect. Sometimes it will seem overwhelming how much there is to figure out. But you don’t have to learn these lessons all in your first year. Even after being an entrepreneur for more than 20 years, I’m still learning aspects of business that many people might think are very basic. It was only this year, for instance, that I finally got my business accounting practices in order.

If you stick with entrepreneurship for many years, you’ll learn a wide range of skills that can benefit you in any business and your personal life as well, such as when you need to negotiate the purchase of a new home or when you plan a wedding and need to stick to a budget.

Some skills that you learn will only be needed on rare occasions, but you’ll be glad to have them.

On a personal level, it can do wonders for your self-esteem to know that you can competently exercise such a wide variety of skills. This helps you see that you’re always capable of improving yourself to tackle new challenges that may currently seem out of reach.

Learn to say no when you’re suspicious

How many times in life do we make the mistake of walking into a trap? Business has lots of potential traps, and getting good at avoiding them is at least as important as capturing opportunities.

It’s very difficult to walk away from a business deal that looked good at first and suddenly turned bad, especially if you’ve already invested a lot in it. This can be as hard as leaving a good relationship that turned bad. You remember the good times and feel that it must be possible to rekindle what was.

In 2010 I hosted four workshops at the Flamingo Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. All of those events went smoothly. We had a great meeting room that was perfect for our workshops, and I enjoyed working with the Flamingo’s staff and found them to be friendly, professional, and competent. I especially liked the meeting planner we worked with, who was always on the ball. The venue was also a good match for our attendees, with reasonably priced guest rooms of decent quality. The Flamingo is right in the middle of the Vegas Strip, which made it a fun and lively location for attendees who wanted to soak up the authentic Las Vegas experience in the evenings.

I wanted to keep doing more events at the Flamingo and thought we’d continue working well together for many years. But when I went to book a new event with them, something had changed on their end. The original meeting planner I’d worked with had been promoted, and they assigned me someone new who didn’t seem to care whether we booked with them or not. She refused to rent us the meeting room we loved, preferring to reserve it for more lucrative wedding receptions. She showed me rooms that weren’t appropriate for our events and that didn’t match the specs I provided. She was all around unprofessional and wasted my time. I couldn’t get a deal done with her, so for our next four workshops in 2011 and 2012, I switched to the Tropicana, which had just been remodeled at the time. Those workshops went well, but I still preferred the meeting rooms and staff at the Flamingo.

I tried going back to the Flamingo again in 2012 or 2013, hoping that the previous issues were a fluke. This time I dealt with a different meeting planner who seemed more professional and accommodating. She was able to get us the room we loved at the same price we paid in 2010. So far so good.

By the time she sent me the contract, I figured it would be smooth sailing since all she had to do was send me the same contract we’d used four times before. It was mostly the same, but there were some differences, all of which slanted the deal towards benefitting the Flamingo at our expense. I was able to get nearly all of that nonsense removed, but I was told their legal department would not allow us to remove one sentence that they insisted on adding this time. This wasn’t in any of our previous agreements.

That one sentence would have given them the right to add additional expenses to our bill however they deemed necessary. In her emails to me, the meeting planner insisted that our costs should be the same as before and that everything should go smoothly. She acted like that sentence was just part of their new standard agreement and claimed it couldn’t be removed. Yeah, right.

When I see such a vague, open-ended catch all in a contract, it sounds alarm bells for me, and it should do the same for you as well. I might have done this deal during my first year or two in business. But not this time. I walked away from the deal and didn’t do that workshop. That one sentence killed it for me.

When companies are in trouble, many times there are still good employees working for them who are trying to do the right thing under impossible conditions. They may be pushed by management to squeeze more money out of good customers, for instance. At the time I thought that either the meeting planner or the Flamingo’s legal department was deliberately sabotaging the deal. I was annoyed that they wasted my time once again. Their decisions seemed ridiculous to me. We had a good thing going that was mutually beneficial, and we could have worked well together for years. Why did they seem to irrationally insist on fucking it up?

In retrospect, however, the story looks a bit different. That meeting planner (or the legal department) may have saved me from a much nastier situation.

Earlier this year, the owner of the Flamingo, Caesar’s Entertainment, filed for bankruptcy. That was probably a long time coming. I don’t know what would have happened if we had booked that event with them, but in retrospect I’m glad they insisted on that one ridiculously unreasonable line in the contract, which pushed me to walk away.

If we had worked with them during that time, we might have gotten stung by various problems that companies commonly experience on the road to bankruptcy, not the least of which may have been having our bill padded or seeing our event become an unfortunate casualty.

The worst mistakes I’ve made in business involved saying yes to deals that I never should have done.

Similarly, some of the worst mistakes you’ll make in your personal life will include staying in stagnant or declining relationships much longer than you should.

Being an entrepreneur will expose you to more of these tricky situations. You’ll learn to pause and reflect a little longer before jumping in headfirst. Those pauses can save you from many headaches.

Grow your skills to capture new business opportunities

Many business opportunities will elude you until you can grow enough to capture them. Seeing those opportunities dangling in front of you and knowing that you could seize them if only you grew a bit more can be very motivating.

The world of business is like a huge fruit tree. You can reach some of the low-hanging fruit right away, but most of the juiciest fruit is higher up in the branches, teasing you with its golden deliciousness.

Once when I was chatting with Hay House President Reid Tracy in his office, he told me that their best-selling authors typically make most of their money from speaking, not from writing books. That was around the time I was just getting into professional speaking and had earned less than $10,000 total from it.

To capture the income from speaking though, I had to grow into a speaker. I had a small amount of experience speaking at tech and gaming industry conferences before I started blogging, but I was only paid with free conference passes at best. I felt I had a long way to go before I’d be capable of earning significant income from speaking.

In the early 2000s, I often sat in awe of people who could speak confidently in front of groups. I wanted to push myself to grow in that area too. One reason I shifted from game development to personal development is that I’d have more opportunities to develop my speaking skills. In the personal development field, I could more easily justify a major investment in my speaking skills because there would likely be a significant financial payoff on that side. If I stuck with the gaming industry, I could still speak at tech conferences, but it wasn’t likely to generate much income because that type of speaking is usually done for free.

I liked speaking, wanted to get good at it, and would gladly do it for free. But I couldn’t justify taking the time away from my computer games business that would be necessary to stretch myself in that way. The demands of my business were at odds with my personal growth interests.

In these situations you can put your old business model first, or you can put your personal growth first. I did the latter. I shut down my games business and started fresh in a new field. A big part of my motivation was to adopt a business model that would do a better job of financially rewarding my major growth pursuits. I could now justify spending more time speaking and writing because those skills would benefit my new business too.

Notice that I was making a big sacrifice here too. In the new field, I wouldn’t have as many rewards for keeping my game programming skills sharp, so I knew that those skills would atrophy. That tradeoff was worth it to me.

Weaving my personal growth journey into my business has been immensely rewarding. It’s like getting paid to grow. Now I have the skills to easily earn six figures a year as a speaker if I wanted to. To me the ability to earn income from speaking is nice, but the greater reward is knowing that I can get up and speak confidently in front of people without fear or anxiety.

This years-long process of turning a weakness into a strength is wonderful by itself. Doing this as an entrepreneur is even better because your business gives you bonus rewards for success if your new strength can be used to generate extra income.

To this day I pay a lot of attention to the alignment between my personal growth interests and the behaviors that my business rewards. When those fall too far out of sync, I know that something has to change.

Think about how you can adopt a business model that will provide extra rewards if you achieve your personal growth goals and/or extra punishments if you don’t. You can deliberately link your income to the behaviors you want to adopt.

Learn patience and consider abandoning deadlines

Many entrepreneurial opportunities can only be captured with immense patience and persistence.

For many years patience has been one of my greatest weaknesses. I went through so many cycles of planning out my work in detail, making careful estimates, and then rejecting my estimates and replacing them with foolishly optimistic estimates because I didn’t want to accept how long my goals would actually take to achieve. I’d set deadlines for myself that were impossible to meet.

I’d try to complete projects in a few weeks that should realistically take several months. I’d set ridiculous deadlines that didn’t give me enough time to finish, let alone to polish the work to a high level of quality. This caused me to keep piling up partially finished projects, which can be a real drain on one’s motivation.

To this day impatience remains a big personal growth challenge for me. I love to move fast. I like going from idea to result quickly, which is probably why I like blogging so much. But I also recognize that doing a really good job on some projects takes a lot of time, and rushing is counter-productive.

One April during my late 20s, my family was about to throw me a birthday party. I was annoyed. I had a lot of work to do, and the timing of my own birthday was inconvenient. I wanted to skip the party and postpone or cancel it, so I could stay at my office and work. I argued with my Mom about it, who (perhaps rightfully) got a bit snippy with me. After I got of the phone, I thought to myself, This is ridiculous. I grudgingly went to the party, but I was distracted by all the work I still had to do. It was a no win situation.

So many creative projects die because people accept unrealistic deadlines. The problem is that creative work can be highly unpredictable. Estimation is hard enough when all the details are known in advance. When unknown problems must be solved, deadlines can easily do more harm than good.

I understand that deadlines and time estimates are important when you’re spending a lot of money, tackling time-sensitive opportunities, fending off competition, or working with large teams. But many entrepreneurs aren’t in those situations. For many entrepreneurs, any deadlines are arbitrary and self-imposed.

I learned that I actually do my best work when I don’t have a specific deadline. I find deadlines immensely distracting. They often cause me to do lower quality work, to make poor decisions, and to make more mistakes. Deadlines raise my stress levels and push my brain out of its best creative zone.

In lieu of deadlines, what motivation could you use instead? If you don’t have a deadline, then won’t you be at risk of descending into laziness?

I find that without a deadline, I actually work even harder. Instead of pushing myself to work faster, I focus instead on the quality of the work I’m doing.

Yesterday I breezed through a 12- or 13-hour workday and deeply enjoyed the work I did. I started my workday around 5:45am and worked the first five hours with no breaks. Even at the end of the day, I still felt motivated to keep working and did a little more work after dinner. This is how I work when I don’t have a deadline. Instead of worrying about the time, I put my full attention on the task at hand. I do the task as if time is infinite.

My major personal growth lesson here was learning that working timelessly is more effective for me than working with a deadline. I know that many people swear that deadlines are important for achieving goals. For me deadlines are counter-productive though. Deadlines trigger my impatience and make me crash into walls.

For me the path to patience has been to allow myself to work as if time doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists is the task that’s right in front of me.

Almost all of my writing was done in a deadline-free fashion. Now I’m learning to tackle a greater variety of projects with this same approach, and it’s working very well so far.

Business is an incredible teacher of patience. When you see patient entrepreneurs achieving results that you’ve never been able to achieve, you’ll feel incentivized to stop sprinting wildly towards random goals and put in the time to do quality work.

Maybe deadlines work well for you. But if not, consider focusing on the quality of your work instead. Immerse yourself in doing your best, and ignore the passing of time.

Grow strong enough to tackle the monster projects

This is a corollary to the previous item, but I think it deserves special treatment.

Many businesses have monster projects. These are the big, hairy, sometimes scary projects that you may dread doing but which could have serious payoffs if you complete them. When you develop your patience and persistence, some of those monster projects will become accessible to you. You’ll be able to dig up gems that you once thought would be too difficult to extract, and you’ll even learn to enjoy the process of digging.

I’ve known for many years that I need to update my aging website, which largely uses the same design it launched with in October 2004. In many ways this is an ugly monster of a project. I launched the site quickly to get it online fast and made a variety of inconsistent design decisions during the past 11 years. The blog portion of the site is managed by WordPress, but the rest of the site still includes dozens of hand-coded HTML pages, various scripts full of spaghetti code, countless redirects, experimental pages that no longer work, hundreds of dead links, and dozens of smaller design problems. That said, the site is still immensely popular, receiving tens of thousands of visitors per day.

A few years ago I made an extensive to-do list of what was needed to modernize the site and fix the design and coding problems, while still keeping the original content intact. That list was more than a dozen pages long. I shoved the monster back into the closet.

This year I finally decided to tackle this monster project. I no longer felt impatient or stressed about it. I approached the project as a personal growth challenge, thinking about all the ways I’d have to stretch myself to get it done.

I considered hiring a designer, but truth be told, I never found a designer whose designs impressed me. I received lots of suggestions, but whenever I checked out the portfolios, I saw lots of designs that didn’t speak to me. My priority was to improve the usability of the site for my readers. I couldn’t see how parallax scrolling would help me achieve that.

Moreover, I wasn’t excited by the personal growth path of working with a designer. It seemed like a boring and tedious way to get the project done. I’ve known other people who went this route to update their websites, and they were often dissatisfied with the experience and the results.

Maybe there’s a golden designer I could have worked with, but I never found that person.

Design is not my strength though. For starters I’m color blind. A person with normal vision sees about 1 million shades of color. I see 25,000 shades. That’s 1/40th of normal. In the blue part of the spectrum, I can see close to what a person with normal vision sees. But when I stray into reds and greens, I really have no idea how those colors look to most people. Fortunately, I have a girlfriend who does have normal color vision. I figured that working with her on the color aspects of the project would make it more fun, which turned out to be true.

I decided to use a simple standard for this project. I would do whatever it took to do it right this time. No deadlines. I’d keep working on it until I was satisfied with the result.

I’d come up with a consistent design philosophy and standards for the entire site. I’d solve each problem carefully and thoughtfully. I’d learn whatever I needed to learn. I’d seek help from other people as needed.

I began that project in late August, not really knowing how long it would take but figuring at least a couple months of full-time work. I decided to put blogging on the back burner, so I could focus more deeply on that one project.

I started by updating my knowledge of WordPress. I went to WordPress.org and learned about the latest features that I wasn’t using yet. I joined the Las Vegas WordPress meetup group and started going to their meetings. In September I went to the two-day WordCamp Las Vegas, my first WordCamp ever. I talked to web developers and designers. I took a lot of notes and looked into every resource I encountered.

I didn’t rush. I didn’t worry about deadlines. I just focused on learning what I needed to learn and doing the best work that I could.

I designed by doing. I would make a prototype design of a single page, look at it, and note what I didn’t like about it. Then I’d try another approach to fix those problems. When I felt semi-satisfied with the result, I’d show it to Rachelle and watch her grimace. Then we’d discuss what was still wrong with it. I’d keep iterating and trying new ideas until we both liked the result.

Treating this as a personal growth project turned out to be extremely motivating. I found it easy to work 10-12 hours a day and still felt an intense drive to keep working until my brain was too exhausted to continue. Instead of just trying to get the project done, I immersed myself in gaining new knowledge and skills and then applying what I learned to make further progress on the project. Every day was a learning adventure.

For example, instead of trying to pick better fonts for the website, I decided to study and learn typography. I spent several days in a row just studying typography for 8-10 hours per day. I probably learned more about typography in that first day of intensive study than I ever knew about the subject in my entire life up to that point. I thought deeply about how the typography choices would affect my reader’s experience of the site.

After I believed I had a practical and functional understanding of typography, I applied this knowledge to the website update. I considered hundreds of different fonts for the redesign and carefully selected the exact fonts I wanted to use. I tested and tweaked every aspect of typography that I could modify until I was finally satisfied. I probably spent 2-3 weeks of this project just on the typography. There is no Arial or Verdana on the new site!

I considered not just fonts but also line height, letter spacing, use of headings and subheadings, and more. I tweaked the number of characters per line to fall within the ideal range for reading articles. I customized the styling of the bullets, numbered lists, block quotes, links, and more. I even programmed the fonts to automatically resize themselves for different screen sizes.

I’ve probably become something of a typography snob as a result of this exploration. The best motivation to finish and launch the new website is looking at the old website and noting how ugly and chaotic it looks to me now.

This project, which was once my monster, has been an amazing personal growth journey. I normally would not have tackled this type of project for myself though. One reason I was motivated to do it was because my website is an integral part of my business. The website already has a lot of traffic, and I know that many readers would appreciate a more modern design. I can’t say if there will be a financial payoff for this project, but a more intelligently designed website surely couldn’t hurt.

For me the immediate payoff is that the new site is going to be much easier to manage. That alone made this project worth doing.

There isn’t much work left to do on the new site. All of the major problems have been solved and fixed. Hundreds of to-do items have been checked off. The remaining work mainly involves tweaking plugins, fixing some broken links, and testing and fine-tuning. The monster has been tamed.

When will it launch? When it’s fully done. I could give you an estimate, but I won’t. :)

In school we learn knowledge and skills that we may never apply in the real world, so of course we forget most of what we learn within a few weeks. This type of learning is mostly a waste of time and energy. School is mostly babysitting.

In business we have the opportunity to learn something and apply it immediately. This adds depth, power, and drive to learning that makes us soak up information faster and with greater retention.

As an entrepreneur you’ll see plenty of evidence that your personal weaknesses are holding your business back. Knowing that you’re going to have to work on yourself to help your business can motivate you to tackle some intense growth challenges.

These growth challenges are endless. Don’t make yourself crazy trying to tackle them all at once, and don’t beat yourself up too much when you fall short. Just keep turning towards that powerful and ambitious spirit inside of you, and be as patient as you can as you continue to grow into alignment with your potential.

www.stevepavlina.com

Entrepreneurs Grow at Warp Speed – Part 1

2015-12-06T01:00:00.000+00:00

By Steve Pavlina

One reason I started my own business in my early 20s is that I believed it would help me grow faster as a human being. I figured I’d learn more valuable skills, tackle more challenges, and enjoy a richer life as an entrepreneur than I would as someone else’s employee. That turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.

The happiest and most successful business owners I know are almost invariably more motivated by the personal growth aspects of business than the financial aspects. Many of them love the challenge, and nothing motivates them so much as turning an idea into reality. The money they earn in business helps to fuel their personal growth interests.

In the years I’ve been blogging, hundreds of readers (possibly thousands by now) have told me they quit their jobs and started their own businesses. That doesn’t surprise me because entrepreneurship can provide many growth lessons and opportunities that are difficult to experience any other way. When you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll often feel like you’re learning and growing at warp speed.

Let me share some of the many ways that starting and running your own business can help drive your personal growth forward.

Ground your growth in the real world

Many personal growth concepts sound intriguing, but do they work in the real world? Without actual testing, it’s impossible to know which ideas have merit. Try applying those ideas to a real business, and see how they perform. This cuts through the B.S. and helps you identify the gems.

You’ll discover that some ideas which sound a bit airy fairy actually work well in business, while other ideas that seem smart and logical are too inflexible to be useful in the uncontrolled chaos of the real world.

Sometimes you’ll observe results that evade a clear conclusion but which help you discover more subtleties. This will polish your thinking, such as by helping you recognize when the time is right to race ahead with optimism vs. when to put on your skeptics cap and think twice about a so-called opportunity.

You may respect promising theories and ideas in the sanctuary of your own mind, but in business you’ll learn to respect what works. You’ll receive meaningful feedback to see how your ideas pan out. You always have numbers to look at, such as your sales and profits… or your losses and debts.

In the pure space of ideas, there are no time limits. In business you’ll learn to favor ideas that can be applied efficiently because time is your scarcest resource. That sense of time pressure to get things done faster helps you learn to balance the time vs. quality tradeoff in other parts of your life. You may love your daily 90-minute hot yoga classes (perhaps 2.5 hours including driving time and showering), but when you see opportunities passing you by while you’re sweating it out at the studio, you’ll surely feel some pressure to find a more efficient way to exercise.

Testing ideas in the crucible of business can seem merciless and unforgiving at times, but it keeps us honest regarding what works. Some things that may have worked okay in your sheltered upbringing, such as complaining or whining to get what you want, are mostly useless in the business world. On the other hand, ideas that your friends and family thought were foolish may actually prove to have huge market potential, and you could prove all the naysayers wrong.

Doing business in the chaotic real world can chip away childish facets of your personality and beliefs and replace them with practical creativity. If you want to get things done efficiently and make your business successful, you’ll need to take your personal growth to a new level. Knowing that your business will push you to grow in this way is a major reason to consider starting a business. How much longer do you want to keep swimming in the kiddie pool?

Grow smarter

Running a business can make you smarter.

A business throws many interesting and novel problems at you. Thinking about and solving those problems keeps your brain active. You’ll have an endless stream of fresh challenges for your neural net to chew on, which will keep your mind strong and fit even when you aren’t working.

The tradeoff is that when your mind is churning on business problems, you may be less present to what’s happening right in front of you. So another skill is learning to center yourself when you want to take time off. For many entrepreneurs this is difficult. But then again you may not care. Many people enjoy the obsessive nature of business.

Do you relish the opportunity to apply your whole being to a problem, challenge, or exploration? The mental and emotional stimulation of facing tricky decisions can be immensely rewarding. If you like solving puzzles, business is full of them.

Being active in business is a great way to keep your mind sharp well into your 70s, 80s, and beyond.

I never want to retire, regardless of how much money I have. Retirement is mental death.

Upgrade your habits

Many businesses have a repetitive side. To handle recurring tasks efficiently, you need good processes for the business, which usually includes good habits for yourself.

You’ll need one set of habits to get the repetitive work done consistently. If you fail to handle the routine aspects of business, your business will suffer. The world of business punishes you for being sloppy and disorganized. The worst punishment is missing a golden opportunity because you were too disorganized to act.

You’ll need another set of habits to avoid getting beaten down by the routine. Too much routine can become boring and tedious. A big part of business involves reducing the amount of time and energy you invest in routine work, so you can invest more time and energy in new opportunities.

Seeing how your habits affect your business can be hard to take, but this feedback benefits us in the long run. It wakes us up and helps us graduate to more intelligent behaviors.

If you approach business with a poor work ethic and a low commitment to learn and grow, you’ll be sent home. I’ve seen many optimistic new entrepreneurs fail in business because they approached their business with a sloppy mindset, as if it were a cutesy little hobby to squeeze between social media and YouTube videos.

I’ve also seen an amazing transition happen with many entrepreneurs. Something finally clicks in their minds, and virtually overnight they go from amateur to professional. It usually takes years to reach that night, however. After that point there’s no stopping them. They approach their business with a dedication and commitment unlike anything they’ve previously mustered. They step up, take charge, make good long-term decisions, and work their plans for months on end.

If you want to think up some better habits, ask yourself, What would a real pro do? Pay special attention to how you believe a professional in your field would behave. What would a consummate professional do different than an amateur?

Do your best to behave as you believe the pro would behave. This is only a starting point though. Eventually you’ll come up with habits that are uniquely your own. Just keep in mind that pros often have a lot of fun doing what they do. They work hard because they love their work so incredibly much. Many pros can be eccentric, and one reason is that eccentricity makes work more fun and engaging. For many pros the biggest risk is that their work becomes too routine and too easy, which would kill their motivation and drive.

Stop working with (or for) idiots

When you’re in school, you’ll have to deal with some idiot teachers now and then. If you work for someone else, you may have to deal with an idiot boss or idiot co-workers. If you run your own business, you’ll still have to deal with idiots in government sometimes, but at least you’ll have some say about who works in your company and who doesn’t.

When I used to work at a computer game store during my early 20s, the high-strung owner would overreact to every little problem. If the shipping guy ever shipped the wrong order by mistake, the owner would fire him immediately, so the supervisor was always having to hire and train new shippers. Sometimes I’d wonder how long each new guy would last till he got fired. I think one of them only lasted four days. In my opinion it was stupid to fire someone for a $20 mistake because it cost the owner much more to hire and train someone new.

When a rare or minor problem occurred, the owner would solve it by creating a new rule that all employees were supposed to follow. These rules were often counter-productive. One time a customer wanted to return a game that an employee had supposedly recommended. The customer didn’t like the game. So our new rule was: No employees can recommend games to customers anymore. Henceforth whenever a hopeful customer came into the store looking for a game and asked for help picking a good one, the employees like me — all of us were heavy gamers — had to act like we had no opinion as to which games were better than any others.

In practice though — and because we cared about the customers — the other employees and I just skirted the owner’s ridiculous rules, such as by saying, “This game allegedly got great reviews,” and “This game has been very popular lately.” So we still recommended games without technically recommending them.

One of the best aspects of running your own business is that you’re finally free to pick and choose the people you work with. If you’re new to business, that will probably take a few years to really sink in. Initially you may find yourself chasing any opportunity that presents itself without giving more thought to the lifestyle consequences of your business decisions.

I made the mistake of working with some dishonest and incompetent people my first few years in business and suffered a lot of unnecessary stress as a result. When I finally realized that I didn’t actually have to work with people I didn’t like or respect and that I’d been making some dumb and overly desperate decisions in this area, I swore off that kind of nonsense for good and resolved to stop. My business back then, which was failing at the time, quickly turned around. That was one of the most important business lessons I learned.

It might sound obvious to have a “No Bozo” policy for your business as well, but oh how rarely this is actually practiced! I hate to say it, but you’re probably going to be tripped up more than once when you catch yourself violating this simple rule until you finally internalize it.

The social atmosphere you create within and around your business can be a blessing or a curse, but remember that you’re in charge. If you don’t like it, change it. This is true for everyone, but employees so often have a tendency to act powerless and accept their lot in life. If you do that as a business owner though, it just makes you look foolish since you’re the boss.

On the flip side, it will probably start to annoy you when you finally begin applying this rule consistently and see how wonderful life is on the other side, and you hear other people complain about their co-workers as if they have no power whatsoever to choose the people they work with. Before you blurt out, “You’re the one choosing to working with those bozos. If you don’t like working with them, then go work somewhere else. Duh!” just remember that you got snared by that trap as well. Then go ahead and say it anyway. It feels good to be righteous now and then, doesn’t it? It works especially well if you can say it with a Forrest Gump accent.

The opportunity to work with some really smart and creative people makes business so worthwhile. But in order for you to earn that privilege, you’ll need to begin doing your best work and put in the years it takes to hone your skills and habits. Otherwise you’ll be one of the bozos they’d rather avoid.

Make better decisions

In business smart decisions get rewarded. Dumb decisions get punished. Sometimes brutally.

I love those days when I made one good decision, and it put an extra $10K in my bank account. Other times I made one slightly suboptimal decision and ended up having to do many weeks of extra work to make up for it. And on the brutal side, there was a time when one bad decision made in a single week set me back a year or two financially. Ouch!

Risk is the nature of the business game. But in most cases, these risks have an imaginary element to them. You’re not actually risking your life. You’re mostly just risking getting a low score with some minor consequences.

For personal growth reasons, I like having a fault-tolerant business, whereby I can make lots of non-fatal mistakes and learn from them quickly. I can choose which opportunities to pursue and where to place my bets. I can make money and lose money, and it doesn’t really matter. The real gains are the personal growth benefits for me and the value I provide to other people along the way.

Some of the most important decisions involve prioritizing. In a real business you’ll have too many problems to fix and/or too many opportunities to pursue. You’ll never have enough time and resources to tackle all of them. Even the top companies in the world don’t have the ability to fix all their problems and pursue all their opportunities equally.

It’s difficult to decide not to do something that you’d really like to get done, especially when other people are complaining about it as if they’re informing you about it for the first time. It’s tough to say, “This problem will never make it to the top of my list, so I’m just going to have to accept its existence.” When your business starts doing well and you need to focus more tightly on the best opportunities, you’ll need to say no even more. It won’t be easy, but it’s an important skill to develop.

Learning to prioritize in your business will carry over into your personal life as well. You’ll get better at recognizing dross and dumping it. And there is a lot of dross in our personal lives.

One of my best decisions was to stop participating in holiday gift exchanges with friends and relatives. Several years ago I made the decision to opt out of this tradition, which added clutter to my life and chewed up precious time for little benefit to those involved. I’ve never been good at shopping for other people, and the experience was usually more stressful than fun anyway. Now the holiday season feels so much better to me. I enjoy the festive aspects without getting caught up in the commercialized gifting side. And I really don’t think anyone cares that I opted out.

As you make better decisions, you’re going to observe this sort of pattern again and again:
You think it’s a big deal and that you’re gonna take a lot of flak for the decision.
You finally accept that it’s the right decision and that you need to do it.
You accept that you’re gonna get some serious flak when you tell people.
You tell people, being overly cautious to explain and justify your decision.
You do receive some flak from people who dislike your decision, but it only lasts 24-48 hours.
After that, people accept your decision. Some people surprise you by being understanding and supportive.
You experience the benefits of your decision, which are even more awesome than you expected.
You wish you’d had the courage to make this decision years ago.
You resolve not to be so timid in the future and to make these kinds of decisions sooner.
You catch yourself being too timid in the future.

With your own business, you have more opportunities to run through this cycle, so you get more practice at it. And you get feedback from different angles, including family, friends, business associates, customers, etc. The more you run through this cycle of making difficult decisions, the easier it gets to stop overweighting the potential social opposition.

Handle setbacks without losing your cool

Setbacks are a normal part of life, and running a business will give you more experience handling setbacks. The personal growth challenge here is to get good at handling setbacks intelligently without losing your cool.

Through business you’ll learn that many of the setbacks you once feared are actually normal life experiences that you can handle.

Many would-be entrepreneurs avoid starting a business due to their irrational fears about setbacks. If you go ahead and start a business anyway, you’ll begin to realize just how ridiculous it is to fear these possibilities.

What happens if I lose money?

If you lose money, it means you’ll have less money. A number in a computer database table will be replaced with a different number. That new number will be smaller than the old one.

What happens if my business idea doesn’t work?

Then you’ll learn that the way you implemented the idea didn’t produce the results you expected. This is called making a mistake.

What happens if my spouse leaves me because I failed in business?

Then you’ll learn that you picked a spouse who wasn’t fault tolerant. You now have the opportunity to pick a different spouse. You may want to test for fault tolerance sooner this time.

What happens if my family makes fun of me?

Just say, “Yeah… I really fucked that up.” Then ask them to share some of their failure stories as well. Revel in being human.

You will fail in business. Probably a lot. Stop thinking that failure is a problem. Sometimes failure is the only way to learn important lessons.

Business is full of setbacks, and you won’t be able to avoid all of them. Of course we’d love to avoid setbacks. No one wants to go broke… or bankrupt… or have to sell off all their office furniture… or have to break a lease… or get kicked out of their home because they’re behind on rent. I’ve experienced all of those things by the way. They only made me stronger.

Does anyone want to lose their home? Of course not. Could you cope with it if it happened? Yes, you could.

The game of business is long. Don’t get so stressed out about the ups and downs along the way. Learn to have fun each day. Learn to enjoy your work regardless of how your finances are doing. Serve customers that you like serving, even when there aren’t many of them.

One tip I’ll share for managing a crisis is to ask yourself, What’s the best I can do here? Your best effort may still mean failure in terms of external results, but you can’t expect to do any better than your best. In this case I mean your best under the circumstances, which may not equal your best under non-crisis circumstances.

Maybe it means doing an all-nighter. Maybe it means accepting a loss. Maybe it means having a difficult conversation. Whatever your best looks like, go do it.

I have a great capacity to forgive myself when I do my best in a crisis. Figuring out what my best looks like and then committing to it has a calming effect and helps me stay centered. Failure is easier to take when you do your best and get beaten down anyway. It’s harder to take when you know you didn’t do your best and partially sabotaged yourself.

Learning to handle setbacks and to accept failure without losing your cool is valuable in business and in life. Your business training will serve you well when you have a relationship challenge, a family problem, or a health crisis to deal with.

Do your best work

Are you, right now, doing the best work of your life?

If not, why not? What’s the point of doing less than your best?

When you know you’re doing your best work, you feel alive. Life has more juiciness and flavor. There’s pep in your step.

When you slack off for too long, your self-esteem goes down the drain. It’s hard to get going each day.

If you’re an achiever, then doing your best work is important to you. I needn’t explain why it matters. You know it matters, and you won’t settle for less. You need and deserve an environment that supports you at your best.

Running your own business gives you the freedom to create your best working environment, assemble your best creative tools, and establish your best rhythms to do the best work of your life.

You won’t be held back by other people’s pointless rules, especially rules that were created to keep low performers from hurting themselves or the company.

You won’t be forced to work with plankton. If you only want to work with people you regard as top performers, you can do that.

If you do your best work solo, you can work solo — for years if you’d like. If you’d rather work with a team, you can build or join one. You can mix things up with solo and team projects for extra variety as well.

In your own business, you don’t have to pigeonhole your skills. You can use whatever skills you have to their fullest extent. You don’t have to limit yourself to using only those skills that fit some arbitrary job title. I especially like using my programming skills to automate tasks and solve problems in my business in ways that would be difficult for non-programmers to do. For instance, I wrote my own WordPress plugin to do some simple tasks that many people would delegate to a virtual assistant. I prefer my solution because it’s simpler (for me at least) and a lot more cost effective.

When you’re new to business, you’re going to be tempted to solve problems the way everyone else in your field does. Sometimes it’s wise to solve problems in industry standard ways. Many of those solutions are popular because they work, and it would be difficult or costly to improve upon them.

But you’re also going to find a lot of unnecessary foolishness in business. Many practices are outdated, inefficient, or ineffective, and there will be abundant opportunities to improve upon them.

In order to do your best work, you’ll need to adopt some combination of proven solutions created by others and your own innovative solutions. You don’t have the time to innovate everywhere, so you’ll need to look for leverage points where innovation is likely to be worth the effort.

Your best business practices will spill over into your personal life as well. When you see the immense payoffs from innovation in your business, you’ll want to tune your lifestyle to better support your unique strengths and your best working rhythms.

In the next part of this series, I’ll share more ideas about the relationship between business and personal growth.

In the meantime, if you’re becoming more interested in starting your own business, I encourage you to sign up for Ryan Eliason’s free business training webinar series, which starts on November 10 (Tuesday) and runs for the rest of the week. Why sit on the sidelines when you could experience the fun, growth, and craziness of being an entrepreneur?

www.stevepavlina.com

Before I die I want to...

2015-11-29T01:00:00.000+00:00

In her New Orleans neighborhood, artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang turned an abandoned house into a giant chalkboard asking a fill-in-the-blank question: “Before I die I want to ___.” Her neighbors' answers — surprising, poignant, funny — became an unexpected mirror for the community.

A good way to spend 6 minutes ... before you die ...

2015-11-15T01:00:00.000+00:00

Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.

Embrace the Near Win

2015-11-08T15:30:00.000+00:00

Sarah Lewis asks us to consider the role of the almost-failure, the near win, in our own lives. In our pursuit of success and mastery, is it actually our near wins that push us forward?

How to speak so that people want to listen

2015-11-01T01:00:00.000+00:00

Have you ever felt like you're talking, but nobody is listening? Julian Treasure demonstrates some useful vocal exercises and shares tips on how to speak with empathy, he offers his vision for a sonorous world of listening and understanding.

Embrace the near win

2015-10-25T01:00:00.000+01:00

Sarah Lewis asks us to consider the role of the almost-failure, the near win, in our own lives. In our pursuit of success and mastery, is it actually our near wins that push us forward?

Never Put Profits First

2015-10-18T13:00:00.000+01:00

By: Steve Pavlina

Most ideas I learned from business books were useless. The rest were downright harmful. Intuition and experimentation have been the best guides.

The #1 assumption business books tend to make is that the purpose of running a business is to earn and increase profits. Some books really hammer on this point, as if you’re an idiot for disagreeing. I found my decisions and results to be the most idiotic when I bought into that model.

I just thumbed through such a book yesterday that someone had sent me in the mail. That book is now in the recycle bin. It will serve a greater purpose as a cardboard box, which is far healthier for all of us than letting someone else read it.

As soon as you walk into the office of a business that puts profits first, you can smell the oppression. It’s almost unfathomable that human beings would accept such a lack of freedom. I dread walking into places where everyone behaves like zombies. The vibe is so disgustingly creepy. No wonder the cartels have such a thriving business. I’d probably drug myself daily too if I had to spend years of my life in a cubicle.

Profits-first is a great mindset if you want to destroy your health, self-esteem, motivation, and relationships. I’d never want to work in such a place, nor would I ever want to subject others to such an environment. People deserve much better than to be treated like cogs in service of a machine.

There are much more empowering priorities for a business. Surely you can come up with something more exciting than, let’s make a bigger number than we did last year.

I rather like this one:

The purpose of business is to empower people to express and share their creativity, for the highest good of all.

It’s nonsense to believe that you can’t have a sustainable business if you don’t put profits first. In my experience it’s much easier to achieve sustainability if you refuse to demean yourself with a money-first attitude.

Instead of putting money first, put creative challenges first. Put growth experiences first. Put fun first. Put the opportunity to work with cool people first. Put contribution first.

I love running my business — so much — because I don’t put money first. Money is a consideration of course, but the bottom line is at the bottom for a reason, right where it belongs.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for nearly 20 years straight now. The years when I put money first were by far the most stressful and miserable ones. The years when I set out to express my creativity, improve my relationships, dive into fun co-creative projects, make a contribution, give more, stretch myself, and so on, were the years when I was the happiest and most fulfilled.

This longer time perspective helps me see that if I create stressful and miserable years for myself, it will eventually add up to decades of such memories, which means that in my older years, I’m going to feel awfully bitter about how I’ve lived. Fortunately I was able to nip that in the bud before I went too far down that path, so now the opposite is happening. I’m getting happier as I get older because I’m stacking up year after year of positive memories. Regardless of how much money I make or don’t make, I remember the fun projects, the creative flow, the intimate friendships, the collaborations, the heartfelt hugs, the people I helped, and so on. I don’t remember what my bank balance looked like.

Generating income from your creativity is great. Let it be part of the challenge. But don’t make money the central purpose of your work. Don’t do things just for money that you wouldn’t otherwise be inspired to do. It’s better to stick to your path with a heart, even if it means getting kicked out of your home because you can’t pay the rent. I’m speaking from experience since I did that once. At the time it was stressful of course, but as a memory it’s something I’m rather proud of, and as a story it helps encourage others not to settle for zombie-hood.

Follow your path with a heart, especially in business. Do real work that you find dignified and fulfilling, and you’ll end each year with a feeling of deep satisfaction, regardless of how much money you make. If you trust your intuition, act on inspiration, and take the time to build experience and positive relationships, you’ll find a path to sustainability sooner or later.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

How to Build a Strong Work Ethic

2015-10-11T01:00:00.000+01:00

By: Steve Pavlina

There is no fatigue so wearisome as that which comes from lack of work. – Charles Spurgeon

If you’ve been stuck in a lazy rut lately, here are some suggestions to get yourself working productively.

1. Accept that many results require hard work.

Remind yourself of the simple causality chain from decision to action to results. That middle phase is where most of the work is.

If you have no willingness to ever work your ass off, if you have such resistance to the very notion of pushing yourself, if you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement that all the goodness of life should flow to you with effortless ease, that’s great. You can read this article purely for entertainment purposes.

But if you’re a more pragmatic realist, if you can recognize that many goals are too big and challenging just to attract and manifest out of thin air, if you can see that the whole point of tackling bigger goals is to develop yourself into a person of bold action, if you can accept that avoiding action altogether is a recipe for stagnation, and especially if you’re tired of not getting the results you actually want and having to settle for less, then perhaps you can make this important leap and accept that some of your goals will require you to achieve them with hard work and lots of disciplined, focused action.

2. Notice how self-discipline vs. laziness feels to you.

Notice that during those times when you actually do discipline yourself to take action, it often feels fantastic once you get past the first 15 minutes or so. Sure it’s nice to enjoy the end result. But also remember what it feels like to push yourself beyond your comfort zone and get into the flow of action.

How did it feel to put in that extra hour? To go to work when you could have justified taking an extra day off? To put in the time to complete that optional creative project?

Sure it involved some sacrifice. But what did you give up? Extra TV time, a little web surfing, and some time lying flat on your back perhaps. What did you gain for your efforts? It wasn’t just the end result. You grew stronger.

Inaction can be unforgiving. It kills your results. It drains your energy. It drains you of hope. Self-discipline pays you back with all of these results and more, including significantly greater happiness, fulfillment, and self-esteem.

3. Embrace responsibility.

Recognize that no one is coming to rescue you. No one will force you into the flow of action. You must do this for yourself.

The lazy avoidance of responsibility isn’t for you. You don’t want stagnation. You want growth, and this requires action, movement, and change. This requires you to make some decisions and get going.

Don’t confuse laziness with ease. In the long run, laziness yields only pointless difficulties and painful regret — and rightly so since you’ll always know you could have avoided those difficulties if you’d really stepped up.

Don’t put this burden of action on anyone else. It rests squarely on your shoulders, if for no other reason than because you’re the one who ultimately has to shoulder the results.

4. Start your day strongly.

A strong work ethic begins with a disciplined morning routine. Don’t be caught lying on your back half-conscious, dragging yourself out of bed in a lazy half-start to your day.

When you wake up, get up. Get moving and get going. This will soon become a habit. If you aren’t doing this naturally already, then respect the utility of a quality alarm clock. When your alarm sounds, pop out of bed and stand up first; then switch it off with your feet firmly on the ground.

If you can’t wake up strongly in the morning, then fix your disgusting diet that’s draining you of energy and motivation instead of fueling you powerfully.

Start each day with a strong morning, and the rest of the day will tend to follow. Move with power and purpose during that first hour. Own your mornings. Then maintain this attitude of mastery over your time as far into each day as possible.

5. Exercise.

If the President of the USA can find time in his exceedingly busy schedule to exercise for 45 minutes each morning, you surely have time.

Exercising strongly will energize you. Your body is meant to move. Your brain especially suffers from a lack of exercise, leading to imbalances in hormones and neurotransmitters. Physical exercise is one of the brain’s best rejuvenators. Don’t allow your mind to be dragged down by a sluggish body.

If you have difficulty focusing your mind, start by focusing on your body.

When you exercise, make it challenging. Don’t just do the same thing over and over. Mix it up. Push yourself. Make it intense. Give yourself not only a physical challenge but also a mental one. Embrace the terrific feeling of accomplishing something difficult each day, ideally in the morning. Kick off your day with a physical victory.

Exercise isn’t just training for your body. It’s training for your mind — and especially for your self-discipline.

6. Tackle a real challenge before lunch.

Nobody can think straight who does not work. Idleness warps the mind. – Henry Ford

Kick off each workday with a mental challenge. Don’t start with something light and cushy. Dive right into a challenging task that some part of you would rather avoid. Train yourself to embrace what’s difficult instead of pushing it away.

When you avoid difficult tasks by pushing them later into your day, soon you’ll justify bumping them into the next day… and then the next one… and then into next week… and then you’ll realize this little postponement has somehow ballooned into months of procrastination.

To avoid a difficult task this moment is to condition the habit of postponing difficulties indefinitely. This is no way to claim the benefits that come from doing difficult work.

Don’t resist difficult tasks. Embrace them as your daily resistance training.

7. Get to it.
Determine never to be idle… It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing. – Thomas Jefferson

Stop waffling. Stop talking about it. Go do it.

Taking action produces faster results than thinking about taking action. Many of the problems people discuss endlessly could be resolved with less than 10 minutes of direct action.

Repeatedly driving yourself to get into action creates flow and feels good. Thinking about doing (while not doing) will produce pile-ups of unnecessary obstacles.
8. Act with good purpose.

When you work, work towards an end result that you desire. Don’t spin in circles doing pointless busywork that won’t lead you to your desired results.

Set your purpose straight. Then act in alignment with that purpose.

Plan each day in advance, ideally at the end of the previous workday. During this time, check back in with your mission. If you don’t have a mission or if you don’t have clear goals, then go read the article on clarity and fix that.

Plan your days in alignment with your long-term priorities. As you consider possible actions to take, ask yourself which ones will matter in a year. Load the bulk of your time with actions that you expect will produce long-term improvement.
9. Condition disciplined habits.

Disciplined habits are those that make a difference in the long run. If a habit will do you little or no good to maintain it for the next five years, then why are you keeping it in your life?

Don’t try to break bad habits. You can’t replace a habit with a void. Instead, select better substitutes that you can condition in place of the old ones.

10. Work first, then play.

The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest, for he has not earned it. – John Lubbock

Play is sweetest when it’s earned. So is sleep. Earn your sleep each night by working hard on your goals during the day. Go to bed with the sweet smile of accomplishment still on your lips.

Take your rewards. Enjoy your life. But earn your rewards first.

Playing before you’ve earned your play time robs the play of much of its pleasure. If you love to play, then you’d better love to work.

When you rest or play, leave your work at work. Don’t destroy the restorative value of non-work activities by bleeding half-work into them.

11. Choose your peers with care.

A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he set out, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts and to second-rate friends. – Cyril Connolly

Maintain high standards for your social circle. Keep yourself at arm’s length from the lazy, the unproductive, and the negative minded. A weak social circle is a psychological prison.

Befriend and associate with the hard-working, ambitious, successful people of this world, and you’ll soon count yourself among them.

Wielding a strong work ethic is ultimately a matter of becoming an action-oriented person. Steer your self-development path in this direction. Decide that you’ll grow into a person with a strong, powerful work ethic. The doing part will flow more easily if you can embrace the being part.

Can you allow yourself to become a hard worker? When someone asks if you have a strong work ethic, can you see yourself saying YES without hesitation?

Now go do something truly challenging for the next few hours.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

Changing Your Culture

2015-10-04T01:00:00.000+01:00

By: Steve Pavlina

If you were to design your own human culture, what would you include? What would you leave out?

Here are some basic design questions to consider, based on the three core principles of personal growth.

Truth
How would your culture relate to truth? Would you create a very honest, truth-based culture? Would your culture encourage the discovery and sharing of new truths? To what extent would people own, hide, or manipulate the truth?

Would you create a culture based on shared stories and/or mythology, even if the stories are made up?

Would you favor politeness over honesty in communication?

Note that there are trade-offs for each path you might take. If you favor a discovery-based culture, then you’ll need a very flexible culture and flexible rituals since your understanding of reality will keep changing as you make new discoveries. That could potentially make your culture more fragile and less cohesive. If, on the other hand, you create a culture based on shared stories that seldom change, you might experience stronger group cohesion and greater stability through a shared identity, but your stories may begin to seem increasingly ludicrous as your culture matures and gains new knowledge.

Love

Which desires will your culture praise? Which will it demonize?

How will the people within your culture connect with each other? Will people be in monogamous relationships only? Will homosexuality be allowed? What about open relationships? Is sexual promiscuity okay? How will children be raised?

Will your culture allow drinking, gambling, drugs, junk food, non-consensual sex, torture, firearms, suicide, etc? Will you have a rule of law, and if so, what will your critical laws be, and how will they be enforced?

What restrictions, if any, will you place upon people’s freedom to do what they might desire to do?

How will your culture relate to other cultures? Will it try to peacefully coexist? To dominate other cultures? To assimilate other cultures?

Power

What relationship will your culture have with power?

Will your culture empower people as individuals to achieve their potential? What if an individual’s goals conflict with another individual’s goals… or with the general direction of your society? Is it more important to have empowered individuals or to build a powerful society?

What if another culture seeks to dominate or to eradicate your culture? How will your culture respond? Will you defend yourselves? Will you be passive and hope for the best? Will you ever take preemptive action against a likely aggressor? What kinds of weapons will you use, and how will you develop them?

Will you seek to elevate other cultures? To bring them down? To establish peaceful relations with them?

There are numerous possible answers to these questions, including the answers that earth’s cultures have already provided. Each answer has consequences, helping to determine how quickly a culture will evolve, how long it may survive, and how happy and healthy its members will be.

Understanding Your Culture

Why think about how you’d design your own culture? If you can get a clearer sense of the design decisions you’re inclined to make, you can compare your design decisions to the culture you now experience. This will give you a sense of where your culture may be out of alignment with your values.

You have the ability to define your relationship to the dominant pre-existing culture(s) in your life. Which parts will you accept? Which parts will you reject or modify? And why?

I really like some aspects of my surrounding culture. I like the sense of freedom that exists in Las Vegas, which is a very non-judgmental place to live. Some aspects of my lifestyle would attract punishment in other parts of the world, but in this city I have the freedom, and perhaps even the encouragement, to be myself and to continue exploring without substantial interference.

I also like the general sense of self-improvement that exists where I live. There’s a strong belief that through hard work and determination, we can change for the better.

Other aspects of my culture feel less aligned to me. I don’t feel inspired by many things that are popular within my culture, like working at a corporate job, going to church, following sports, obsessing over celebrities, or eating animal products.

The more I travel and the more I interact with people from other cultures, the more I see just how stressed out many Americans are. There is a lot of freedom here but also much tension with so many people having beliefs like “I’m not good enough,” “I need more,” and “I have to work harder.” People here put a lot of effort into things that don’t make them happy, and then they escape into addictions like watching tons of TV.

We have abundance but not enough appreciation. There’s an addictive quality to this more-More-MORE obsession. People here don’t realize that if they can’t appreciate a sip, they won’t appreciate a gulp either.

Influencing Your Culture

When you become an oddball within your culture, you can keep quiet and slink into the background, or you can speak up and share your observations and lessons. When you do the latter, you gain the ability to influence your culture to become more aligned with your path. Obviously not everyone will follow your lead, but some will find your ideas worthy of exploration and experimentation, and they’ll want to hear more and collaborate.

Surely there will be others within your culture who’ve gone down similar paths, and they’ll begin to influence cultural shifts as well as they speak up more and more. As these people begin to find each other and connect more deeply and more often, they may even contribute to a movement to help shift the larger culture. This can take many years to play out, but it’s exciting to behold.

If you feel that you’re all alone in your oddballness, that probably isn’t accurate. There are probably lots of others like you out there, but you haven’t found them yet. That’s likely because you’re invisible to them. If you’d like to connect with other like-minded oddballs, that becomes much more likely if you broadcast your desires and let the world know how you really think and feel. Sure, you’ll get some judgment for doing that, but so what? Own it anyway. Stand tall in being yourself. This will eventually attract the attention of others who think as you do.

The alternative is to hide. If you have to hide for safety reasons, that may be your best bet for now, but if there’s no physical danger in speaking your mind, then do so. You’ll be glad you did. In fact, you’ll wonder why you kept quiet for so long unnecessarily.

If your ideal culture seems far removed from your current culture, you could leave to find a culture that’s a closer match for you if you think one exists. Or you could stay put and strive to become a changemaker within your own culture, such as by gathering like-minded people together.

Question what your culture expects from you, and be willing to more powerfully inject your own values back into your culture, especially when you think your culture’s values are destructively misaligned.

Here’s a very simple example. I recently read that most people buy food for friends and family that’s less healthy than what they buy for themselves, especially during holidays. Most people also report that they feel obligated to eat unhealthy food when it’s offered to them by others. And yet, most people would prefer to be offered healthier options by their friends and family. So why are we encouraging each other to eat unhealthy food, and saying yes to it when offered, even though most of us would prefer not to do this? Staying quiet only goes against the outcome that most people would prefer to see.

By staying quiet in such situations, you put your social conditioning, politeness, and brainwashing ahead of your health and the health of your friends and family. Instead of blindly agreeing to follow cultural norms that have long-term negative consequences for everyone, you could always buy food for your friends and family that’s at least as healthy as what you buy for yourself, to decline unhealthy options offered by others, to encourage people to offer healthier options in the future and praise them when they do, and to publicly broadcast to your social networks that you prefer to offer and to be offered healthy options whenever food is provided.

By speaking up instead of hiding your preferences, you can help create ripples of positive change.

If you don’t fit in with your surrounding culture, perhaps the reason is that you’re there to help improve the culture. If you see some aspect of your culture that seems misguided to you, call it out as such, and suggest an alternative. You’ll often be surprised to discover that while you were keeping quiet, so were many other people in your life, and when you speak up, they feel free to elevate their standards as well.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

Do a Full Day’s Work in 90 Minutes

2015-09-27T01:00:00.000+01:00

By: Steve Pavlina

The typical American office worker only does about 90 minutes of real work per workday.

The rest of each workday is largely spent on distractions like reading the news, web surfing, socializing with coworkers, snacking, taking coffee breaks, shuffling papers around, processing irrelevant emails, needless delay tactics, playing games, and daydreaming.

Moreover, American office workers are among the world’s most productive. In many other countries, even less work gets done each day.

This stat hasn’t changed much in decades, despite massive investments in time management and productivity training by many companies. We have more technology to assist us in being productive, but we also have more to distract us.

The general problem is that we’re still applying an industrial age model to the productivity of knowledge workers. It makes sense to pay attention to hours worked if the productive output for each hour is roughly the same. That may be true for repetitive labor, but it doesn’t apply much to knowledge workers.

For a knowledge worker, what’s the difference between an hour of peak productivity vs. a low productivity hour? That peak hour could easily be 10x more productive in terms of the volume of work completed and the results generated.

What sense does it make to spend more time at the office if you’re normally operating at less than 20% of capacity? Why not simply do 90 minutes of real work and then go home for the day?

What if you could complete a whole day’s work in only 90 minutes? What would that 90-minute period look like?

Focus Blocks

Here are some recommendations for having a very productive 90-min period (let’s call it a focus block):

1. Pick one theme – Instead of doing a bunch of random actions, pick one clear theme for the block. This allows your brain to load in a singular context and stick with it, which makes you more efficient. Your theme may be a project you’re working on, a type of work like catching up on correspondence, or anything that lets your brain load in one clear context and stick with it.

2. Define the finish line – See your focus block as a fast dash to the finish line. But where is the finish line? What does it look like? Having a clear goal that’s only 90 minutes away will help you focus. Don’t worry if you don’t cross the finish line each time; it’s there to help you focus, so aim for it, but accept that sometimes you’ll miss. Some examples: Write and post a new blog entry. Process items in my email inbox till it’s completely empty. Plan and schedule all my focus blocks for the upcoming week.

3. List the action steps – List the specific actions you’ll take during this block. For some blocks this is really helpful. For others it may not be necessary if the steps are already clear. I wouldn’t list out my action steps for writing a new article since that process is very familiar to me, but I’d list brainstorm and list steps for an unfamiliar new project to make it easier to get started. Some examples: Delete all obvious spam and clutter from my email inbox first. Then quickly process all messages that I can handle in less than two minutes each. Next, sort and prioritize longer messages for response. Respond to my most important longer messages till I’m at the 90-minute point. Surrender to the realization that it’s not a good use of my time to reply to the rest, and just archive them to empty the inbox.

4. Ensure zero interruptions – Do whatever it takes to ensure that you will not be interrupted under any circumstances during your focus block. If necessary, tell people in advance that you will not be available for the next 90 minutes; let them know that you will be available after that. Lock your door if you can. If you can’t guarantee that you won’t be interrupted in your current work environment, then do your focus block somewhere else. You’ll be much more productive and your focus will be deeper if you know for certain that you won’t be interrupted.

5. Work fast – Think fast. Move fast. Work fast. If you catch yourself going slow, speed up! Imagine that you’re in a race, and you have to maintain a strong pace for the full 90 minutes. After that you can rest. With practice this gets easier.

6. Allow no distractions – During your focus block, you must do your pre-defined work and nothing else. Keep your cell phone off. Turn off any notifications that might interrupt you. Turn off your Internet access if you won’t need it during this block. Do not check email during this time. Do not take a coffee break or snack break. Use the bathroom during this time only if you must.

I think you get the idea.

Avoid the Gray Zone and Take Real Breaks

Many people spend their workdays in a gray zone marathon. That’s why it takes them 7-8 hours to do 90 minutes of work. They work slowly and inefficiently. Their work time is cluttered with distractions and interruptions. They begin late and wind down early. Most of the time, they’re only half working.

Instead of doing a gray zone marathon each day, cycle between real work and real breaks. This will be much more efficient, even if you work only half as many hours or less.

Don’t immediately go from one focus block right into another. After you complete a focus block, celebrate your achievement. Then assess where you are. Tune into your energy and see how you feel.

If you’re still feeling alert and energized, you may only need a short break. Take 5-10 minutes to stretch, go to the bathroom, and have some fresh fruit. Then feel free to dive right into another focus block.

If you feel tired, it’s good to eat something and/or take a nap.

If you feel like doing something physical, go for a walk or take an exercise break.

If you feel like you could use some emotional renewal, you may wish to meditate, socialize, or read some inspiring material.

How long should your breaks be? Make them as long as necessary till you’re ready for another round of focused work. Sometimes you may only need a few minutes. Other times it may be wise to take a couple hours off, especially if the previous block was particularly draining. Between focus blocks, seek to refresh and renew your energy until you’re ready to handle another focus block.

Do your best not to load up your breaks with gray zone tasks like email since that’s more likely to drain you. I recommend batching small tasks into their own focus block (including email). But if it’s just a quick one-minute email check now and then, that probably won’t be too bad, but never do email checks during a block unless it’s critical for the completion of the block.

Realize that if you only complete one focus block in a whole day, you’ve still done as much real work as the typical American office worker does in a full eight-hour day. And if you only complete two blocks, you’re twice as productive as most. On a super productive day, you may complete five or six blocks, which is like getting a full week’s worth of work done in one day.

Do a Week of Work in a Day

During one of the most productive periods of my life, when I was doing contract game programming work, I’d normally work from 9am to noon, take a one hour break for lunch, and then work from 1pm until 5pm or 6pm. But I’d subdivide the work into shorter focus blocks of deep concentration.

At the start of each day, I’d define the next milestone I wanted to reach, such as a short list of new features to add. Then I’d make a short list of action steps in my work journal (just an everyday spiral notebook). Sometimes I wouldn’t bother to list the action steps if they seemed obvious. Then I’d program the items on the list. Finally, I’d compile the software, test the program, fix bugs, and tweak the implementation until I was satisfied. A typical milestone would take me about 45-90 minutes to achieve.

Since I was programming games, testing the program meant playing the game a little to test the new features as well as the overall gameplay. In effect, the testing phase gave my brain a nice break from designing algorithms and writing code.

When I finished one cycle like this, I’d feel a nice little sense of accomplishment. I might take a quick stretch break. Then I’d make a new list and repeat.

In the morning, I would complete a few of these cycles, perhaps three of them. In the afternoon I’d do several more. My game projects progressed very quickly during this time. Every day I added many new features. I could have a prototype of a whole new game running in just a few days this way. With today’s better development tools, the work can progress even faster.

During lunch each day, I took a complete break to restore my mental energy. I rarely went to lunch with my co-workers. Usually I brought a sack lunch with me, but I left the office to go eat. I’d drive to a nearby park, sit on the grass with my back against a tree, and eat alone in silence. I’d let go of work and just relax. After eating, I’d lie back on the grass and take a 20-minute nap, or I’d stare up at the sky and totally zone out. I’d enjoy the breeze and listen to the birds. I gave the brain circuits I needed for programming work a very restful break. Then I’d go back to my car, return to work, and crank out a few more cycles before leaving for the day.

Test, Train, and Experiment

If you aren’t used to a working rhythm of alternating focus blocks with rest periods, you may need to practice this method for a while to get used to it. I expect you’ll really like it once you taste this kind of flow. Doing a full day’s work in about 90 minutes is not only efficient; it’s also motivated and energizing.

Cycles of about 90 minutes usually work well once you get up to speed. But you may find that shorter cycles like 45 or 60 minutes work better for you. You may also find that different cycle lengths are more suited to different types of work. Sometimes I’ll keep going for 2.5 hours (or more) if I’m feeling good, especially when writing a new article.

Some people like having scheduled focus blocks with scheduled breaks, so everything is a set duration. They’re sticklers for starting and stopping at set times. There’s some evidence that this helps your brain optimize its performance if your cycles are the same every day.

For instance, you might have focus blocks at 5:30-7:00am, 8:00-9:30am, 10:30am-noon, 1pm-2:30pm, and 3:30-5pm, which would give you five 90-minute focus blocks with hour-long breaks in between. This would be a super productive day that would see you doing as much real work in one day as the typical American office worker does in a week, but you’re only working for 7.5 hours total.

Other people prefer a more organic approach, deciding based on their energy levels how low each focus block and break should be. This is how I work most of the time.

A modest but still highly productive schedule might entail having three focus blocks per day. You could easily complete a great deal of work this way. Many top creative workers only work 3-5 hours per day, but they work with deep focus and zero interruptions during that time.

Don’t succumb to the cultural bias that may try to convince you that working 8+ hours per day makes you productive. That may be true for physical labor and some repetitive tasks, but it’s not true for knowledge workers and creative types. Many people enjoy tremendous flow and achieve great results by working in short high energy, bursts of motivation and drive. Try this for yourself, and you may never want to return to the gray zone of long, unproductive workdays again.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

Selecting Projects Wisely

2015-09-20T01:00:00.000+01:00

By Steve Pavlina

Sometimes people dive into new projects because they really want to make some money or to “get something going.” They put pressure on themselves to start a project mainly for the sake of trying to create some forward momentum.

While forward momentum can be a beautiful thing, I would actually recommend against this approach. Usually when I see people try to motivate themselves like this, their projects fizzle out within a matter of months, if they can complete them at all. A couple years later, they have little or nothing to show for their efforts. The “I’ve gotta get something going” approach is the dabbler’s strategy. It’s too amateurish to work well most of the time.

The main issue is that these types of projects are selected largely at random. They don’t fit into any greater strategy. They’re just ideas, but they aren’t really inspired ideas, so even a small amount of resistance can kill them off.

I’d suggest thinking instead about a long-term journey you feel you could commit to for at least 5 years — some combo of lifestyle + income streams + fulfilling work that makes for a nice package deal. Then think about projects that align with your vision. This way you’ll be more likely to follow through on those projects; you’ll have more important reasons for seeing those projects succeed.

In 2004 I started on the path of building a personal development business, and I began with two different skill paths: blogging and speaking. On the lifestyle side, I wanted to explore personal growth very deeply, to conduct my own growth experiments, and to share what I learned along the way. It was the overall lifestyle that appealed to me most of all. I loved the idea of centering my life around personal growth for many years. That was an inspired idea that I could really commit to.

In order to make that a reality, I needed a flexible business model. That’s why I picked blogging and speaking for my work outlets — they’re both flexible and travel-friendly, and I enjoy doing them. But most of all, these outlets can support my desired lifestyle.

I knew that both of these skill paths could also be used to create a variety of income streams. I could write books, create info products, do paid speaking, do public workshops, etc. I like variety, so this seemed like a good overall strategy. If I stuck with these skill paths, I knew I’d eventually be able to monetize my work one way or another and make it financially sustainable. That was just a matter of time. But the real motivation was to support the lifestyle of being able to work on personal growth and to share what I learned with people.

As I went down this path, I tried to pick projects that aligned with it. Which projects would help me achieve my big picture lifestyle desires?

Some of those projects fizzled. Some succeeded. I tried a lot of different things to figure out what I liked doing most, what generated reliable income, and what provided value to people. Those projects were chosen because they fit the bigger framework — my long-term commitment to living a certain lifestyle centered around personal growth explorations and learning. You could say that these projects were stepping stones, but I didn’t always know which stones to step on and in which order. So in retrospect some of them may look like stepping stones, but when I originally picked those projects, it was usually because they looked like reasonable ideas that could support my lifestyle journey. I didn’t always know in advance how I might build upon them.

Here’s a quote from Steve Jobs that fits nicely here:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I think you can also trust in some basic intelligence. If you take the time to get clear about the core of your desired lifestyle path, and then you choose skill paths that can support it, I think you’ll have an easier time picking good projects and not seeing them fizzle so often. Otherwise there’s a high risk of choosing projects that are very disjointed and incongruent.

If your main motivation for selecting a project is money, but you aren’t yet clear about what type of lifestyle that money is supposed to support, then your motivation will likely be unstable and inconsistent. Minor distractions will knock you off course.

You may also be trying to force your project forward, such as by pressuring yourself for financial reasons, but that approach probably won’t create the most inspired work. So even if you complete your project, you may have a hard time selling it. Much to your chagrin, you may discover that no one feels inspired to buy your project that was forced across the finish line just so you could make money from it.

When I started studying public speaking in 2004, it was part of my big picture lifestyle vision. I knew that if I got good at speaking, I could use it to share personal growth ideas, to meet wonderful people, and to generate income. So for the first few years, I picked speaking projects to enhance my skills, to experiment with different styles, to discover my most authentic ways of speaking, and to get really comfortable in front of an audience. I didn’t get into speaking just to make money or to “get something going.” I chose it because it was a good skill set for my desired lifestyle path. This gave me a lot more motivation to stick with it.

Many of the speaking projects I picked in those early years, such as doing a one-day workshop on blogging or speaking at Hay House’s I Can Do It!conference a couple times, were chosen because they aligned with my big picture lifestyle vision. I turned down a lot of other potential projects along the way because they didn’t align with my lifestyle path. I could have gotten into corporate speaking, but I didn’t go that route because speaking at corporate events doesn’t mesh with my lifestyle well enough. Public workshops, however, mesh beautifully with my lifestyle since I get to connect with people who are very enthusiastic about personal growth, and designing a workshop is a great way to delve deeply into a subject that interests me.

I think you’ll find that if you get clear about your desired lifestyle path — clear enough that you can make at least a 5-year commitment to it — you’ll be smarter about picking good short-term projects that align with your lifestyle and your desired skill paths. And you’ll be able to escape the dabbler’s fate of doing random projects that always fizzle.

I understand that it can be hard to take a step back and think about your big picture lifestyle vision, especially when you’re feeling a lot of pressure to get something going. But the get-something-going approach usually just punts the problem a few months forward. When you complete your project (or give up on it because it fizzled), you’ll be facing that same kind of pressure yet again. You’ll still be telling yourself that you need to get something going.

Looking back, haven’t you already been doing this to yourself for some number of years already? If so, then isn’t it fairly predictable that you’ll still be doing this to yourself a year from now… five years from now… ten years from now? Of course you will, unless you choose a different path now.

The people I know who are happiest in life almost invariably put lifestyle first. Yes, they do work they love too, but a big reason for their chosen work is that it supports their desired lifestyle journey.

I really enjoy writing and speaking, but I especially love that these skills support my lifestyle. It’s more accurate to say that I love writing and speakingabout personal growth. If these skills didn’t support my lifestyle, my interest in writing and speaking would fizzle — I just don’t care to write and speak about other topics as much. The same goes for other creative projects. It’s the “about personal growth” aspect of those projects that makes them fulfilling and that motivates me to eventually complete them.

What’s your version of the “about personal growth” qualifier that suits your desired lifestyle journey? I think that once you identify it, you’ll find it easier to know which projects fit your qualifier (and your lifestyle) and which aren’t worth your time.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

Hard Work

2015-09-13T01:00:00.000+01:00

By Steve Pavlina

Success literature going back hundreds of years espouses the benefits of hard work. But why is it that some people seem to feel that “hard work” is a dirty word nowadays?

I define “hard work” as work that is challenging. Both hard work and “working hard” (i.e. putting in the time required to get the job done) are required for success.

A problem occurs when people think of challenging work as painful or uncomfortable. Does challenging work necessarily have to be painful? No, of course not. In fact, a major key to success is to learn to enjoy challenging work AND to enjoy working hard at it.

Why challenging work? Because challenging work, when intelligently chosen, pays off. It’s the work that people of lesser character will avoid. And if you infer that I’m saying people who avoid challenging work have a character flaw, you’re right… and a serious one at that. If you avoid challenging work, you avoid doing what it takes to succeed. To keep your muscles strong or your mind sharp, you need to challenge them. To do only what’s easy will lead to physical and mental flabbiness and very mediocre results, followed by a great deal of time and effort spent justifying why such flabbiness is OK, instead of stepping up and taking on some real challenges.

Tackling challenges builds character, just as lifting weights builds muscle. To avoid challenge is to abandon one’s character development.

Now it’s natural that we’ll tend to avoid what’s painful, so if we see challenge as purely painful, we’ll surely avoid it. But in so doing, we’re avoiding some very important character development, which by its very nature is often tremendously challenging. So we must learn to fall in love with challenge instead of fearing it, just as a bodybuilder can learn to love the pain of doing “one more rep” that tears down muscle fibers, allowing them to grow stronger. If you avoid the pain, you miss out on the growth. This is true both for building muscles and for building character.

While a common philosophy says to go with the flow, the downside to this belief system is that you must yield control of your life to that flow. And that’s fine if you don’t mind living passively and letting life happen to you. If you feel you’re here to ride your life instead of drive it, then you’ll have to accept where the flow takes you and learn to like it. But sometimes the flow doesn’t go in a healthy direction. You can go with the flow and end up in a pretty screwed up situation if you don’t assume more direct control when needed.

On the other hand, there’s the alternative way of looking at life with you as the driving force behind it. You create and control the flow yourself. This is a more challenging way to live but also a much more rewarding one. You aren’t limited to those experiences that can only be gotten passively or painlessly — now you can have much more of what you want by being willing to accept and take on bigger challenges.

If I only went with the perceived easy flow of my life, I’d never have learned to read, write, or type; those were all challenges where I felt I was going against the flow of what was easy and natural. I wouldn’t have gotten any college degrees. I wouldn’t have started my own business. I certainly wouldn’t have developed any software. No way I would have run a marathon — one doesn’t exactly flow into such a thing. And I most certainly wouldn’t be doing any public speaking. This web site wouldn’t exist either; it was definitely an entity created more by drive than by flow.

I do believe there is an underlying flow to life at times, but I see myself as a co-creator in that flow. I can ride the flow when it’s headed where I want to go, or I can get off and blaze my own trail when necessary.

When you step up and learn to see yourself as the driver of your life instead of the passive victim of it, then it becomes a lot easier to take on big challenges and to endure the hardships they sometimes require. You learn to associate more pleasure to the character development you gain than the minor discomforts you experience. You become accustomed to spending more time outside your comfort zone. Hard work is something you look forward to because you know that it will lead to tremendous growth. And you eventually develop the maturity and responsibility to understand that certain goals will never just flow into your life; they’ll only happen if you act as the driving force to bring them to fruition.

When faced with the prospect of saying to yourself, “If I always avoid hard work, I’ll never in my life get to experience X, Y, or Z,” it’s a little easier to embrace the benefits of hard work. What will you miss out on? You’ll probably never run a marathon, marry the mate of your dreams, become a multi-millionaire, make a real difference in the world, etc. You’ll have to settle for only what going with the flow can provide, which is mediocrity. You’ll basically just take up space and die without really having mattered. The world will be pretty much the same had you never existed (chaos theory notwithstanding).

If you want to achieve some really big and interesting goals, you have to learn to fall in love with hard work. Hard work makes the difference. It’s what separates the children from the mature adults. You can keep living as a child and desperately hoping that life will always be easy, but then you’ll be stuck in a child-like world, working on other people’s goals instead of your own, waiting for opportunities to come to you instead of creating your own, and doing work that in the grand scheme of this world just isn’t important.

When you learn to embrace hard work instead of running from it, you gain the ability to execute on your big goals, no matter what it takes to achieve them. You blast through obstacles that stop others who have less resolve. But what is it that gets you to this point? What gets you to embrace hard work?

Purpose.

When you live for a strong purpose, then hard work isn’t an option. It’s a necessity. If your life has no real purpose, then you can avoid hard work, and it won’t matter because you’ve decided that your life itself doesn’t matter anyway. So who cares if you work hard or take the easy road? But if you’ve chosen a significant purpose for your life, it’s going to require hard work to get there — any meaningful purpose will require hard work. You have to admit to yourself then that the only way this purpose is going to be fulfilled is if you embrace hard work. And this is what takes you beyond fear and ego, beyond the sniveling little child who thinks that hard work is something to run away from. When you become driven by a purpose greater than yourself, you embrace hard work out of necessity. That child gets replaced by a mature adult who assumes responsibility for getting the job done, knowing that without total commitment and lots of hard work, it’s never going to happen.

Desire melts adversity.

Show me a person who avoids hard work, and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t found their purpose yet. Because anyone who knows their purpose will embrace hard work. They’ll pay the price willingly.

If you don’t know your purpose yet, then in the world of mature human beings, you don’t yet matter. You’re just a piece of flotsam on the flow created by those who do live on purpose. And deep down you already know this, don’t you? If you want to make a difference in the world, then hard work is the price. There are no shortcuts.

Purpose and hard work are buddies. Purpose is the why. Hard work is the how. Purpose is what turns labor into labor of love. It transmutes the pain of hard work into the higher level pleasure of dedication, commitment, resolve, and passion. It turns pain into strength, eventually to the point where you don’t notice the pain as much as you enjoy the strength.

Once again it all comes down to purpose. Create a purpose for your life, and live it each day. And many of the other success habits like hard work and working hard will fall into place automatically. Figure out the why. Why are you here? Why does your life matter? That is the ultimate test of your free will.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

Make People Feel Good

2015-09-06T01:00:00.000+01:00

By Steve Pavlina

A simple way to enjoy a happier and more abundant social life is to put some effort into making people feel good.

Many people get so caught up thinking they have to rack up some accomplishments, get into better shape, become a person of high value, and more — just to give themselves permission to reach out and connect with others. None of that is necessary. That’s putting the focus on yourself, where you’ll only swirl around in endless circles of self-doubt. You’ll never feel prepared with that approach. You’ll never be done. You’ll just keep coming up with more reasons why you aren’t ready. Your goal will always be six more months away.

If a woman wants me to like her, all she needs to do is ask me, “What can I do to make you feel good right now?” I’ll tell her. Suppose I say, “Well, I’d love a good head-scratching.” And she says okay and starts giving me a head-scratching. Now I’m blissing out, and I have her to thank for it. She’s instantly promoted to my A-list.

Do I care if she does yoga for two hours a day to stay in shape? Does it matter how much traffic she gets to her website? Do I care what color her skin is? None of those things matter to me. If she makes me feel good when I’m with her, of course I’m going to like her.

Alternatively, she can try to impress me instead. She can talk about her education and career ambitions. She can talk about her previous boyfriends and how much they worshipped her. She can tell me about her decade of yoga practice.

And I may very well be impressed. I’ll think, Wow… this woman really has her life on track.

Then I’ll excuse myself and go sit with the woman who gives great head-scratchings… or the one who tells funny stories and makes me laugh… or the one who loves to cuddle.

Why do I love my girlfriend so much? It’s very simple. She makes me feel good.

She smiles at me. She gives me lots of affection. She travels with me. She plays with me. She cuddles with me. She makes me yummy vegan food.

She learned what makes me feel good, and she does those things regularly.

I also make her feel good. I know what she likes, and I do those things often.

Does It Feel Good to Stay?

Why ever leave a relationship? You and/or your partner stop making each other feel good. Either you stop learning what makes each other feel good, or you stop doing what you know.

How could you reignite a broken relationship? Ask your partner what you can do to make him/her feel good, and start doing those things every day. Tell your partner how to make you feel good, and ask him/her to start doing some of those things every day. If either of you doesn’t honor this commitment, let go and find someone else who will synergize with you.

You may encounter people who want you to do things that don’t feel good to you. There’s no need to make sacrifices. Find something you’re willing to give, and then look for people who will appreciate what you enjoy giving.

Some people love buying gifts for each other. Some love to verbally express encouragement and appreciation. Some love touch and affection.

Don’t force yourself to give in ways that don’t feel good to you. Instead, seek out people who enjoy and appreciate a style of giving and receiving that’s compatible with yours.

I love making people feel good through touch, affection, and sharing laughs. It also feels good to receive this. My favorite connections normally include lots of touch as well as plenty of laughter and joking around.

What Makes You Feel Good?

Do the people in your life know what makes you feel good? Have you made it obvious to them?

If you’re currently in a relationship, go to your partner and ask him/her: What do you think makes me feel good? See how accurate the answer is. If it’s not accurate, enlighten your partner. Then switch roles, and tell your partner what you believe makes him/her feel good.

Now review with your partner how often you actually do the things that make each other feel good. Have you been doing well or slacking off? Is someone not pulling their weight? Has some resentment been building? Are you out of alignment between what you’re each willing to give vs. what you each desire to receive?

Get the basics right. Make each other feel good. Do those simple actions every day, multiple times per day.

If you aren’t making your partner feel good, then you’re more likely to feel jealous and possessive since there’s a chance your partner will eventually meet someone else who does make him/her feel good. And where will that leave you? Why should someone remain loyal to a partner who doesn’t make them feel good?

But if you know how to make your partner feel good, and you do those things regularly, then what is there to worry about? You know that your partner has good reason to keep returning to you.

If you make people feel good when they’re with you, they’ll likely want to keep connecting with you. You don’t always have to make this investment though. You may frequently meet with people where such an investment doesn’t seem worthwhile. But when you see other signs of compatibility and you’d like to explore a deeper connection with someone, then making someone feel good is an easy way to open the door.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

Take an Inspiration Day

2015-08-30T01:00:00.000+01:00

By Steve Pavlina

Have you ever felt the urge to explore a totally different field, skill, or interest for a while?

What is it you’d like to try, if you only had the time? Music? Programming? Web design? Entrepreneurship? Camping? A new exercise? A better way of eating? A new social group?

But then of course, you talk yourself out of it, don’t you? You probably tell yourself things like:

I can’t be starting something new right now.

I have too many other things to deal with.

It would take a big commitment to get anywhere with this, and I don’t have that kind of time.

I’m not ready to transition yet.

No one is forcing you to commit though. Commitment is unnecessary at this point. Why not simply taste and sample your new interest? Give it a day to impress you.

Set aside one day to explore your new interest. Say yes to it for one day only. During that day let it guide you, lead you, and make its case for further exploration.

Fire up GarageBand, and try writing your very first song. It’ll probably suck, but so what? It will be your own creation.

Film some video with your phone, fire up iMovie, and make your first movie. You’ll learn a great deal by doing.

Go to an art supply store, tell an employee you want to try painting, and ask for help to buy the bare minimum supplies you need to paint for one day. Take it home, and paint the day away. See what flows through you. Maybe you’re more creative than you realize.

Spend a day researching and reading about a whole new field — the one that keeps coming up for you recently.

Go out and visit stores you wouldn’t ordinarily visit. Talk to the salespeople. Ask all the questions you can think of. Become as much of an expert as you can in one day.

Go vegan for a day, and you’ll save more water than you would by not showering for a year. There are thousands of free recipes online, so use Google to find them. Make a shopping list, cook up a storm, and have a feast.

Read about the equipment in a part of the gym you never visit. Learn some exercises you can do. Then do a full workout there. It will give you a nice sense of accomplishment.

Have you ever played tennis? Disc golf? The equipment is cheap. Go have your first game.

After that one immersive day, you’ll be a slightly different person. You’ll have a fresher understanding of your interest. And you’ll be in a better position to assess and evaluate whether you’d like to explore it further.

Maybe one day is all you need. You satisfied your curiosity and discovered that the door wasn’t for you. That’s a good outcome since you won’t have to worry about those distracting urges for years to come.

Maybe that day triggers many more questions. You got a taste, but it wasn’t enough. You want more. So take more inspiration days, half days, quarter days, or whatever you need to continue your exploration. Lean into it more.

Maybe that day was amazing — full of rapid learning and encouraging progress. You walked through a door and discovered a delightful new path. Wonderful! Keep going. Let the inspiration continue to motivate you.

What if nothing inspires you? Then you’re not listening very well. If you can’t hear the voice of inspiration, turn down the volume of everything else. Turn off the distractions like the constantly buzzing phone, sit quietly by yourself, and take an hour to simply listen. Reflect on your life, your lifestyle, your work or school, your relationships, your finances, and your body. Listen to your thoughts. Hear yourself think. Notice your feelings.

What’s nudging you to change, grow, or shift? Where do you notice a pushing or pulling sensation? Where’s the dissatisfaction? Where’s the disappointment? Where’s the gentle request to try something new and different?

Maybe you have many commitments already. Maybe you’re busy. Maybe you have some great excuses. Give your inspirations an outlet anyway — a small slice of your time. Otherwise they’ll poke you… then nag you… then eventually overload you with regret.

Give an inspiration a day to make its case. Open the box and peer inside. Listen, taste, and explore.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/

Changing Me to Change Them

2015-08-22T01:00:00.000+01:00

By Jim Clemmer

"We must be the change we wish to see in this world." - Mahatma Gandhi, Indian nationalist and spiritual leader who developed the practice of nonviolent disobedience that forced Great Britain to grant independence to India in 1947

I can think of all kinds of ways to change our kids, my associates, my wife Heather, and lots of other people in my life. But that's not the place to start. The place to start is with changing me. The Nobel Prize winning physicist, Albert Einstein, observed that we can't solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it. The same principle applies to influencing and leading people around us. I can't influence others to change what they're doing with the same behavior that contributed to their current behavior.

The longer I've been with others who I'd like to improve or change, the more this applies to me. Something I've been doing, or failing to do, has contributed to their current behavior patterns. If I am going to shift their behavior to a new level, I will need to change my behavior. To change them, I need to change me. As the 18th century French writer, Francois Fenelon, put it, "we can often do more for others by correcting our own faults than by trying to correct theirs."

This key leadership principle is useless if we think that we can control others. It's especially easy to believe this if I am the boss, parent, owner, teacher, coach, project leader, director, or in some similar position of authority. I will always be stuck at the superficial level of "doing my leadership thing" as long as I try controlling others through position power. I am ready to move to the deeper levels of leadership being (and greater effectiveness) when I give up trying to control. I can then shift my focus to influencing and guiding others by what I do as well as by what I say.

To create something we must be something. For example, becoming a parent is easy; being one is tough. We can't teach our kids self-discipline unless we are self-disciplined. We can't help build strong organizational teams unless we're a strong team player. We can't help develop a close community if we're not a good neighbor. We can't enjoy a happy marriage if we're not a loving partner. We won't have a supportive network of friends or colleagues until we're a supportive friend or collaborative colleague.

In The Heart Aroused: Poetry and Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, David Whyte writes, "all things change when we do." Writer Gautama Chopra elaborates, "by changing our beliefs, our perceptions, we cause our experience to change, and in this way we change the world around us. There is no true boundary or limit to the self; there is no separation from the world that encircles us. When we master the forces within, we influence the forces without."

In The CLEMMER Group's leadership development work we use a simple exercise to help participants connect the changes they'd like to see to the changes they need to make in their own behavior. Draw a line down the middle of a page. Title the left column "Changes I'd Like Them to Make." List the four or five biggest changes you'd like to see in others.

OK, that's the easy part. Now title the right column "Ways I Can Exemplify These Changes." Brainstorm ways you can influence "them" with your personal behavior. This is the hard part. It means I must face up to what I have or haven't been doing to influence their behavior.

It's much easier to be a victim - to blame all their behavior on them and refuse to accept any responsibility at all. But how honest and true is that, really? I may need more feedback from them to clearly see my role in their behavior. I likely need to reflect further and deeper on our relationship. Is my Influence Index weak? The big (and often painful) leadership question is; what do I need to change about me to help change them? Instead of just wishing for a change of circumstance, I may need a change of character.

Follow Me: Leading By Example

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American writer and poet

Most of us put leading by example high on the list of key leadership characteristics. We use phrases like "walking the talk" or "connecting the video with the audio" to express this core leadership concept. That's authenticity.

We recognize real leadership when we see it in others. What we often don't recognize is our own behavior reflected back to us. For example, children act like their parents despite all attempts to get them to love learning. Teams act like their leaders, despite attempts to train them otherwise. Customers yawn about the indifference of our service despite all the catchy slogans and advertising. Family members feel unappreciated despite (unexpressed) feelings about how much they mean to us. Conflict creates tension and misunderstanding despite realizations that issues should be confronted more effectively.

Good intentions are useless if they stop there. Unless we act on them, they're nothing more than warm, fuzzy thoughts in our own heads. When it comes to leadership, the messenger must be the message. That well-known biblical story of the Good Samaritan would have no meaning if all he did was look with sympathy at the badly wounded traveler lying by the road. He acted on his compassion and made a difference. One of the biggest differences between most people and authentic leaders is action. Real leaders make it happen.

About The Author

Jim Clemmer

Excerpted from Jim's fourth bestseller, Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success. View the book's unique format and content, Introduction and Chapter One, and feedback showing why nearly 100,000 copies are now in print at www.growingthedistance.com. Jim's new companion book to Growing the Distance is The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success. Jim Clemmer is an internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams, and personal growth. His web site is http://www.clemmer.net/articles

Article Source: http://www.articlecity.com/articles/self_improvement_and_motivation/article_4794.shtml

Leaders are Learned Optimists

2015-08-15T01:00:00.000+01:00

By: Jim Clemmer

"People often say that this or that person has not found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates." - Thomas Szasz, 20th century American psychoanalyst who founded the 'anti-psychiatry' movement

Effective leaders are "unreasonable" optimists. Optimists refuse to live in "the real world." They live in a world of hope and possibilities. They see an opportunity in every calamity. The pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity. Optimists excite and arouse others to action by helping them see, believe in, and reach for what could be.

If you haven't already read Learned Optimism, put it at the top of your reading list. Learned Optimism was written by Martin Seligman, professor of social science and director of clinical training in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In it, he reports on decades of pioneering research he and others have done on the effects of pessimism and optimism, ways to assess the degrees of either, and how to change a pessimistic style to an optimistic one. His work adds an important new twist and depth to understanding the timeless principles of leadership action.

He writes, "The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder."

At the core of Seligman's findings are the interconnected concepts of "learned helplessness" and "explanatory style." Seligman explains, "Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter. Explanatory style is the manner in which you habitually explain to yourself why events happen. It is the great modulator of learned helplessness. An optimistic explanatory style stops helplessness, whereas a pessimistic explanatory style spreads helplessness."

He goes on to cite research that shows pessimism is a major cause of depression, inaction and inertia, worry, and much poorer physical health (including earlier death). He has also found "pessimism is self-fulfilling. Pessimists don't persist in the face of challenges, and therefore fail more frequently - even when success is attainable... their explanatory style now converts the predicted setback into a disaster, and disaster into a catastrophe."

We can use Martin Seligman's ABCs to assess our explanatory style: any Adversity we encounter triggers our habitual Beliefs, which determines the Consequences of that situation or those circumstances. Learned Optimism has many useful assessment tools to help you understand whether you tend to pessimism or optimism and suggestions on how to become more optimistic.

To see beyond what is to what could be, we need to become "learned optimists." It starts by working with our teams or on our own to "reframe" negative situations and problems by looking for the improvement opportunities buried in them.

About The Author

Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams, and personal growth. During the last 25 years he has delivered over two thousand customized keynote presentations, workshops, and retreats. Jim's five international bestselling books include The VIP Strategy, Firing on All Cylinders, Pathways to Performance, Growing the Distance, and The Leader's Digest. His web site is http://www.clemmer.net/articles

http://www.articlecity.com/articles/self_improvement_and_motivation/article_4825.shtml

How You Can Become One In A Million

2015-08-08T14:59:00.000+01:00

By Christopher Green

Do you ever wonder why millions and millions of people live life in exactly the same way? Fear and a need for security are the driving forces at work here and this combination prevents most people from living their dreams. Terrified to take even the smallest of risks, they experience very little excitement and few adventures. A steady job, married with two kids, a nice home in a decent area and a couple of vacations every year. Make no mistake about it, this is pretty much as good as life gets for the vast majority of people.

Do you want to live like this or do you want to live a happier, more exciting life colored with adventure, risk and big rewards? Few people live this way, and those that do are one in a million. If you want to join this exclusive group, here's 5 tips to help you achieve it:

1. Risk - be prepared to accept that big rewards demand a price. You have to take a risk to get them. Whether it's business, a dangerous job, an extreme sport to name but three areas, you have to balance the risks involved with the rewards on offer. Quite simply, risk comes with the territory and you cannot get big rewards without it.

2. Conformity is doing the same things everybody else does because everybody else is doing them so it must be right, yes? Just one problem. If you do the same things as everybody else you'll get exactly what everybody else gets - minimal levels of happiness, huge levels of debt, the rat-race and a life devoid of any real excitement and achievement. Would you describe anyone who lives like this as 'One in a million'? Also, sheep conform. They do what all the other sheep do because they cannot think for themselves. How about you - are you a mindless, obedient sheep? Resolve to do your own thing and walk a different path to everybody else - if you want to be one in a million that is.

3. Know what you want. People who get the most from life do so because they know exactly what they want. They take the time to think about what they want to achieve and they set goals for themselves. Then they get busy on achieving their goals. Contrast this with the majority of people who bumble through life with no idea at all about what they really want to do. Key difference: Life is either something that happens to you or something you make happen. Guess which attitude you need to be one in a million.

4. No excuses. This is a big one. Because most people have many opportunities presented to them throughout their lives but are too scared to take one. Instead, when opportunity comes knocking, most people will build a wall of excuses to avoid it: Age, sex, education, family, jobs, money, skills, abilities, the cat, the dog, the goldfish and the weather. There's more and I'm not being flippant when I mention pets. You name it, the vast majority of people will use it as an excuse to justify missing out on an opportunity that could drastically improve the quality of their lives. If you want to be one in a million, then throw your excuse crutch onto the bonfire and resolve to never use any excuses to cheat yourself out of opportunity. Welcome it. Embrace it. And then milk it for all it's worth.

5. Don't listen to people who haven't done anything. Be your own person and use your intelligence to make good for you decisions. The problem is that when you do, others will pour cold water on your ideas by highlighting all the negative aspects they can think of. They will do their level best to stop you from pursuing a better life by heaping their fears onto you. DO NOT LISTEN. Unless they've lived an exciting life, full of rich experiences, exciting adventures, successes and failures and true happiness. Such people will be more positive about your plans and will be able to provide you with knowledge to help you on your way. Those who haven't done anything are not in a position to be of any use to you whatsoever and as such, are part of millions. But you want to be different yes? You don't want to be one of millions you want to be one in a million. So why listen to people who are and always will be one of millions?

You want to live life in your own unique way and these 5 tips will help you to do it. You can do it and after all, what have you got to lose? The reward is to be one in a million. Believe me, it's well worth it.

About The Author

Christopher Green is the author of the new book 'Conquering Fear', the acclaimed program that shows you how fear can help you achieve your goals and transform your life. For more info CLICK HERE => http://www.conqueringfear.net

Article Source: http://www.articlecity.com/articles/self_improvement_and_motivation/article_4845.shtml

Making Life Less Stressful: Five Tips for Easing Time Pressure

2015-08-01T15:17:00.001+01:00

By Cynthia Lindner

Developing time management skills is one way to prevent Time Pressure from adding to unhealthy stress we may already have. The best way to prevent stress from becoming a health or emotional problem is to manage stress by both modifying our habits and changing the way we respond to situations we think are stressful.

With keeping this in mind, what is your experience in regard to time? Do you have the time to do the things you enjoy, or do you postpone your leisure activities for meeting work deadlines, and keeping appointments? Do you often feel so tired that you spend most of your spare time sleeping?

The many people who share this type of experience usually recognize feeling an increase in their stress levels, but ironically, they don't have the time to do the deep relaxation exercises that will help to reduce the unhealthy effects of stress. Feeling time pressure adds to the feelings of stress.

The pressure, it seems, is becoming the norm especially for women who work and raise a family. Fortunately, by using these tips even the busiest people can create extra time in the day to relax, have fun, and enhance their health.

Tip #1: Know What's Important

Every couple of weeks, or once a month, look at "the big picture", and consider what is really most important to you. How does that fit into your life now? Will it be important in the future?

Tip #2: Set Priorities

Keep a note book with a list of things to do, errands, chores, etc. Then rate the importance of the items listed in terms of your overall goals, and also the goals shared by your family, work group, also consider your education obligations. For each entry ask your self, "What would happen if I didn't do this? Is this task worth the investment of my time?"

Tip #3: Make Some Space

Get rid of unnecessary paper and clutter, and arrange things you save in a more orderly fashion so that you can find them more easily and quickly.

Tip #4: Break Big Jobs Into Small Steps

If you're putting a project off because it seems overwhelming, break it up into smaller manageable steps and take each step one at a time.

Tip #5 Change The Way You Think

Notice your thought pattern as you approach (or avoid) a task. Listen for negative thoughts such as: "I don't feel like doing this. I'm not capable of doing such a hard assignment. I always miss the deadline anyway." Substitute more positive ideas and self-talk. "I will feel much better when this is done. Once I begin this project I'll feel more like doing it. If I do a little each day, I'll be able to finish the project."

After about one month of using these techniques evaluate your progress. Ask yourself these questions: Am I accomplishing more? Do I feel more in control of the time I have? Am I feeling happier? If you are able to answer yes to any of these questions then you are experiencing some success-- keep up the good work. Many people, however, find making these changes on their own to be difficult or impossible. People who seek out the help of a professional have much greater success in making the changes and having the changes last for a good long while.

About The Author

Cynthia Lindner, MS is a certified hypnotherapist with 20 years of experience working in the mental health professions. She has specific expertise in applying the complementary modalities of guided imagery, hypnosis, and biofeedback for the purpose of self-improvement, wellness and with Doctor's referral, relief of pain and symptoms. Cynthia has taught hypnotherapy workshops at international conferences, and has authored several published articles, and conducts on-site corporate trainings. She is a highly skilled professional in private practice on Long Island, NY with a talent for using mind-body techniques as an enhancement to the standard therapeutic process. Website: http://www.clinicalhypnotism.com/id11.html

© Copyright 1997 & 2006 by C. Lindner, all rights reserved. May be reprinted in its entirety including author box.

Article Source: http://www.articlecity.com/articles/self_improvement_and_motivation/article_4877.shtml

7 Effective Strategies for Conquering Negative People

2015-07-25T01:00:00.000+01:00

By Lori Radun, CEC

Have you ever been around a chronically negative person? How does he or she affect your mood in that moment? More than likely you will feel drained of energy or you'll find yourself carrying around your own negative energy. Negative people make us feel angry and challenge our ability to stay positive. Whether your child or spouse has an occasional negative day or you deal with a family member, friend or co-worker that is chronically negative, there are things you can do to remain positive in the face of negativity.

Opposition is Rarely the Answer

The worst thing you can do is argue with a negative person. This only adds fuel to the fire. A negative person will use the opportunity to argue to reinforce his mood or attitude. I have noticed when my children are in an irritable mood, it is best to avoid trying to convince them to have a positive attitude. As soon as I take the approach of being in opposition with them, they pounce on the opportunity to prove me wrong. Their negativity escalates and the situation gets worse before it gets better. Know when to remain silent and let the negativity pass.

Smother Negative People with Love

Strange as it may seem, a negative person often needs love and attention. Unfortunately, it is not easy to love a negative person. It is our challenge to rise above the off-putting behavior and love the hurt and scared person that is deep inside. By truly listening to what she is trying to tell you, you are showing love. Acknowledge the feelings she has by saying something like, "It sounds like your daughter really makes you angry". Even if you don't quite understand the person's feelings, know that your reality is rarely the same as someone else's. Ask if there is any way you can help. This shows you care about her well being. Offer a hug even if you get rejected. Remember not to take a rejection of your love personally. A negative person often has difficulty receiving love from others.

There is Always Something Good

There is always something good to be found in any negative situation. Search for anything positive that you can draw attention to. Even a negative person has positive character traits. When a person is drowning in negativity, it can be difficult to see the light. Whenever my clients begin highlighting their shortcomings, I always remind them of all the positive things they are forgetting. I admit that sometimes a negative person doesn't want to see the positive. This might require her to shift her perspective. Negativity can become a person's best friend and no one wants to willingly give up their best friend. Be patient and gently remind your ill-tempered friend or family member to be grateful for all her blessings. Hopefully, in her down time, she will begin to reflect on what you have said.

Turn Generalizations Into Specifics

If you pay close attention, you'll notice negative people often speak in generalizations. You may hear them say things like: "Lawyers are shady." "It's stupid to be an entrepreneur." "My kids are driving me crazy." These kinds of statements are referred to as cognitive distortions. To help a person sort through her distorted thinking, ask for more specifics. Questions like "Which lawyers are shady?" or "What specifically are your kids doing that is making you feel crazy?" forces a person to evaluate what he or she is really trying to say. A negative person will either get to the bottom of the issue or drop the subject because they are being challenged to elaborate.

Practice Detached Involvement

Sometimes the best thing you can do is emotionally detach from trying to change the negative person. No one likes it when someone is trying to change them, and their tendency will be to fight harder to remain negative. You can even try a little reverse psychology and agree with everything she says. I once read a great article about a mother who was exasperated with her son's negative mood. Everything she tried to soothe him and make him feel better backfired. She finally gave up and started agreeing with everything he said. When her son told her his teacher hated him, she agreed with him. When he complained that playing with his friends was boring, she couldn't agree more. After several minutes of this conversation with her son, his mood suddenly shifted. He declared that he was sleepy and he went to bed happy.

Remove Negative People or Seek Professional Help

Chronically negative people can critically affect your physical and emotional well being. Sometimes you have no other choice but to avoid these people or completely remove them from your life. It is possible to find a new job if your boss or other co-workers are negative. You can replace a friendship that is bringing you down. Other people, such as children and spouses, may require professional intervention if their negativity is affecting your life. By setting very strong boundaries with chronically negative people, you protect yourself and send a message to them that you care enough about yourself to avoid negativity.

Maintain Your Own Positive Attitude

If you do nothing else but focus on managing your own negative thoughts and behavior, you will come a long way towards remaining positive. A negative attitude is like a bad virus, but a positive attitude is contagious as well. Surround yourself with positive people that encourage you to be your best self. Use positive affirmations to conquer your own negative self-talk. Keep a gratitude journal to remind yourself of all your blessings. Take the time everyday to stop and smell the roses, watch children laugh and play, and listen to the birds chirp in the morning. Read inspirational material and listen to joyful music. Connect with your spiritual self. Do whatever you have to do to remain positive and joyful despite the negativity you face. The world will be a better place because of you and your attitude. And you never know, you just might help a negative person make the transition to a better way of living.

About The Author

Lori Radun, CEC � certified life coach for moms. To receive her FREE mini eCourse on eliminating guilt, her FREE newsletter for moms, and the special report �155 Things Moms Can Do to Raise Great Children�, go to http://www.true2youlifecoaching.com.

Article Source: http://www.articlecity.com/articles/self_improvement_and_motivation/article_4889.shtml

How Do You Break This Bad Habit?

2015-07-18T01:00:00.000+01:00

By Steve Gillman

Which bad habit is the worst? They each do their damage, but if bad habits were given awards, I would nominate the habit of waiting for things to happen for the category of most depressing. Waiting for things to happen is essentially waiting to die. It isn't a very inspiring or resourceful way of life.

Waiting For My Ship To Come In

What a terrible thought! Waiting for opportunity? Waiting doesn't invite opportunity into one's life - work does! While others are out their building their "ships" some people sit desperately, saying, "I am just waiting for my ship to come in." What ship? You mean the one you didn't build?

What is this supposed ship supposed to bring? The riches created by others? Instant money, overnight fame? Waiting for others or "the universe" to bring opportunities to you is a sure recipe for a poverty of the soul and of the wallet or bank account.

This kind of thinking is fed by stories of people getting rich quick and singers who are "overnight" successes. Those who get rich quick usually spent years learning how to make money, of course. Most successful entrepreneurs fail at several business before succeeding. As for "overnight" fame and success in the movies or in music, it is usually preceded by years of low paying struggles.

Do people sometimes get "lucky" and become wealthy or famous with little effort? Of course. A lottery is won by someone every time it is run. Look at the odds though. How many lifetimes do you have to wait for your ship to come in? Look at the results too. Instant fame or money is almost universally followed by the loss of that wealth and fame. A person who has not learned how to handle money or fame cannot be expected to learn instantly.

Want to break this bad habit of waiting for opportunity? Start searching out opportunities and creating your own opportunities. Training your mind to find them can be as simple as looking for them consistently. Train yourself to take advantage of them by always taking some small step the moment you recognize an opportunity. Start the process and the rest becomes easier (not easy, perhaps, but easier).

Waiting For Something To Happen

Many people are secretly waiting for things to change. That might work with the weather, but it isn't a very productive practice in one's personal life. You hear the clues that this thinking is active when people say things like,"Maybe I'll do it next year," or "I hope things will be different in the future," or "Someday I'm going to go to..."

They may or may not "do it" or change or go to wherever. What are the odds of success though? Poor at best. Compare this to what someone who doesn't have this bad habit might say: "I am planning a trip to Nepal in two years. I am putting aside $200 per month to pay for it, and I applied for my passport this month.

What does wishing for things get you? Disappointment, if wishing is all that there is. If you had faith the size of a mountain it won't even get you off the couch without something more. That something more is motivation, goals and action.

It is self-destructive to wish for things. It trains you to be disappointed with life. This why so many idealists become cynics. To quit this bad habit of wishing and waiting, stop wishing! Get honest. If something really isn't worth the effort to you, drop the thought. If you decide it is worth it, take the necessary steps to get it.

What if you don't know what those steps are? Take the necessary steps to find out. any honest step forward is better than a thousand prayers and wishes. Do anything that takes you closer to your goal. Do anything other than indulging the bad habit of waiting for things to happen.

About The Author
Steve Gillman writes on many topics, including brainpower, weight loss, meditation, habits of mind, creative problem solving, generating luck and anything related to self improvement. Learn more, and get FREE e-courses athttp://www.SelfImprovementNow.com

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