WOW: Multiply Excellence and Chutzpah

Play It Where It Lies

edited by Alexander Becker

Plan or play?

Do you think he plans it all out or just makes it up as he goes along?

Have an overall, yet general plan and comfortably own any situation.

What may look like outrageous chutzpah is most of the time spontaneous action taken on the spot, at the exact right time. It's like Columbus' egg: Everybody could have done it -- but they didn't. That, by the way is the genesis of conspiracy theories. Was it planned all the way through to the end or is a sequence of events being taken advantage of by someone just doing it?

Playing it where it lies does not necessarily imply to conceal your intentions. You can make it even more elegant, seize an opportunity, lightning-fast, the very moment it emerges. The right timing makes your action appear planned and thought through. Knowing what it is you want, you can act boldly yet spontaneously, as long as the opportunity in question is remotely compatible with your big picture view. Once you're sure about the big picture, you can play almost everything and immediately, seemingly without even thinking. Start playing while everyone else is busy pondering doubts and mistaking hesitation for an elaborate form of planning.

Have a rough plan, if any; play it where it lies, with everything you've got; and have everybody admire your apparently delicate plan as you make up the details when the situations unfold.

Labels: audacity, business, decisions, discipline, excellence, lifehacks, lifestyle, marketing, motivation, opportunities, personal+branding, planning, success

The Top 5 Reasons to Get Even Leaner

edited by Alexander Becker

The following article is an entry in the group writing project "Top 5" by Darren Rowse at problogger. The whole known web is currently getting streamlined, partitioned, sliced and diced, by Top-5s only to eventually be reunified in that one, giant, list of all of them. Enjoy.

Let's take a look at why it is beneficial to get even leaner. Not lean instead of fat. Leaner instead of lean. Leaner than lean. This is about and for the already lean. Get more perfect. Here is why --

5. Excellence. The #5 reason to get even leaner is the act of pushing through and going all the way, expecting more than others think is possible.

You leaned your system down until now. Up to this point, you recognize that the leaner you get, the better it gets overall. Why would you settle for mediocrity. You're well on your way to excellence. Why settle for less? It's the goal and the relativity in leaner that propels you forward and makes you accomplish more and more in order to get there. You may not reach perfection but no one ever died from wanting too much either.

4. Efficiency. The #4 reason to get even leaner is to get ever more revenue for the same or even less input.

A leaner organism is a more effective organism. Come with minimal luggage. Don't bring more than you really need. Lean determines the ratio between work and rest, between production and administration, between muscle and fat. The more muscle that is at work against less and less superfluous weight -- as opposed to specific workload -- the more effective is the whole system. Think bureaucracy. Think governments.

3. Hunger. The #3 reason to get even leaner is the hunt, its prerequisites and its conditions. There is no place for complacency on the hunt.

The leaner you get, the more hunger you experience. Hunger keeps you awake and makes you alert. You need all your senses to even mildly satisfy that hunger. It's the hunger for more that guides you on the path to getting leaner in the first place.

2. Discipline. The #2 reason to get even leaner is the reward -- in this particular case, the reward is the reward.

The process of getting leaner is the opposite of instant gratification. It's the noble art of enduring the delay to eventually get it all. As long as the journey appears to be the reward, you're not there yet.

1. Competition. The #1 reason to strive for maximum leanness is doing it because it's possible.

Something that gets infinitely harder, the closer you come to reaching the absolute goal, is the ideal feat to fight for. If it was easy, anybody would do it and succeed. To succeed in getting even more lean -- leaner than any one of your competitors -- is the chance for you to set your name in stone. Competition is the ultimate comparison. There is only one first place.

Please note that while thinspiration employs and works with human role-models, you may also consider lean management, or think lean business administration, for example, if this makes you feel more comfortable.

Getting leaner is ultimately getting rid of more stuff. The ideal of getting leaner is about releasing the unnecessary. Less is more.

Good riddance.

Labels: comparison, competition, diet, discipline, excellence, group+writing, hunger, inspiration, lean, lifehacks, marketing, motivation, personal+branding, productivity, thinspiration, top+5, wow

The News Diet: Less News = More Productivity

edited by Alexander Becker

News Fasting. The deliberate avoidance of all forms of news media, particularly to relieve stress and relax the mind. Also: newsfasting.

The concept is tried and trusted. Achieve moderation through deprivation. Go on a controlled fast and recognize the difference it makes.

If you want results and you want them fast enough, you have to go extreme ways. Don't expect a balanced approach, we're going all out here. This is no moderate diet, no zone, this is the no-carb, guaranteed fat-loss, whatever-it-takes solution.

Try and temporarily avoid the news and see the difference it makes. Do not ignore but screen out the news altogether -- without even attempting to keep track of what's going on through blogs -- for a specific time.

Think fasting, in the dietary sense. Go on a controlled news fast for four weeks, no local news, no global issues, no foreign politics allowed. Schedule one cheat day each week and indulge in the weather channel. Make sure to stay with your local weather and avoid the world weather binge fest.

Potential benefits include less TV time, less newspaper expenses and therefore less waste, a better mood and a greater sense of control since you cut out the things you can't influence anyway. The double effect on productivity is a relative increase in actionable information and an absolute increase in time to take action.

Focus exclusively on your business (supposed you're not in the news business, in which case this diet isn't for you) and monitor the time you save and the decisions you make -- unbiased from and not influenced by daily news events.

After completing this special diet, start to participate in news-inspired discussions -- freshly resetted and devoid of all too current facts, you'll find yourself perceiving -- ideally without judging -- the assumptions and influences of world news on your peers.

No, there is nothing wrong with it, news are no evil, nor are they bad per se, just as carbohydrates aren't bad as part of your diet. The reason for going on a total fast is the occurring break and the experience of the difference. Just as with carbs, we slowly and moderately and consciously reintroduce news into our information diet. Start by gradually adding section by section of your newspaper or news aggregator of choice to your reading schedule. Deliberately include them in your diet, choose one, two, or three sections, and deliberately exclude the rest. What can you do without?

Please note that the four-week duration is capable of breaking the habitual news consumption once and for all. Appreciate and enjoy your extra time.

Labels: bias, communication, discipline, email+detox, fasting, info+diet, lifehacks, lifestyle+design, moderation, news, news+fasting, personal+development, productivity, time+management, wow

The State of Flow and Becoming Addicted to Action

edited by Alexander Becker

There is much said about the state of flow. If you want to achieve genuine and non-esoteric flow, try action. Cascading action. Action which builds on top of preceding -- action. Action as in progress. Action as in creation as well as in evolution.

Become addicted if you aren't already. More and more. Create. Evolve. Whatever it is but let it move and it keep it ever new. Progress. All the time. There shall be no single day without any -- even the smallest -- step towards the current and the next goal. Action.

What did you do today to achieve immortality?

As with publicity, almost any action, good or bad, is preferable to inaction and static being. Positive progress is obviously favorable -- though when in doubt, have it move in either direction, as long as it moves to begin with. If and since you work -- you do, don't you -- under the premise that each and every time you perform at the very best of your ability, that at that particular time, you can only excel and ask for more and more tasks to crunch.

By following and cultivating this attitude it will be easier to do only one thing, that nobody will ever forget -- every day. Which, by the way, is just the minimal answer to the immortality question. What if you accomplish that one thing early in the morning, even before breakfast? Would you try and get done one more thing towards immortality? What about an entire series of things?

Once you start a series of cascading actions, the addiction part is taking care of itself. This is flow. This is the point where it is commonly said that success is inevitable. It just doesn't work any other way because each event triggers -- almost domino-like -- the next and the following ones with the result becoming inevitable because of cause and effect.

Please note that while some effects certainly do not require specific causes, and some causes produce no effects at all, it is equally certain that inaction -- unless no action is the desired cause -- is not going to cause any significant effect. In other words: No cause doesn't cause anything.

One last thing: The use of the term addiction hints at some negative implications. While the focused, conscious obsession definitely helps with achieving your goal, the addiction has its downsides: Laser-like concentration tends to utilize other system's vital energy and you may destroy on one side as much as you are trying to build on the other side. Get rid of your addiction as soon as the negative issues outweigh the positive ones -- and yes, there are positive aspects with any addiction. Otherwise it wouldn't be such a problem in the first place. Remember that you're after the rewards.

Labels: action, addiction, discipline, excellence, flow, lifehacks, lifestyle, motivation, personal+branding, personal+development, productivity, success, wow

Assess and Improve Your Trends

edited by Alexander Becker

Now that you measure your data regularly, it's time to analyze and see if we can derive some meaningful information from the amassed figures...

Measure and compare your key data over time. Compare your financial data, weight, health, ... recognize and determine the trends and make sure that each trend goes in a -- meaningfully -- positive direction.

Everything you do or are responsible for is measurable and comparable. To keep things going or to bring things back on the right track, make sure to monitor and -- if desirable -- change trends that are possible to monitor and observe with little effort. You need at least five measurements over time and, sometimes after eliminating the extremes, you can read a general direction of progress. Do not go crazy about spikes and weird, single instances, it is the general trend that we're after.

Getting better, staying the same, and getting worse. There are only three general, observable directions for any given, measurable, progression. By the way, in order to avoid the trap of interpreting stagnating figures as positive inactivity, try to always get on a track of -- ever so slightly -- increasing quality.

Look at your weight, three years ago, last year, six months ago, today: Is it staying the same? Congratulations. Your net worth. This should go up. Is it increasing over the course of the key dates measured? What about inflation? Do not forget to normalize your results.

Determine a number of key indicators and monitor them religiously, set goals to improve each one of them, ad infinitum. There is no need to stop making progress once a certain amount of growth is achieved. Do not settle for a perfect figure. The only perfect figure is the next, better one. Continue and go on and on.

Labels: accounting, business, discipline, fitness, lifehacks, lifestyle, measurement, personal+development, productivity, progress, tracking, trends

Subjective Reality: Create an Atmosphere

edited by Alexander Becker

This essay is part of The Subjective Reality Series.

Do you ever wonder what your vast, unused mental potential is busy doing at any given moment? An obviously significant part of it is creating atmospheres out of your sensory input, it combines previously stored patterns and expectations and judgements into your very own subjective perception of intangible and often indescribable qualities.

Atmospheres are objective environments which are subjectively created by your thoughts and emotions. An atmosphere is the pervading tone of a place or situation. The very same place, when perceived at different times under different or even similar circumstances may be experienced as if it was a completely different location.

Note how time and circumstances are shaped and suddenly change at your fingertips when lived through a slightly changed context.

Take your current environment as an example. Look around and consciously scan the setting which surrounds you right now. How does it feel? And back. What is there to evoke that particular feeling? If it is hard to describe it is because there is obviously some more to a situation than the sum of quantifiable and thus tangible parts.

Develop and create an environment, your environment and make it your personal, your branded space. Take your environment and make it yours. You will be amazed by the unlimited options you encounter when it comes to configuring and fine-tuning your setting.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. Genesis 1:28 (King James Version)

Create your atmosphere to your own and complete satisfaction. Recreate yourself in and through your environment and shape the resulting atmosphere until it is yours. Take special care of the more subtle elements, an air, think appearances and manners of objects and circumstances.

Ultimately, the sequence is your mind creating an environment; you, perceiving that environment, perceiving it consciously; and finally shaping it through active and creative perception. If, for any reason, you are not absolutely, positively content with the atmosphere you created in the first place, go no further than your very own mind and -- if not working on the manifestation itself, at least improve your perception -- the rest, reality that is, will take care of itself.

Your creations develop a life of their own. Try to always make sure that your intention perfectly matches the atmosphere that comes along with the manifestation. And vice versa.

Featured Link

Secrets of "The Secret". Ebooks that reveal the spiritual Law-of-Attraction Secrets behind the movie The Secret.

Labels: discipline, inspiration, intention+manifestation, law+of+attraction, lifehacks, mindset, motivation, perception, personal+branding, reality, subjective+reality, success, wow-subjective-reality

The Aficionado's Guide to Appreciation

edited by Alexander Becker

Use intentional and controlled deprivation of that which you love most -- be it food or any material good that you don't want to live without, or an abstract, positive addiction that you usually follow -- to vastly enhance your sensation of abundance.

Deprive yourself through deliberately avoiding your object of desire for as long as you like -- or for as long as you want to enjoy the craving, for that matter. Watch yourself developing and executing the most arduous plans to actually get what you now really want.

This makes for an interesting experience in conquering discipline from both sides, you will try to keep up the discipline to continue the experiment while at the same time, you'll want to satisfy your need, often a conditioned habit, a negative discipline.

You will learn a lot about the energies hidden within you, only waiting to emerge and strike at the perfect moment. You are going to expend energies that just weren't there, or so you would have thought.

You will experience real-world adventures and have amazing tales to tell about serving and satisfying nightly cravings, about exploring levels of creativity and ingenuity that give you a glance of your true capabilities. Then, compare your usual levels of productivity to these peak states of potential productivity.

Observe the mixed feelings of satisfaction, when actually depleting the resource, the act of finishing until the last bit, only to replenish and start all over. Particularly noteworthy is the way you treat that last bit of what's left. Do you prepare to appreciate the final bit in a special way? Do you finish the remainder of the abundance like any other piece or do you throw it away, to avoid having to deal with the moment of absolutely nothing?

What can we learn from these traits, the description of nothing less than classic addictive behavior, to make us even more happy and more beautiful?

If you would only appreciate what you have while it lasts, you wouldn't have such a hard time when finally parting with what you never consciously enjoyed. The least you can do is to try to enjoy and celebrate every bit as if it were the last one.

One more thing... this is an experiment designed to stimulate the mind. Please think chocolate or some rewards to use as the trigger for the craving reaction. Do not think oxygen, or any other vital supply.

Labels: addiction, aficionado, appreciation, chocolate, cravings, diet, discipline, energy, experiment, habits, how+to, lifehacks, lifestyle, mind, personal+development, satisfaction, stimulation, wow

How Your Mind Benefits from Cleaning Up Your Physical Workspace

edited by Alexander Becker

After you resolve to clean up that mess, you are forced to make yes-or-no decisions and, as a result, you will enjoy an unexpected, long forgotten peace of mind, in return for your physical efforts.

Get rid of the clutter, take a look at your files in the drawers, at your clothes in their closets, at the too many items on your homepages, ... finally look at the stuff that piles up in your brains, occupying valuable working memory.

No, you won't use any of it at some later time. You will, and neither will no other human being, never ever look again at the so called reference material, the results of your organization efforts to get things done.

Organizing your physical world is an important step on the path leading to clarity, purpose, and success. The sorting through files and paperwork will reload the essence of all these things into your mind. Use this special occasion to handle everything only one single time and immediately make your decisions to either keep or drop. When in doubt, choose the latter.

The intention of building an archive containing reference material, material dedicated for later, unspecified, potential use, will leave you with constructive insights -- you will find things you long thought lost, only to notice that you manage to live without them, leading to the eventual, logical consequence to finally throw them away.

A positive side-effect is, that once you free your physical space from the clutter, you also free your mind. You do not even have to touch your cluttered thoughts to benefit from the cleaning, the newly won space in the physical world will simultaneously widen and expand your mental world. You will even notice the relief from stress, unrecognized stress resulting from long built-up heaps of stuff that is increasingly clogging up your productive system.

Resolve today to get rid of something, everyday.

An extension of this method is to continually and consciously make room for something new. In the same manner you stop old habits or activities in order to find time to start new habits and activities, make physical space for things you wish to acquire. Think of every acquisition as a replacement of something old with something new. Everything you buy, every item or abstract concept or idea you adopt, is in fact a renovation of all that you have -- once you stick to the giving away of something in exchange for anything which you receive. Live life, light.

Peter Drucker would say: Before acquiring something new, give away something old.

Labels: archiving, cleaning, clutter, discipline, gtd, inspiration, lifehacks, mind+sweep, motivation, passion, personal+development, potential, productivity, responsibility, workspace, wow

Learn to Trust Your Inner Voice

edited by Alexander Becker

How old are you? Aren't you old enough to finally trust yourself?

You feel like not exercising today? You feel like really overeating? Maybe there is a big project that is labeled important and thus would have to be treated first, with top priorities... but you feel like not touching it today?

You are old enough. Listen to your instincts and do not always assume that your inner voice is a lazy one. Your inner voice, your instincts are guiding you. Why would you accuse yourself of attempting to cheat? Do you really think you are that bad?

On the other hand, you may fear your inner voice could tell you to double your efforts -- how would you react to that?

How many times did you give in to your feelings of not doing something at that particular time and on how many of these occasions did you beat yourself up, drowning in guilt, only to later realize that it was just right to not pursue that project on that day. Funny how the day after came along the last bit of input that I would have ignored if it hadn't been for my day off... and I thought I was lazy...

The amazing thing about instincts is their effectiveness, they work... instinctively. It's like an additional sense -- but only when carefully observed and trusted.

Take advantage of your inner voice and test it with minor issues at first. Act according to your instincts, preferably on difficult decisions where your conscious mind would suggest doing the exact opposite. Go with your instincts and evaluate what turned out to be different compared to the conscious-mind-only method. You will notice how your instincts contribute to your sensory input and -- once trusted -- are an important way to achieve clarity and stable decisions where the mind-only way would be still guessing.

Respect your instincts and learn to trust your inner voice. Why would you assume that your inner voice is wrong? Why assume that your inner voice is bad in the first place?

It is easy to ignore the inner voice, sometimes it is even easier to keep up the discipline than to break it. You have to constantly evaluate your actions. Do not let your habits run you and prevent you from optimizing your environment and your decisions. Do not stick to a habit because of the guilt that is associated with taking a day off. Stick to your habits because your mind and your instincts tell you to do so.

Listen to your inner voice. Trust your inner voice. Rely on your inner voice.

Labels: discipline, experiences, inner+voice, inspiration, instincts, laziness, lifehacks, motivation, personal+development, productivity, respect, trust, wow

Eat as Much as You Want: Experiences with the Warrior Diet

edited by Alexander Becker

One of the advantages of the Warrior Diet is the clear and simple distinction between what is allowed and when: Undereat for 20 hours and indulge in overeating the remaining four hours -- each and every day. It is easy to adhere to the principles and to defeat potential attempts to cheat -- refined sugars, for example just aren't allowed.

Certain other diets prescribe exact times for exceptions or specific amounts that basically invite you to eat some more or some stuff that would be off, but... seems to be... with some stretching of the rules... and so on.

After eating according to the rules of the Warrior Diet for more than five weeks now, here are some impressions, in no particular order:

Weight: Although I don't follow the Warrior Diet to actually lose weight, it definitely works to get rid of some bodyfat (Hofmekler calls it "stubborn fat" in the book) if you combine the diet with physical training.
Undereating: Absolute undereating; only water, coffee, and fruit juices seem to work best for me in terms of alertness, energy, and overall well-being throughout the day.
Overeating: I eat as much food as I ate during the first half of the year all in one month and I still lost some weight; in excess of four pounds over the first three weeks. Overeating, and especially the included compensation feels very real and converges with my take on moderation.
Coffee: I stopped drinking coffee, the compulsive, repetitive, hourly coffee, half a year ago. Since then, I only drank a cup or so once a week. Now, on the Warrior Diet, I drink coffee again daily, one small cup in the morning and another one in the afternoon. Drinking that black bitter dervish on an empty stomach feels great, in contrast to what you and I expected. It really supports the undereating phase.
Food groups: I am still eating vegan, no meat, no dairy -- all warrior... My eating vegan is an ongoing experiment and I am happy with the results so far. As of now, I experience no deprivations or deficiencies. (Note: The Warrior Diet is not about eating vegan.)
Diet composition: A week on all veggies and almonds feels great. Extraordinarily great. I ate an average of 200g almonds each day and I even lost weight. (I even felt great after eating more than 400g on one single day -- don't try this on any other diet, you probably don't want to try this at all...)
Exercises: An intense workout on an empty stomach, right after work, in the evening just before preparing the big meal feels amazing and leaves me with even more energy than I brought home. I don't even feel hungry after exercising.
Cravings: The body seems to crave exactly what is nutritionally necessary. It's always amazing to see the vegetative functions working so well.
Instincts: Eating vegan, my instincts aren't too bloody... but I am taking care of the almonds and the fat intake and I believe that all instincts respond and react the way they should.

Conclusion: I still and highly recommend the Warrior Diet for everyone, for physically active people as well as for the 24/7-in-front-of-the-screen crowd.

Labels: books, diet, discipline, eating, exercises, experiences, fasting, fatloss, health, instincts, lists, nutrition, ori+hofmekler, recommendation, vegan, warrior+diet, weightloss, wow, wow-diet

Make Exclusive Decisions

edited by Alexander Becker

Divide et impera, divide and rule: separate your thoughts, each from the other, sort through, be painfully selective about your longings and your objects of desire.

You want it all, I know, but don't you want it all, only to avoid making a decision in favor of the definite outcome, the one thing you really want?

Separate the goals you must accomplish from the objectives you merely hesitate to discard from your list of wanted achievements. Triage indiscriminately, not only your obligations but also your desires. Focus on one target at a time. Only this way, you will eventually have them all.

Do not set up three top-priority goals in order to triple your happiness and your satisfaction. Is it even possible to be three times as happy, measurably? Resolve to concentrate on that one major project. Choose one and appreciate the satisfaction that comes from having decided and being gratified with just the right one. Trust your choice. Choose the one you really want. The chosen one itself will be happier being the only one and will show you great appreciation for your exclusive choice.

The main objective of your experience is quality, not quantity. Do not give in and participate in the race for more and more at the expense of better and better. Instead, try to cascade towards the best that is achievable with the means you have at any one time. Always trade in the inferior for the superior. Always discard the good in favor of the better. You will end up having the best experience possible. You have to refrain from collecting the stuff that amasses along your way towards material enlightenment and let it cloud your wonderful presence.

It is your indecision that makes you unhappy. Do not change your plans on a daily basis. Decide, stand up, and stand by your intent. Your decisions will bring clarity into your life. You will receive unexpected help from the people around you, they will surprise you with their support, now that they know what you stand for.

Make your decisions and rule your own, personal kingdom.

Buy only one car at a time. How many favorite cars are in your garage? Is it possible to have more than one favorite in any one class?

You decide.

Tags

Labels: anticipation, behavior, decisions, desire, discipline, divide+et+impera, goals, lifehacks, mind, motivation, obligations, personal+development, triage, wow

Positive Peer Pressure

edited by Alexander Becker

Peer pressure is usually associated with negative behavior and the social dynamics of youth and growing up. Adopt and employ the concept of peer pressure to make a positive difference. Get your tribe to follow your positive lead just as they would follow you blindly in decadence. You are highly responsible for your fellow adventurers, the people around you who read your lips and do exactly what you do. Take good care of them.

Live the best way you can under the best circumstances you can create and do not let your tribe in the dark. Strive to be an idol and carefully monitor every step you take in public; you are always watched and adored for what and for how you are. You are a role-model whether this makes you comfortable or not. Accept being cited as an example.

This is by no means an abstract advice. Look around and observe the people you are with on a regular basis. Everyone influences everyone else. Even the most negligible action can have vast effects when, evaluated in hindsight, through your initial cause someone got inspired to do something not so negligible -- be it good or bad.

Your network of influence, how far does it reach? How far do you intend to reach out? As a rule, the most freakish actions are the ones emulated the most and with great passion. How do you move? Do you eat in certain ways? Do you exhibit any weird behavior that supports your public, your stage personality? People will copy exactly that. Use the power of being an example to spread positive and meaningful actions, thoughts, and emotions. Sort through what is expected from you and live up to people's well-meant anticipations. Make sure to only meet positive expectations; everyone will wait for and prey on your negative output -- do not give in to lower instincts.

The goal is not to create a uniform, synchronously-dancing, equal-looking tribe which would resemble an army more than anything else -- the ideal is the exact opposite, open-eyed, loosely connected, independent and free individuals, given their own, true voice, aware of their abilities and their purpose. You act merely as a catalysator for the people who look up to you.

There are many who strive to become like you.

Labels: anticipation, behavior, celebrity, discipline, lifehacks, lifestyle, marketing, mind, motivation, peer+pressure, personal+branding, personal+development, role+model, stage, tribe, willpower, wow

Autopilot and the Advantages of Flying by Yourself

edited by Alexander Becker

You can work either creatively or you can work reactively, closely following a fixed plan that doesn't allow too many deviations in order to get fulfilled.

Once a basic system is up and running, working on autopilot, pursuing one laid out path according to preset instructions and requirements, seems to be the way to go. Grinding away at the work that shows up is the perfect application for the autopilot, you could substitute a robot for your labor, and that's exactly the problem.

The required and expended mind power depends on the phase of the project you're in. In the planning and developing stages of any project, you obviously don't want to give up control or flow nor would you want to bypass your own brain.

Pragmatical exceptions are of course settings which are worth the effort in terms of fast results, for example. Mindless, robot-like work is the way to go to get things done effectively, for short, discrete periods of time that is. Don't ever feel -- nor dare to express -- that you are too good for any kind of work.

Working on autopilot robs you of any emerging, synchronous incubation tracks which would offer themselves spontaneously if you were consciously present and fully alert, working as if you'd still be enthusiastically conceiving.

You can use the fact that you feel yourself like working on autopilot as an indicator that you have to change something about your system. You work on quantity instead of quality, on stuff instead of making any real progress. It's like moving laterally on a ladder. You are exploring the width of the field while it would be so much more rewarding to move up, step by step, and leave the lateral field-scanning to the robots.

Your autopilot is not a creator. You are. Using the human mind and its power to run like a, however complex, machine is a tremendous waste of resources, it's overkill.

Setting up, programming, and training the autopilot is an exciting task only to have it up and running on its own without your continual input needed. Just make sure to not program yourself to become the autopilot.

Fly by yourself. You are no robot.

Labels: autopilot, business, discipline, marketing, personal+branding, personal+development, productivity, quality, robots, success, willpower, work, wow

Employ Your Instincts Against Overtraining and Burnout

edited by Alexander Becker

Plato has Phaedrus say: You will soon break the bow if you keep it always stretched.

When the initial motivation is extremely high or the external and internal, personal expectations are too demanding, often physical and mental burnout are observable. What is happening in management can be compared to a similar phenomenon in sports: overtraining, plateaus, physical burnout, and fatigue are the results of the triumph of will over sensibility. The cure against burnout and overtraining is very simple: stop immediately and rest.

Excessive training, trying too hard, or monotonous routines that don't challenge the mind or body lead to overtraining syndrome with symptoms that are hard to recognize and differentiate from mere temporary exhaustion or psychological causes instead of effects.

Overtraining may lead to training plateaus, the body cannot catch up regenerating itself and gets stuck on a mid-level that is achievable without adequate rest. Overtraining is the result of weeks or months of wrong training, you're not going to burnout after a couple of days or some high intensity training.

An effective strategy to avoid and to prevent overtraining is to listen to your body's needs and its instincts. It's all too easy to override pain in order to achieve the next promising and potentially rewarding goal. The body as well as the mind need rest. Growth and improvement take place while not training, while at rest, between workouts and after work. Hard work is definitely necessary but the moment it becomes mindless it is a sure sign of becoming insensible and therefore against nature's requirements.

It is vitally important for eventual success to balance and level the eagerness in the beginning and focus on maintaining the discipline through the initial motivation and the lows and the highs and the plateaus.

Consciously relax and release all the tension from time to time. Make no exercise a dedicated exercise and count the non-reps, e.g. try to statically hold nothing for the intended duration. This special exercise is the only exercise that let's you grow while still working on it...

The same holds true for corporate executives: rest consciously without working at all. Schedule an amount of time where you absolutely do not work. Consciously dedicate this time to not working at all. As a side effect, you will notice how, perhaps unexpectedly, your productivity will go up. Your energies will replenish and you will gain new clarity.

Enjoy every moment of your recovery, as much as you enjoyed, with all your heart, work until crashing.

Labels: business, discipline, fitness, health, instincts, overtraining, personal+development, plateaus, recovery, sports, training, willpower, wow, wow-test

Moderation in All Things?

edited by Alexander Becker

One of Benjamin Franklin's virtues was to: Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

I am always a proponent of pursuing extremes, if not for the outcome then at least for the value of the experience. Yet recently, I discover moderation as a concept. There are many events in life that benefit greatly from a moderate approach. Selective moderation leaves time and energy for the really important, for the high-priority issues to be tackled in extreme ways, excessive in single-mindedness and with overwhelming determination.

With the overall concept and pace being moderate, as moderate as possible, resources are shifted towards the high-leverage objectives that are treated with all the power available, with utmost persistance and through exaggeration and escalation of circumstances whenever possible, even beyond the likelyhood of success.

Moderation adds variety and promotes diversity since active moderation is capable of breaking repetitive habits -- the prevention of having too much of the same too often, for example -- allowing fresh input into your life.

It may seem to conflict with the issue of discipline and exceptions, but you can benefit from moderating discipline itself for too much restriction -- and that's what a good part of discipine is about -- is detrimental to your success and your well-being.

Moderation is important to break up black-and-white thinking since nothing is perfectly black nor white. Moderation is the complete scale from black to white and so is life which is -- to stay with colors -- taking continuously and simultaneously from the whole spectrum, including the extremes, incorporating every color that is imaginable, all side by side.

Moderation precludes -- by definition -- the effects of excess.

For good measure, take a look at extreme moderation which seems to be a contradiction in terms. You can exaggerate everything, just apply the concept of excess to the idea of moderation.

Contemplating the reasoning behind moderation does in fact temper the extremes by itself through showing the nature and the evident advantages of moderation vs. excess; variety vs. uniformity; diversity vs. similarity; &c.

I still feel the urge to take moderation to the extreme...

Labels: benjamin+franklin, discipline, excess, extreme, goals, inspiration, lifestyle, mind, moderation, motivation, personal+development, productivity, willpower, wow

Why You Should Seek Inspiration Instead of Motivation

edited by Alexander Becker

Motivation makes you want to do while inspiration tells you what to do.

Motivation is unspecific. You are motivated or you become motivated through external stimuli and you get ready to do something. Once you are motivated, i.e. stimulated to a sufficient extent, you can and do start whatever task is offered or would offer itself to you.

To sustain motivation, it has to be kindled and rekindled and carefully guarded while, on the other end of the scale, the overwhelming force which inspiration creates, is hard to disturb and even harder to resist.

Inspiration starts with an idea or the seed of an idea, call it a hunch or an intuition, with only the slightest hint of motivation. Once picked up, the idea will immediately start to unfold and pull motivation towards itself until completion, until its full manifestation.

Inspiration-invoked motivation is invincible and divine, it is not comparable to the externally aroused, raw, almost crude, give-me-something-to-do kind of motivation.

The trick is thus, in order to achieve maximum and real motivation, to work on and take care of inspiration. Inspiration is the shortcut to motivation and it is much harder to induce since the reception seems to be a very delicate and subjective process without the physical means that trigger motivation.

Inspiration takes place in the mind, via emotions and evaluation of the effects of sensory input. Motivation, on the other hand, is a matter of tangible cause-and-effect events that function via direct sensory input. You can become motivated through physical activity -- inspired you won't become, not necessarily though.

I may motivate you with passion and with the influence of physical power but without actual inspiration and you will ask me for a task to complete... any task, you will be eager to use your instilled energy no matter how. I may do the opposite and give you inspiration; you will instantly and effortlessly motivate yourself and find and complete, all by yourself, the exact task for that very moment.

Always look for inspiration and motivation will take care of itself.

Labels: creativity, discipline, goals, inspiration, mind, motivation, productivity, willpower, wow

Willpower: Let Go of Everything

edited by Alexander Becker

You have a strong will. People fear your willpower, you even celebrate it. Yet, against popular belief, you cannot change other people's will with your own will, no matter how strong or terrible it is.

You may use seduction or force to get what you want, but you cannot put up willpower against willpower. Try to recall such a situation -- did it work? What were the consequences?

Get rid of the belief that you can control everything, because you can't. In fact, you are not even able to control anything, what you can and do control is your perception of things and events. You control and set up your expectations and your evaluations of events and their particular circumstances -- this is the mechanism to influence reality itself. Your subjective perceptions do objectively change your realities. You change your point of view, you walk around the object of contempt or desire and start to see it from different perspectives.

Putting up your will against an undesirable situation causes frustration and resent, your own frustration and the situations' resent. You may use or leverage some hierarchical power to change the situation but this is not your will. The moment you're trying to control your environment through your will, you do in fact force that very will upon your own mind. Your ability to create suffers as a consequence.

Change the situation using your will for good, not going against any other person's will and you are going to employ willpower for the first time in an economical and successful manner. Use that powerful will of yours to enhance and enforce your discipline, for example.

Let go. As an exercise, let go of everything. How does that feel? Let go of everything and consciously select the few things that you actually desire to productively take care of. Let go of everything else.

Now you are free. Free to create and free to succeed.

Labels: acceptance, discipline, goals, how+to, inspiration, lifehacks, mind, motivation, personal+development, productivity, society, tips, willpower, wow

A Simple Technique to Experience Amazing Productivity Gains

edited by Alexander Becker

You plan your objectives in written form. You live Getting Things Done and the accompanying struggles.

That is the easy stuff; mindsweeps, making lists of things, organizing and structuring the always up-to-date lists into contexts and working according to the circumstances, the environment, and the available energy. You will most likely end up with lists that grow longer and longer without even the slightest chance to ever satisfactorily complete any one sub-list.

Enter the advanced stuff.

Since you're working with and alongside intentions anyway, let's try to build a somewhat idealistic, but nevertheless fully functioning, productivity model based on only the best intentions.

Start with the ubiquitous mindsweep.
Recognize and accept the Must Do tasks.
Collect your intentions for the desired outcomes of the Must Do and the Want-To-Do Really Badly stuff.
Inject as much positive thinking as possible into your mental process. Sanitize every thought of potential auto-sabotage.
Feel the synchronicities and the manifestations show up in waves depending on your faith in the actual reception of the intended goal or subject of desire.

It is as simple as reaping what you sow, only more elegant.

You act in accordance with your intentions, you set out your intentions and everything flows naturally, almost effortlessly, you take occasional glances at your plans and lists and you select instinctively, without much conscious thinking, the most appropriate and highest value-yielding task to subsequently accomplish in your sequence of events.

Now that is productivity, where the world seems to run in slow-motion while you are, in high-speed mode and fully alert, observing the fulfillment of your laid out plans and the arrival of your results.

The next -- and the last -- project you are going to tackle the old-school way will be the raising of your consciousness to the level where the magic becomes possible in the first place.

Labels: discipline, goals, gtd, how+to, humor, intention+manifestation, law+of+attraction, lifehacks, mind, motivation, personal+development, practice, productivity, subjective+reality, tips, willpower, wow

11 Ways to Improve Clarity and Start Getting Results

edited by Alexander Becker

Once you have found your purpose in life, you will have more than enough to do in never enough time. Here are some ways to make your experience even more joyous:

List the top three objectives of your current endeavour. To do this, weigh the most important goals and assign them relative importances. You obviously have to decide which ones are not in the top three. Can you see where this is going? No two things are equally important.
Be sure and confident about what you are doing and why and pursue exactly one project, single-mindedly to the end, until completion. This means you have to make decisions. Do not stand in your own way. Concentrate all your efforts and energy on one target at a time.
Be able to present a written list, at any time, with your top priorities. Practice and pretend to be pitching your services and your goals every day.
Define your #1 goal, its #1 project and its respective #1 task and start working on it, once you understand that this is the only thing there is, right now.
Do not worry about the future. Stop worrying altogether. Apply your rage to the present moment. Transform rage into vigor. Do not fight the future and do not fight in the future. Be clear about the present, about this very moment.
Your rewards are nothing to worry about either, they will come to you when their time has arrived -- worrying will only delay them and prevent you from receiving what you deserve.
Realize that you do not have to suffer to achieve what you want. You decide whether suffering is part of your experience or not.
Drop any goal that isn't worth pursuing anymore; do not let your countless started, semi-finished, and never followed-up upon projects divert your focus. They are worth nothing and only add to your sense of failure. Get rid of the clutter.
Set up a hierachy of time and desire. You cannot have everything you dream of immediately. Even if you skip sleep and eating, you are not going to accelerate the pace with which your dreams are made real.
Set yourself up for success by accepting what you have, as the ground in which to plant the seeds. Do not resist the situation you're in for you set up your future failure as long as you fail to accept the present.
Do not break down and destroy your previous achievements in order to follow a new idea. Recognize the foundations that are laid out for you and your creation. Build on top of what you have -- whatever that may be.

There is another way that runs parallel: see and set your goals as plans to improve your current experience of the present, whatever their outcome may be, regardless of the time it takes to successfully complete them, if they are ever going to be completed, that is.

Labels: clarity, discipline, education, goals, gtd, how+to, inspiration, lifehacks, lists, mind, motivation, personal+development, practice, productivity, tips, willpower, wow

Understand Pain to Train More Efficiently

edited by Alexander Becker

It doesn't have to hurt in order to work, especially not on an everyday basis, but an always and infinitely comfortable workout is no guarantee for success either. There is no reason to run away from the slightest air of pain, as much as you don't need to run away from hunger. Enjoy your pain as long as it lasts.

Have you ever trained to accomplish full splits? This hurts and it has to.

You can choose from three different kinds of pain.

First, there is the pain of muscles that are brought to their maximum in a controlled training situation. Your workout is breaking up the muscle fibers which subsequently heal and grow bigger and stronger as a result. You want that pain.

Then there is the pain of injury: it hurts and at the same moment you know that you should stop your workout immediately. You certainly don't want it but you need that pain in order to prevent further serious damage to muscles, joints, or ligaments.

Another form of pain, the most stressful and the most desirable one, while at the same time the hardest, is the pain of endurance, where the mind offers to shut down the muscles long before they are technically due. Your body would thankfully give in. It is an art in itself to signal the mind that you understand that there is still a long way to go -- sometimes literally, think marathon -- and that the body is physically capable of working the load. You convince the mind that its efforts in telling you to stop will be ignored.

The pain stays the same, whether you run the double or the quadruple distance, the trick is to surrender to the continuous pain and to proceed anyway. The reward is a solemn state, which is achieved when this royal pain is conquered with marathons for example, with wall chairs, with willpower plus discipline. Nothing more.

It is this pain that you don't really want nor need, in fact it is -- to a certain extent -- a game that your mind is playing with you. The more you resist and endure, the more your mind will respect you and finally cooperate with you in your effort to excel.

You need willpower to successfully finish heavy, painful workouts, you are even able to overcome the pain of injury with sheer willpower -- take care though -- but in order to conquer the pain of endurance you have to combine willpower and discipline. This is where real training with massive results begins.

Pain is weakness leaving the body. Mental weakness, that is.

Labels: discipline, education, endurance, exercises, fitness, health, how+to, inspiration, lifehacks, marathon, mind, motivation, pain, personal+development, sports, theory, tips, training, willpower, wow

Exceptions Create Variety

edited by Alexander Becker

To make an exception or to deviate from an established discipline, often induces guilt or the feeling of failure.

Yet by deviating from -- not giving up -- self-imposed discipline, the discipline itself is trained in its flexibility, not in its strength.

Exceptions expand situations. Exceptions weaken the impact of resolutions but they also uncover hidden facets of otherwise known circumstances. Exceptions lead to conclusions that would never surface by sticking to all too perfectly executed, robotic routines in any area of life.

It is important to accept that exceptions have to remain exceptions. There is no reason nor sense in declaring any exception the new standard -- that is taking the path of least resistance. It is the continuous tension between discipline and exception that acts as a creative force and reflects what being human is about.

Exceptions are means to creation, they divert attention, and create variety, they are seeds for events yet to unfold. Embrace and live each exception, indulge in it, and honor and appreciate it for what it is: a gift.

One exception... when the goals are clearly set and agreed upon, exceptions are not permitted. Some paths have to be followed without exceptions.

The mind, like any muscle, has to be moved in as many ways and in as many angles possible. Exercises have to take that into account.

Labels: discipline, exceptions, exercises, goals, lifehacks, mind, theory, training, wow

Resolve to Improve

edited by Alexander Becker

As with most human issues, healthy eating is not about being perfect. You won't be able to eat perfectly anyway. Yet most people set the threshold too high and keep eating what there are eating, reasoning that they are not going to be able to keep up their discipline anyway.

So what? Eat one apple as soon as possible and ideally eat it instead of something unhealthy. Too hard? Eat it in addition.

You not only make the first step but you improve your health in a practical way that you can build upon. Every little thing, every decision in favor of good health is great. You don't need to change any habit -- at least not for now -- eat exactly what you always eat but add that apple and you will end up healthier than ever before.

The idea is, of course, to raise your awareness but you don't need an elaborate diet plan or starvation routines or a mean workout program to get that beautiful life started.

Eat an apple today, add a glas of water and a walnut and you are better off than yesterday. That apple will have a hard time counterbalancing the junk food that you may be addicted to, but it won't travel unnoticed through your body either.

Resolve to improve something. Everything accumulates over time.

Labels: apple, diet, discipline, goals, motivation, nutrition, personal+branding, personal+development, wow

Tracking and Evaluating Progress

edited by Alexander Becker

The habit of regularly recording and comparing specific data -- as much diverse, significant data as possible, is an easy to implement measure and the most efficient tool to use while working on your goals.

You want to lose or gain weight? Start by measuring and recording your weight once a day, at a fixed time. As a note, I always suggest not to count calories but you may want to count your calories and are free to write them down too.
Keep your financial goals in front of you and make sure to update and track the progress and evaluate the development over time regularly and often.
Workout: Make sure to log the number of repetitions for each exercise you do. Try to ignore people making fun of your training journal, success is much harder to achieve without clear, measurable, and visible goals and subgoals. Besides, how would you ever be able to improve your marathons without being able to compare your runs over time?

The mere sight of comparable records and the recognition of often obvious trends -- ups or downs -- is a great motivator. You don't want to write down a higher weight than yesterday, or a lower balance on your account for today. Just make sure to be brutally honest with yourself.

Archive your data! You may motivate yourself with past achievements in different, measurable fields by looking at your goals' and eventually your life's statistics. You can archive your files in basic ways or you can go creative with printing out graphical charts, pies, or whatever technique suitable for visualizing your progress.

The medium you use to keep your records is not important, you can use pen and paper, your computer's text editor, a spreadsheet program, or one of the various online tools like Backpack or the convenient Google Spreadsheets which lets you import and export your data in various formats.

For fitness-related data, I use a pen and paper solution with custom forms printed out and neatly kept in a binder. This way, the records are always accessible without the need for a computer or internet connection. I do transfer some data into a spreadsheet on the computer to have progress automatically calculated but the initial recording is tree-based.

If you can measure it, you can improve it.

Labels: accounting, diet, discipline, evaluating, exercises, google, health, log, measurement, personal+development, progress, tracking, training, wow

Diets and Exceptions: One Day Off?

edited by Alexander Becker

While I definitely get pleasure and satisfaction from cycling between extremes, I do think that the weekly binge eating excess is a worthwile target to knock down and leave behind for good.

Many people say they need that regular day off and that it would be impossible for them to completely avoid their sweets, candy, and pastries.

Could you tell when you'd arrived at your naturally healthy lifestyle? Would you know when you were really there?

The day you don't crave those sweets anymore will be the first day of that conscious, healthy, beautiful life.

One more thing. Exceptions are just that: exceptions. They are surely permitted, even desired occasionally to maintain that sense of freedom, while regular, weekly, scheduled exceptions are nothing more than excuses.

Let's try to get over excuses.

Labels: binge+eating, diet, discipline, exercises, health, personal+development, wow

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