Amir Afianian — Writing

How decision fatigue is silently killing your productivity and what you can do about it

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 09:00:00 GMT

The marvelous journey to excellence can be terribly unfair. Unfair in that we are constantly under the influence of vicious enemies that lead us astray. Worse yet, we are oblivious to these enemies. They hit us, but we don’t know where from. One of these sinister enemies is decision fatigue.

What is Decision Fatigue

If you have ever been to a gym pulling up weights, or if you have ever been out running, you probably have reached moments where you’re so tired that you cannot simply continue. Thus, you Give Up. In other words, you are physically fatigued and you lose performance drastically.

Fatigued Muscle is Analogous to a Fatigued Brain — picture by Stephen Wood

The precise same thing can occur to your mental faculties. Decision fatigue is the state where you are drained of all your willpower due to making decisions. Decision fatigue hunts everyone from ordinary prisoners to the prestigious supreme court judges.

The Hefty Costs Of Decision Fatigue

There are too many people, and too few human beings. — Robert Zend

Most of what we consider the feats of the human brain — imagination, self-control, analytical thinking, decision making, etc. — is regulated by a brain region called prefrontal cortex (PFC). Your PFC needs a specific fuel to work and that fuel is glucose — A simple sugar that your body manufactures from the food you eat. When you make decisions, you are burning this limited fuel. Hence, your PFC — the region that gives you the power to think and decide, monitor your behavior, and control your impulses — is now left with an empty fuel tank.

As a result, after a decision-heavy workday, you come home feeling depleted and you simply procrastinate on whatever you had promised yourself to do. You might have wanted to go running around the block but now, you don’t feel like it. You might have wanted to muster up your willpower to attend to your side hustle and craft your next blog post, but your brain defaults to the path of least resistance and you find yourself sitting on the couch rewatching another episode of Game of Thrones. Penalty on productivity is one of the consequences of decision fatigue. There are darker impulses that can be left unchecked in a state of decision fatigue.

When the governor of New York, Eliot Spizer hired a hooker that led to his downfall, when the governor of South Carolina snuck off to Buenos Aires to visit his girlfriend, and when Bill Clinton indulged in making up with his intern, they were all subject to the occupational hazard that comes with being, as President Bush once described himself, “the decider.”

But, fortunately, you can outsmart your willpower and avoid the traps of decision fatigue.

How to Prevail Decision Fatigue and Increase Willpower

1. Routines: Automate the Garbage Decisions

I put it so bluntly because there are daily decisions we have to make which are utterly unimportant and yet, they consume from the very same precious and limited willpower supply we have for a day. Such decisions are: What do I wear? what do I eat? Do I take the bus to work or a taxi? Which task should I work on?

Extraordinary Achievers Eliminate Daily Unimportant Decision Making

This is why all extraordinary achievers like Obama, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., always wear almost the same clothes and they all have very specific morning routines. So, make a list of such decisions and plan for them once and for all. Save your precious willpower for more important tasks.

You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. — Barack Obama

2. Circumvent Decision-Fatigue by Committing

Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort — Paul J. Meyer

The sheer thought of wanting to do something is profoundly fickle. If you want your thoughts and resolutions to crystallize into action, schedule them and write them down. Whenever I find myself procrastinating on some idea, I guarantee its execution by writing it down and providing it with a precise schedule.

The effectiveness of writing my plans down is bombastically fascinating. So much so that I went a step further and adopted the bullet journaling system which is now an extension of my brain.

It is now my conviction that writing down elicits commitment and commitment crystalizes into action.

3. Prioritize Your Commitments and Remove Micro-Decisions

“If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.” — Jim Collins

If you make a list of tasks, make sure you prioritize them. Otherwise, you will fall back into the same trap: having to decide which task to carry out first. Thus, prioritize your tasks, preferably the night before. This will minimize the decision you have to make regarding your productivity.

4. Bypass Decision-Fatigue by Precommiting

I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, no living man, or men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me, But death — not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die! — Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer

Precommitment is an effective strategy that would prevent you from having to rely on willpower in the first place. The Essence of the strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path. You anticipate that you will face lucrative temptations to stray you from your path; so, you make it impossible — or somehow make it disgraceful, sinful, or unthinkable — to leave the path.

Precommitment is what Odysseus did to get past the luring and deadly songs of the Sirens. He had himself lashed to the mast with orders not to untie him regardless of how hard pleaded to go to the sirens.

His men precommited differently, by plugging their ears that would make them oblivious to the enchanting songs of the Sirens.

Do you want to prevent yourself from indulging in the social network while you have to focus on your projects? Precommit by blocking your access to them.

Do you want to make sure you go to the gym? Precommit by promising a friend that you will be at the gym. Keep precommiting and you will be endowed with something valuable that relieves you from having to precommit or rely on willpower anymore: A HABIT.

5. Eat Your Way Out of Decision Fatigue

Never trust a glucose-deprived brain for anything important.

If decision fatigue is the result of making decisions and losing glucose, then we can refuel our willpower by providing more glucose. Studies on willpower show that drinking a coke swiftly boosts willpower and thus, provides the brain with the fuel it needs for analytical thinking, decision making, etc.

But, sweets are the worst in terms of providing willpower fuel because they provide a quick boost followed by an immediate crash which will leave you craving even more sweets.

The better options are the foods that will provide you with a gradual and steady fuel such as most vegetables, nuts (e.g. peanuts and cashews), many raw fruits. (e.g. apples, blueberries, and pears), cheese, fish, meat, olive oil, and other good fats.

So, if you had a decision-heavy day and still have more important decisions to make, eat your way out of the decision fatigue.

6. Leverage Your Environment Against Decision Fatigue

A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being; and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer of the man with his surroundings. — James Allen

If you are about to go on a diet, and if your home is filled with lots of tempting sweets and snacks, you are going to have to constantly make the decisions to avoid eating them. This will immediately lead to decision fatigue and leave you wide open to the claws of upcoming temptations.

Ironically, studies show that people with the most self-control spend less time resisting temptations than others. That’s because they’ve leveraged their environment to empower them by removing the temptations.

7. Remove the Required Micro-Actions to Ensure the Real Action

Whenever you entertain the thought of doing a task, your subconscious mind quickly measures the sum of all the required mico-actions towards that task.

Let’s break down a popular action to its comprising micro-actions: practicing music, let’s say Guitar. Here are the required micro-actions:

Grabbing you Guitar case
Opening it up
Pulling out the Guitar
Putting away the case
Setting up to note sheets
Holding the Guitar
Starting to play

Micro-actions 1–5 add up to a lot of decisions to be made and your subconscious dissuades you by inducing a feeling of resistance.

Thus, to ensure execution, simply remove as many micro-actions as possible. In the practicing Guitar example, put your Guitar, out of its case, and put it on its stand in your room.

Next time you decide on playing guitar you only have to take two micro-actions: Grab it and start to play.

Final Words

Willpower is not something you can wrestle with. To tap into its endless benefits, and also to avoid its perils, you will be better off outsmarting it.

Happy thriving

Veto power: The only weapon you need to crush your temptations

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 09:00:00 GMT

You have promised yourself not to take that extra chocolate chip cookie, then, 10 minutes later you are staring with awe at its empty case …

You have promised yourself to go jogging in the evening and suddenly the laziness monster creeps in and dissuades you from taking action.

In a single day, we succumb to one in every six temptations regardless of our efforts to resist according to studies conducted by Florida State University.

It turns out that if we could get rid of these tempting impulses, we would be far ahead in life.

The following technique is discovered by neuroscientists and if you cultivate it through practice, you will be virtually free of the commands of your temptations and impulses. You will no longer be subject to your impulses. Rather, you will become the master.

What is Veto Power and How to Use it?

Willpower is the capacity to restrain our impulses, resist temptation — do what’s right and good for us in the long run, not what we want to do right now.” — Roy Baumeister

To inhibit distractions you need to be aware of your thoughts and internal mental processes. This will give you some room to catch the wrong impulses before they take hold.

This is what happens in your brain before you take an action:

Imagine a simple act, as the desire to move your finger, or stretching your hands to grab your phone.

What science has recently revealed is that half a second before a voluntary movement, the brain sends a signal called an action potential, which relates to the movement about to occur.

This action potential happens long before (half a second) you are consciously aware of the desire to move. Your brain decides “I will grab the phone” about 0.3 seconds before you are aware of it.

Once you are aware of this desire to move — be it grabbing your phone or moving your finger — your brain has made the decision for you 0.3 seconds ago.

After this point, there is 0.2 seconds during which you are aware of being about to move, but haven’t yet. This 0.2-second window is a decent amount of time, long enough for the mind to notice the urge and intervene.

Put differently, you don’t have much power over what you will desire to do, but you have this veto power to intervene and reject it.

It would be far easier for you, to exercise this veto power during this 0.2-second window, otherwise, that impulse gets momentum and is much more difficult to suppress.

In the words of Dr. Jeffrey M. Schawrtz:

It seems that you may not have much free will, but you do have “free won’t”

This is the essence of I have talked about so far:

How to Actually Use the Veto Power Effectively

At the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done.”
― Thomas A Kempis

Many things on paper sound very lucrative. This technique is quite powerful in itself. But there are a couple of caveats along the way which might prevent you from gaining the most of it.

Firstly, the use of veto power requires awareness and mindfulness.

You can use this veto power to suppress any destructive impulse — from the desire to devour that delicious chocolate to the desire of venting off anger.

But, in the hit of the moment, what happens is that you probably won’t even remember that you have this mighty veto power in your arsenal.

Thus, ideally, when the impulse arrives we want the thought of having this veto power to come along with it, and we want it as soon as possible; otherwise, we will miss that golden 0.2-second window to use it.

The most simple way to gain this awareness and establish this association (between impulses and veto power) is to constantly expose yourself to this idea.

What I would recommend you to try, is to write it somewhere that keeps reminding you about it.

I usually put such dramatic insights into the background of my phone. Or I write it on a sticky note and post it where I am constantly exposed to it.

I use my monitor a lot, so it looks like this for me:

Veto Power Consolidation — photo by livelikepros

Secondly, you have to make use of this technique almost automatic.

The simple way would be to exercise it regularly. Of course, you know it already. But here’s the catch, it doesn’t have to feel boring or feel like a burden. You can make this process far easier by remembering the following simple fact (which is rooted also in neuroscience):

Remember that each time you exercise this veto power, the next time it would be slightly easier for you to do it.

If you follow these simple steps, i.e. reminding yourself and keep using this veto power, you will reach a point where it gets almost automatic. It becomes a part of your personality.

Consequently, you would be a more disciplined person.

So, remember to suppress the impulses as soon as they arise, before they suppress your progress.

Why we struggle with self-control — the problem of two minds

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 09:00:00 GMT

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life:

“A war is going on within us,” he said to his grandchild.

“There are two wolves inside all of us. One wolf is white, good, altruistic, generous, and kind, and the other wolf is black, mean, lazy, greedy, and angry.”

“The two wolves are in a constant war inside us.”

The grandson, asks, with awe: “But which one will win, grandpa?”

And the grandfather says (there is usually a pause before delivering the spiritual punchline — wait for it …)

“The one which you nourish.”

How often do you find yourself in a tug-of-war between a part of you which wants to pursue a healthy and productive lifestyle and the other part of you which wants to lie down on a couch have strawberry cheesecake while watching Friends for the 10th time?

And have often do you wonder:

What is the root of so many conflicts? Where are these two wolves coming from?
How can I feed the white wolf and help it triumph (hence, be healthy, wealthy, happy, and wise.)
How can I tie the hands of that sinister and self-sabotaging wolf?

I’ll address all the questions here.

First, let’s identify the root of all the struggles between the good and the evil.

The Problem of Two Minds

The Black Wolf

Evolution has two main purposes: ensuring your survival and reproduction. Thus, towards these ends, it has instilled within you, instincts, impulses, and urges that compel you to fulfill its purposes.

Back then, for instance, when food was scarce, the more fatty and sweet food you had, the more reservoir of energy you would pile up, and in case of long famine, you would survive. That is why you have the instinct to find fatty and sweet food delicious.

These instincts (desires for food), urges (desire for sex), and feelings (anger, fear, laziness), have evolved long before we — the homo sapiens — emerged they are all the manifestations of our inner black wolf.

These instincts were evolved to ensure our survival until things started to change …

The White Wolf is Born

Imagine this: It is 100,000 years ago, and you are the top-of-the-line homo sapiens. Just a few generations before, the black wolf would guarantee your survival:

Find food (cravings)
Reproduce (the urge for sex),
Avoid the danger or fight them (fear or anger)

But now, being part of a society, you would need other tools for survival. You would still need to pursue food and sex but you also needed “not to piss off anyone in the process.”

Even if you had the craving and the urge, you couldn’t just take your neighbor’s buffalo burger and have sex with his mate and get away with it.

Therefore, you needed new skills to win friends and influence people. You needed new mental modules to put a cap on the impulses of the black wolf.

Hence the white wolf was born to provide you with self-control. (I say born but it actually took thousands of years till it developed.)

The War Begins

Dualism — Photo credit: Republic of Mind

Evolution prefers to add on to what it has created, rather than starting from scratch or replacing what’s already there.

It means that the white wolf was born and grown under the shadow of the black wolf. And this is the very source of the conflict you sense when facing temptations, procrastination, etc.

You’re on a diet and your gaze locks on the strawberry cheesecake.

You want this so much. But you can’t. But you want. But you can’t. You know what you need to do, but you aren’t sure you can handle this.

This is the war of the wolves in your brain.

And now the million-dollar question: What can we do about it?

Getting Rid of Your Black Wolf?

It is tempting to think of our self-control system to be the superior “self,” and regard our primitive instincts as the vestige of our evolutionary past.

Sure, back then when we lived with dirt all over us they might have saved us well, but now, they’re just getting in the way, leading to empty bank accounts, health issues, and sexual encounters for which one has to apologize on national TV.

“If I only could get rid of these instincts …” you might say.

Not so fast. Although not always beneficial, it is a terrible mistake to think you should conquer your instincts completely.

But why?

Well, medical case studies attest how crucial these primal instincts are for our health, happiness, and ironically self-control.

A bizarre case involves a woman who lost her midbrain during brain surgery, and consequently, she lost her ability to feel fear and disgust. As a result, she developed a habit of overeating until she got sick. Even worse, she was frequently found sexually proposing to family members. Not such a good role model for self-control. As Kelly McGonigal — health psychologist at Stanford puts it:

Without desires, we’d become depressed, and without fear, we’d fail to protect ourselves from future danger. Part of the self-control challenge will be finding a way to take advantage of, and not fight, such primitive instincts.

What does it mean?

Does it mean that we can or should reconcile the two wolves towards a shared goal?

Getting Help From The Black Wolf

Fear, disgust, pain, laziness, etc., are all different cloaks of the black wolf that you can use to effectively exercise your self-control and crush your temptations.

The essence of this approach is to associate what you are craving to do (smoking, eating junk food, etc.) with something disgusting, or painful in your mind.

Here’s an example.

Walter Mischel, the brilliant mind behind many studies on willpower and self-control, was a chain-smoker.

One day when he was walking through the halls of Stanford University’s medical school, he sees a terrifying sight: A man is being wheeled down the hall, strapped to a gurney; his eyes wide-open, staring at the ceiling with green dots on his body.

A nurse explains that the patient had cancer and was being taken for another radiation session. The green marks were there to direct the radiation.

“I could not shake that vivid image of the consequences of my addiction from my mind,” Mischel recalls.

And, this is how he used this repelling experience to quit smoking for good:

Cigarettes were my continuous temptation, and I had to change them into something that disgusted me in order to cure my addiction. Whenever I felt a craving (at first this was often), I inhaled deeply from a large can filled with old, stale cigarette butts and pipe debris. The can had a concentrated nicotine odor intense enough to be nauseating. […] I supplemented this step by deliberately reactivating that haunting image of the cancer patient to make the “later” consequences of smoking as salient and vivid for myself as possible. […] It took a few weeks of struggle, but ultimately it worked.

Visualizing such terrifying scenes is not fun at all but it is one of the most powerful ways to crush any addiction or temptation.

If the situation is life-threatening or causing you misery, summoning the black wolf for help is a quick way to salvation.

But what about the white wolf? Didn’t you say you can nourish it to make it mighty? Unyielding to the reign of the black wolf?

Self-Control Workouts — Nourishing The White Wolf

Neuroscientists now posit that if you ask your brain to do math every day, it gets better at math. If you ask it to worry, it gets better at worrying. If you ask it to concentrate, it gets better at concentrating.

By the same token, can you ask your self-control to get better? In other words, can you feed the white wolf and take it to the gym?

The answer is an exciting YES.

Now, what does training for self-control look like? This is how Kelly McGonigal — Stanford psychologist — suggest you do it:

You can challenge your self-control by planting temptation traps around your home, a chocolate bar in your sock drawer, a martini station by your exercise bike, the photo of your very married high school sweetheart taped to the fridge.

So, you are forced to exercise your self-control regularly.

This way of increasing willpower is similar to what Baumeister and Dianne Tice — the pioneering psychologists on willpower studies — have found.

In a lucky experiment, they discovered that the bothersome advice — “Sit up straight!” — caused the most significant improvement in the willpower of participants. And the reason: It required them to override their habit of slouching.

This is the key to empowering the white wolf:

Regularly, engage with activities that is burdonsome or requires overriding a simple habit.

Here are some ideas:

Start using your non-dominant hand for routine tasks. I’m right-handed and from three years ago I started brushing my teeth, holding my spoon, opening doors, etc., with my left hand.
Another training strategy is to change your speech habits, which also require mental effort to modify. For instance, try breaking the habit of peppering your discourse with like and you know.

I have experimented a lot with willpower and self-control. The most effective approach that I have found to work is this:

As a rule of thumb, when facing any task, decision, etc., if you don’t feel like doing it, that is exactly what you should do; and in the long run, what happens is that you become comfortable being uncomfortable and that’s the ultimate freedom.

But, does it have to be so painful to increase self-control?

Well, there’s actually a better way.

Taking The White Wolf to The Gym

We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. — Archilochus

If you want a simple and powerful way to increase your self-control, then you need to meditate.

Neuroscientists have found that meditation has a wide range of benefits for self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness.

In her book, willpower instinct, Kelly McGonigal writes:

People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at self-control skills. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. Regular meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex [the seat of self-control] as well as regions of the brain that support self-awareness.

The good news is that you don’t need to practice for a lifetime or become a monk to see the benefits. Studies show that just three hours of meditation practice leads to improved attention and self-control. And after eleven hours, those changes are readily visible in your brain (through the fMRI imaging technique.)

So if you are now ready and excited enough to meditate, here’s the minimalistic approach to do it.

The five-minute breath focus mediation:

Stay still and put: Seat up straight on a chair with feet on the ground. It’s important not to fidget and not even scratch an itch meanwhile. That’s the physical foundation of self-control. Resisting the impulses.
Turn your attention to the breath: Close your eyes and focus on your breathing (whether on the sensation of breath passing your nostrils or on your belly moving …)
Get back your attention to the breath: When you notice your mind wandering (and it definitely will), just bring it back to the breath. This is the critical step of meditation, catching your mind wandering and taking it back to your breath.

The practice of taking attention back to breath causes blood flow to the pre-frontal cortex which is the brain equivalent of lifting weights at the gym.

A crucial question here is, how do you know if you’re doing the meditation right?

No one describes a successful meditation session better than Tim Ferriss:

What if you think of your to-do list, past arguments, or porn for 19.5 minutes out of 20 minutes of meditation? Do you get an F in meditation? No. If you spend even a second noticing this wandering and bringing your attention back to your mantra (or whatever), that is a “successful” session.

Final Thoughts

Thanks to the modern architecture of our brain, we have two rulers in our brain each of which competing to get the reign of our behavior.

But there seems to be a third self in play too. Our awareness, which notices the conflict between the other two selves. A judge that can intercede. A leader that can direct the force of both selves to a greater good.

Educate and train this leader. As Horace once said:

Rule your mind, or it will rule you.

How I finish a 300-pages book every week and remember all the key ideas

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 09:00:00 GMT

So many books, so little time. — Frank Zappa

If you resonate with the quote above, then I’m thrilled to share with you how I satisfy my zest for absorbing as much knowledge as possible.

Normally, I finish a 300-page book in less than a week.

Noteworthy to add that I merely read non-fiction books, and as odd as it may sound, I retain more than 80% of the key materials in the long run.

So good to be true?

Well, there is no magic at work here. All you need to have are the followings:

A zest for knowledge
The right method
The right tools
The right mental techniques

Given that you are reading this article, I presume you already satisfy the first requirement. So let’s move on to the second.

2. Read Faster: The Right Method

Think before you speak. Read before you think. — Fran Lebowitz

All of my endeavors to find the best reading techniques were to address these two cravings of mine:

Read Faster — Photo Credit: Giphy

Reading much faster
Retaining much more

I faced two obstacles in this journey.

First, I constantly found myself lost in the endless maze of my thoughts.

Second, even if I was focused, I simply couldn’t read fast enough and none of the speed reading techniques worked for me.

After experimenting a lot, I finally found what actually works:

Exploiting both the visual and auditory senses for reading.

So here’s the method: I follow the text while listening to it. That’s it.

All you need is the text of the book (either in the form of e-book or hard-copy) and an audio version of the book.

This simple method without any further tweaks utterly resolved my issue with focusing.

Addressing my speed of reading at this point was a piece of cake. I simply started to increase the playback speed of the audiobook.

Initially, 1.25x, then 1.5x and now I can readily follow the audio and the text at 2x speed. (Given that I’m not reading a book like how the mind works by Steven Pinker.)

3. Read Faster: The Right Tools

I have two different sets of tools that enable me to follow this combinatory method (these are my personal picks and I am not affiliated with any of the following.)

The first set of tools are my iPad and a marvelous application called PDF Expert.

This application has a wonderful text-to-speech functionality and you can adjust the speed of the narration.

Thus, you get to look at the text, while the app is reading it for you.

As for the narration, it is surprisingly smooth and human-like. Using PDF Expert I no longer have to purchase the audiobook separately.

The second set of tools involves my kindle and the Audible application.

I get to have the text on my Kindle app and have the audiobook on my mobile. The audible application lets you adjust the narration speed as well.

We’re done for the speed part, what about the retention?

4. Remember More: The Right Mental Techniques

Our brain naturally is not adept at retaining facts, numbers, etc. What our brain is remarkably good at, however, is retaining images; hence the quote:

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Let’s have a brief experiment. Look carefully at the following image for 20 seconds:

Captured by Johannes Plenio at Pixabay

Now, try to recite as many things as you can.

How many did you get? 10? 15? 20?

With the 20 seconds limitation, could you pull off the same feat if the words were written down on a paper?

When it comes to memorizing, it’s not about how strong your memory is, it’s about how efficiently you use it.

So, burning facts into your memory is as simple as converting them into images, which works enormously well for retention.

Now, what about accessing and retrieving those facts?

There is one more step to guarantee successful retention and retrieval: putting those images you mentally constructed into a place that you know by heart.

This is the very concept of a memory palace.

Memory Palace by Sam Falconer

In summary, this is how I chisel a book into my brain using the memory palace technique:

For each book, I designate a place with which I am quite familiar such as my childhood school, or my office, etc. Let’s say I choose my office for now.
Next, for each chapter, I consider an area in that office, such as a room or the kitchen.
Then, I transform the chapter title I’m about to read, into a memorable image. Images that invoke emotions within you, images that are provocative, humorous, extraordinary or exaggerated, in general, stick far better than other images.
After constructing the image for the chapter’s title, I put it on the entrance of that area (room, kitchen, etc.)
From now on, if there are any facts that I want to remember, again, I turn them into images and put them in that room, one by one, side by side.

How to Retrieve From Memory Palace

After filling the office with images, remembering the chapters and facts would be as simple as an imaginary walk through the office or the place you have chosen. That’s it.

Final Thoughts

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice — Anton Chekhov

I must point out that I view knowledge as merely an initial attempt towards growth.

The “knowledge is power” is true only so long as you absorb as much as you can and synthesize them into action. That’s how you rise above the crowd.

I hope this article helps you at least with the first part of the equation, absorbing as much as possible.

Happy thriving.

A 3-tier system to unleash the productivity monster within you

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 09:00:00 GMT

I consider myself a maniac when it comes to productivity. And if you’re like me, you’re familiar with the enormous satisfaction that comes from producing high-value output.

But, whether you aspire to direct your productivity force into your job or into your side hustle, you can’t deny that the pandemics and the work-from-home movement are putting some obstacles along your way.

In fact, a recent study conducted by Atirnity — an enterprise digital experience management company — shows that prolonged remote-working entails a significant decrease in productivity. They have even coined the phrase “productivity tax” to refer to the issue.

So, whether working from home or in the office, how can we ensure continued productivity?

What follows is a 3-tier system which is the distillation of my 8 years of studying and experimenting with the productivity habits I’ve learned from the Titans — from Elon Musk in tech to Anthony Trollope, one of the most prolific novelists in history.

A System-driven approach to productivity

If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. — Scott Adams

I have recurringly noticed this pattern, that almost all the extraordinary achievers have a system with these three elements:

A vivid idea of what is their high-value task.
A robust schedule for practicing that high-value task on a regular basis.
A tangible self-monitoring system to track and monitor their system.

Let’s examine each.

1. Find your high-value task

“Focus on signal over noise. Don’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t actually make things better.” — Elon Musk

The first step to creating an effective productivity system is finding your high-value tasks.

But what defines a high-value task and why is it important?

According to Cal Newport — the best selling author of Deep Work:

If you want to go high on the ladder of achievement you have to consistently produce high-value results.

But here’s the catch.

Producing-high value results require that in your lists, you give the priorities to the items that end up producing a valuable outcome.

Therefore, you have to make the distinction between high-value productivity ( the ability to consistently produce highly-skilled, highly-valued output) and the traditional task-productivity ( the ability to organize and execute non-skilled obligations).

For instance, if you are an aspiring writer, it means that you must designate the majority of your time to write (instead of getting wrapped up with the trivialities such as growing your twitter account).

“The amateur tweets. The pro works.” — Steven Pressfield

After figuring out your high-value task, you must go for the next level of the system: attending to your high-value task regularly.

2. Time-block your days

In a digital economy where distraction is a currency, if you can focus on one thing, for 3 to 5 hours, and block out all the distractions, you’ll have a huge leg up to do the deep work and connect dots that are connected. — Tim Ferriss

Your next step in designing your productivity system is to dedicated specific time-blocks to your high-value task on a regular basis.

Ramit Sethi REGULAR Time-Blocks

Ramit Sethi — who made a multi-million dollar business out of a tiny blog — sets out 3 to 5 hours EVERY Wednesday.

And here’s an important note:

It DOES NOT work if you connect 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there, adding up to 3 to 5 hours. They’re just not the same. Protect your time-block as if they’re sacred.

So, what happens if you don’t?

Most probably you will fall prey to the banalities of trivial checklists and to-do lists.

Doing what’s urgent rather than what’s important.

3. Establish a robust self-monitoring system

Anthony Trollope. one of the most prolific novelists in history — who is a perfect embodiment of this 3-tier productivity system — had cultivated the habit of writing each day for 3 hours early in the morning.

As for the self-monitoring, for each of his novels, he would draw up a working schedule, typically planning for 10,000 words a week, and then kept a diary:

“In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labor, so that the deficiency might be supplied. There has been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”

A blister to my eye. You won’t find anything on psychological literature that would so aptly summarize the efficacy of self-monitoring.

My own high-value task that I practice daily is programming or devouring related tutorials. This is how I conduct the self-monitoring part:

Given such a rigid systematic working, what happens to creativity, you might ask?

Well, I‘ve been entertaining the same thoughts when I was reading Murakami’s book what I talk about when I talk about running.

And here’s where I found my answer:

If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy: focus — the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value. — Haruki Murakami

In sum

With the new normal, it’s important to consider ways to maintain your productivity. Start by figuring out your high-value tasks: What activities generate the highest returns on the time you invest.

Allocate specific and regular time-blocks to your high-value tasks. Establish a monitoring system to track how much you engage with your high-value tasks

Then exile all distractions to better stick to your time blocks. Remember that laser travels far because the photons are focused towards the same direction.

Private, “protected” attributes in Python — demystified once and for all

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 09:00:00 GMT

Never, ever use two leading underscores. This is annoyingly private. — Ian Bicking, Creator of pip, virtualenv, and many others

How many times have you encountered these words: Public, Private, and Protected in the world of Python? And how many times those one leading underscores _, two leading underscores __ puzzled you, trying to make sense of them?

Well, let’s demystify them once and for all. What’s the use of private and “protected” attributes. And, how they look like in the Python world.

What’s The Point of A Private Attribute Anyway?

Consider this scenario: You have a class named Vehicle which internally uses an instance attribute named horn and does not want to expose it. Now, you want to subclass Vehicle and name your own class MyCar.

If you create your own horn instance attribute inside the class MyCar you will be overriding the Vehicle’s horn instance attribute. What happens as a consequence is that you will smash all those methods in Vehicle class that are using the horn attribute. Worse yet, it would be a headache to debug the problems that ensue.

To prevent such scenarios, the developer of Vehicle class would make the horn attribute private to prevent such inadvertent accidents.

Private Attributes in Python

In the world of Python, unlike Java, there’s no way of creating a private modifier. What python gives you is a simple mechanism to prevent accidental overriding of an attribute in your class if someone wants to inherit from your class.

In the previous example, if you wanted to make the horn attribute private, you would need to prefix it with two underscores: __horn.This way, Python will store this attribute name in the instance __dict__ prefixed with an underscore and the class name. Thus, in the Vehicle class, your __horn attribute becomes _vehicle__horn and in <em>MyCar</em> class it becomes _MyCar__horn.This feature of python goes by the delicate name of name mangling. Here’s the code for what we discussed so far:

Example 01 — Private attributes where the names are mangled

The important note here is that name mangling is all about safety and not security. It will not keep you protected against intentional wrongdoing; just, accidental overriding. In the example above, you can easily alter the value of a private attribute simply by doing this: v1._vehicle__horn = 'new value'.

“Protected” Attributes in Python

Neither name mangling feature, nor the skewed appearance of the names written as self.__horn is loved by the Pythonistas. In public repositories, you’ll notice that developers often prefer to follow the convention of adding just one leading underscore (self._horn) to “protect” them from inadvertent modification.

Critics suggest that to prevent attribute clobbering it’s enough to simply stick to the convention of prepending the attribute with a single underscore. Here’s the full quote from Ian Bicking I cited at the beginning of the article;

Never, ever use two leading underscores. This is annoyingly private. If name clashes are a concern, use explicit name mangling instead (e.g., _MyThing_balabla). This is essentially the same thing as double-underscore, only it’s transparent where double underscore obscures.

I must note that an attribute with a single leading underscore _ does not mean anything special to the python interpreter. But, it’s one of those strong conventions in the world of Pythonistas. If you see one, it means that you should not access such attributes from outside the class. You can even observe that even in some corners of the official Python documentation, attributes with a single leading underscore _ are called “protected.”

Even though the practice of “protecting” an attribute using a single leading underscore is common, it is not as often to hear them being called “protected” attributes. Some even call them “private.”

In Sum

The main point of making an attribute private is to prevent the accidental overriding of that attribute by the subclasses. The official way to make a variable private in python is by adding two underscore e.g.self.__privateattr. But, in the python community, there’s a strong preference to just add a single leading underscore when making a variable private. You may often hear or see that such attributes are called “protected.”

So, just know that making a variable private in python is about safety and it’s enough to protect them from inadvertent overriding by adding a single leading underscore: e.g. self._protected.

What separates elite achievers from average performers?

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 09:00:00 GMT

In the 1990s, a trio of psychologists from the Universität der Künst in Berlin embarked on a quest to answer the question: What separates elite achievers from average performers? Their resulting research became the basis of the so-called “10,000 hour rule,” popularized by psychology writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers — the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve true mastery of a skill. (Gladwell has pushed back on the interpretation over the years, but the popular conception of the rule has taken on a life of its own.)

For their study, the researchers gathered a set of star violin players, ones who professors believed would become world-class performers. Let’s call this group the stars. They also put together another group: students who were serious about the violin, but as their professors noted, not in the same league as the stars. We’ll call this group the mediocres.

All of the students were asked to log, in detail, how they spent their time each day. Through the diaries, the researchers observed that the stars put in an average of about 50 hours of practice per week. In today’s world, where we valorize nonstop hustle, a number this high makes sense: To get better at anything, we believe, we simply need to put in more time.

But what may come as a surprise is that the mediocres also put in 50 hours of practice per week. Yes, the group of average performers spent around the same amount of time as the elite players working on their scales, fine-tuning their tempo, and doing whatever else is necessary to improve their violin performance.

So what separated the two groups, if not hours devoted to their art? There were two big differences.

First is that the stars spent almost three times more time on deliberate practice than the average group. Deliberate practice is the uncomfortable, purposeful type of practice where you stretch your abilities. You’re not just running through what you already know; you’re challenging yourself to expand what you can do.

Second is when the two groups did their practicing. The mediocres scattered practices throughout the day, while the stars consolidated their practicing hours into two specific periods. As shown in the graph below, there are two prominent peaks: one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

The proportion of time spent practicing as a function of time of day for the mediocres (left) and the stars (right). Credit: “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance,” Psychological Review.

From this chart, we can see that the best of the best tended to stick pretty strictly to two sessions a day, a schedule that sounds more stressful than it is: when the researchers asked the players to estimate how much time they dedicated each week to leisure activities — an important indicator of feeling of relaxation — the stars were significantly more relaxed than their less exceptional peers.

That’s a point worth saying again: The students who practiced harder — who committed themselves to a rigid plan of several energy-draining hours each day — were less stressed overall. They put in the hard, uncomfortable work, and then they left it behind.

When you’re trying to improve in something, whether you’re a student trying to cultivate your mind or a worker striving to take your career to the next level, then busyness and exhaustion should be your enemies. If you’re constantly stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. You’ve become a victim of the delusion that productivity necessarily equals value.

To join the stars, do less. But do the work with absolute, intense, and hard focus. And when you’re done, be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.

7 months of keto and 10 juicy benefits I’ve enjoyed

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 09:00:00 GMT

Optimizing my cognitive performance and productivity has been my life-long passion and obsession.

7 month ago, along this journey of optimization, the turn came for my next read which was titled: Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar — Your Brain’s Silent Killers.

The promise of this book was just captivating: No more mental fog, increased energy, laser focus, better sleep, you name it. Basically whatever you need in your toolbox for massive productivity.

So, I gave it a try. It’s been 7 months now and the keto diet has become an indispensable part of my lifestyle, part of who I am.

Here is a brief intro to the keto diet and the juiciest benefits that I’ve reaped so far.

What is the ketogenic diet

Fat is not the enemy in your diet. Fat is your friend. — Jimmy Moore

The food you consume can be categorized into three macronutrients: Carbohydrates, protein, and fat.

Your body converts carbohydrates and protein into glucose (read: Sugar) and uses it as its energy source.

In keto diet, however, you significantly limit your carbohydrate and protein intake (to 5% and 25% of your daily calories respectively); and healthy fats will constitute the majority (75% ) of your daily calories.

After several days (3 to 21 days ) — when your body consumes the last remnants of glycogens (carbohydrates stores) — your liver starts breaking down fats into ketones. This process is called ketosis.

When in ketosis, instead of glucose, your body uses the ketones as its energy source.

And here’s what I love about it.

The fuel that these ketones provide is like the rocket fuel and it brings you a whole different experience. Now let’s look at some of the benefits of this rocket fuel and the keto diet.

The Benefits of Keto that I’ve Enjoyed So Far

Keto diet is like the holy grail of health. It is used to reverse type II diabetes, fight cancer, etc. And more recently, the keto diet is considered as a powerful option in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and even autism.

Fortunately, I just had to use the keto diet for productivity purposes. And here are the benefits.

1. Far, Far more Energy

This one excites me the most. When I am not in keto, I have to take a couple of naps during the day to stay sharp. Having lunch is like having sleeping pills and at the end of the day, I often feel lethargic (I have 12+ hours workdays).

When in keto, however, I feel like my body is running on nuclear power. I don’t need naps during the day, lunch doesn’t function as sleeping pill, and when I arrive home, I can still continue working (I’ll expand on this one).

2. Laser Focus and Mental Clarity

The mental clarity that I experience is like seeing the world in(UHD). The effect of the keto diet on mental performance is so prominent that even navy SEALS are using it to be even more effective.

There are two reasons that the keto diet shine when it comes to focus and energy.

The first reason is that in keto you remove a myriad of toxins that you may have in an ordinary diet. For instance, many grains (like wheat) contain gluten which has significant amounts of glutamate. Glutamate is an excitotoxin. Namely, it overexcites and kills or damages brain cells the results of which include brain fog.

The second reason involves the process of keto itself. When in ketosis, the liver produces beta-hydroxybutyrate (beta-HBA), which in the words of Dr. Perlmutter “is the most important fat for brain energy utilization.” (this is the rocket fuel I mentioned earlier.)

3. No More Ups and Downs

The problem with regular diets is the ebb and flow of your energy level. You drink a sip of coke and your blood gets filled with glucose and your energy touches the roof; and then, of course, it crashes down and you crave more sweets.

I used to experience these annoying \ ups and downs every day. I would realize my lack of energy through two signs: either I would crave food, or more prominently, I would mentally be bored.

When your body runs on ketones, however, you will enjoy a steady flow of energy throughout the day.

The reason is that in keto when your body runs out of the fuel (e.g. the fat you provided by having breakfast) it will tap into your stores of body fat and converts them into keto. This is unlike the regular diet where you have to provide your body with food to help it restore your energy.

4. Rapid Weight Loss

Even though it was not among my goals at all, I lost 15 kilos (33lbs) in the first four months.

I must note that part of the initial rapid weight loss is due to losing body water. And second, I do regular intermittent fasting in keto which helps you boost your way into ketosis and burn fat on a rapid rate (more on this later.)

It is perfectly fine to do keto just to lose weight — as many people do — the efficacy of keto in weight loss is just fascinating.

5. No More Cravings

Eating carbohydrates makes you hungry. If you don’t eat carbohydrates, there is no hunger.” ― Jimmy Moore

Before keto, craving for lunch used to be a huge buzz killer for me. Hunger and craving for food would emit noise on my focus. Even though I enjoyed the lunch, it would eat away almost 2 hours during which I could be productive.

So, every day, I would torment myself for losing productivity either due to not having lunch or due to having lunch. Not to mention the lethargy that would hit me after the eating (often happens when you have a carbs-heavy meal which I had.)

But when in keto, and your body is fat-adapted, you will barely feel hunger or cravings.

Even if I choose to have lunch, a keto meal just provide me with more energy and focus. I would not trade the lightness that comes after a keto meal with a burger with extra cheese.

6. Better Sleep — I Mean, Much Better Sleep

I’ve tried many weird techniques — from polyphasic sleep to Dr.Seth Robert’s elephant tranquilizer cocktail — to reduce my body’s need for sleep. So far, the most stable result I’ve had, without feeling suicidal after a while, has been with the keto diet.

I used to take 8–8:30 hours of sleep each night with a couple of naps during the day. (Too much, I know. It agonized me for a long time). But now, I’m up and running after 7 hours of sleep.

Better yet, I no longer need naps during the day.

7. The Delicate Pride of Defeating The Giants

Adhering to keto is not easy. In fact, the keto diet has almost the lowest compliance rate (less than 10% according to Tim Ferris.)

Thus, when I seat at the lunch/dinner table with my friends or colleagues, there’s always this sense of pride with me that I am breaking the giant’s horn.

8. Willpower Gamechanger

Willpower and discipline have been another obsession of mine. I’ve written many articles on it capturing my experiences. I’ve got to admit, when I read about the keto diet and its effect on metabolism, it put everything I knew about willpower under a huge question mark.

Perhaps you’ve heard that willpower is like a muscle that is worn out when you use it. It’s true. For the willpower to work, studies suggest, you need brain fuel which is primarily glucose.

And what is so mind-boggling?

In keto, there is no glucose!

There are ketones which I said earlier are like rocket fuel. Your body always has access to stores of fat in your body (in contrast with glucose) to produce ketones and fuel your brain and body.

One way I profoundly feel this increased willpower is monitoring my working hours. In a normal diet around 5–6 PM I used to lose the mood for working. When I lose the mood, I know my willpower is depleted and I have to tap into my discipline to continue which can be extremely hard.

When on keto, however, I easily work past 9:00 PM without feeling any resistant or boredom. I just have the mental energy to continue doing any thought-demanding task.

I know, sounds too good to be true.

9. Keto Effects Cascades Throughout Your Life

In one of the chapters of his classic book Power of Habits, Charles Duhigg talks about keystone habits:

Keystone habits are “small changes or habits that people introduce into their routines that unintentionally carry over into other aspects of their lives.” — Charles Duhigg

Embarking on keto was pushing the first domino to a better life for me. I rebooted my meditation habit, and after a couple of months, I started doing daily workouts.

So, keto can be the first step of massive changes in your lifestyle.

How To Hack Your Way Into Ketosis In Less Than Three days

I would suggest you try this hack after you have familiarized yourself enough with the keto diet. There is a lot of nitty-gritty involved that I cannot cover in this article. Assuming you have done you’re homework, here’s the hack:

This plan involves three simple steps:

Bulletproof Fasting
Lots of walking
A fat-heavy dinner

I. Bulletproof fasting

In the first morning, make a bulletproof coffee instead of breakfast. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s the recipe:

1tbs coconut or MCT oil.
1tbs butter
coffee

Mix them all in a blender and enjoy the rich and delicate taste. This will be your breakfast.

Then, you have to skip lunch and take a long walk.

II. Take a long, long walk

Your body starts entering into ketosis when you have depleted all the glycogen (carbohydrate stores) in your body.

Walking or working out, boost the consumption of glycogens. So, the more you move, the sooner your body starts entering into ketosis.

I have tried 1 hour of walking, and on the third day, I was deep into ketosis.

III. Have a Fat Bomb for Dinner

For dinner, you must have a fat bomb which can amount to 1000 KCal.

In keto, 75% of calories come from fat, 20% from protein, and 5% from carbs. But, in terms of volume, half of your plate must be vegetables, 1/4th fat, and the remaining 1/4th would be protein.

Photo Credit: FatForWeightLoss

The recommended — and most healthy fat — in keto are: Olive oil, butter or ghee (especially grass-fed ones), avocado, MCT oil, coconut oil, eggs.

Feel free to make your steak in 50 grams of butter along with tons of vegetables.

If you repeat this process for three days, you will find yourself into the holy state of ketosis very fast.

Final Thoughts

Keto is not a diet. I believe it’s a lifestyle. A lifestyle that optimizes your health, focus, and energy.

Whether you aspire to trim your body, reverse diabetes, or boost your productivity and cognition, keto could work for you. You just have to give it a try (at least two months.)

If you make it to the end of the second month, I believe you won’t go back to your previous eating habits. The benefits are just too enormous to ignore.

And to make it to the end of the second month, you must have a strong why. Keto went sharply against all my eating habits. But, my passion for productivity paved the way.

How to increase your willpower by hacking your heart rate

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 09:00:00 GMT

If you could ask for a superpower (not a fantasy one), what would it be?

Personally, I would definitely opt for iron willpower.

Why?

Because it’s the ultimate freedom. You would be no longer at the mercy of your emotions, temptations, or desires.

You would do the right thing at the right time, whether you feel like it or not.

Unlike fantasy superpowers, this one is attainable by learning how to shift your physiology into a state that boosts your willpower.

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) — The Body’s Mighty Willpower Reserve and How to Unleash it

Paul Ekman — the brilliant mind behind the discovery of micro-expressions — made a striking observation when he was studying the expression of emotions on the face.

Ekman discovered that the effects of emotions and physiology on one another are mutual.

When something makes you happy, for instance, your body releases endorphins and you laugh as a consequence. This genuine laugh has a signature on your face with specific signs:

Raised corners of the mouth
Raised chick bones
Crows feet around your eyes

These facial expressions are the result of your emotions, the sensation of happiness.

And the striking part?

Ekman discovered that if you mechanically mimic or fake the signatures of happiness on your face, your body releases endorphins and you actually feel happy in consequence.

But, what does it have to do with increasing willpower?

Suzanne Segerstom, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, has found that, just like happiness, self-control has its own biological signature and that is: heart rate variability.

Heart Rate Variability — The Signature of Willpower

Basically, heart rate variability (HRV) is the time between every two of you heartbeats which could vary slightly per pulse.

Heart Rate Variability — Photo Credit: firstbeat

Studies show that when someone successfully exerts self-control, his/her HRV is increased.

Heart rate variability is such a good index of willpower that you can rely on it to predict who will resist temptations and who will give in. For instance, recovering alcoholics whose HRV goes up on the sight of alcohol are more likely to stay sober.

People with higher HRV, are better at ignoring distractions, delaying gratification, and dealing with stressful situations. They are less likely to give up on difficult tasks even if they initially fail and receive critical feedback.

So, the more the HRV, the more willpower.

Now the million-dollar question?

After all, it’s not just a smile that you can fake. Then, how can you actually manipulate your heart rate variability?

There are three ways.

1. Breath Your Way to Increased HRV and Willpower

There’s a simple breathing technique through which you can replicate the signature of self-control and increase your HRV.

Next time, when the temptation kicks in, or you have to do a project but you don’t feel like it, use this technique to claim your mighty willpower. Here’s how it goes:

Slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute. That would be ten to fifteen seconds per breath.

Heart rate variability steadily increases as your breathing rate drops below twelve per minute.

Do this for just 2–3 minutes and you will marvel at results.

Pro tip 1: Do not hold your breath when trying to slow down your breathing. Otherwise, it sparks stress.

Pro tip 2: It would be much easier to control the exhale. If you had trouble, focus on slowing down your exhale (imagine you’re venting off the air through a straw in your mouth).

This technique is powerful enough to crush your impulses. But, you have to mindfully exercise it every time that those impulses strike.

What if there would be a drug or solution that simply worked permanently, keeping your HRV to the roof most of the time?

2. The Willpower Miracle — How To Significantly Increase Heart Rate Variability Permanently

Megan Oaten, and Ken Cheng, having just concluded their study on a new treatment for self-control, were stunned by their findings.

Their guinea pigs included six men and eighteen women. After two months of treatment, they showed improvements in attention and their ability to ignore distractions.

But, that was not all.

They had reduced the drinking, smoking, and caffeine intake — while nobody asked them to. They had adopted healthier eating habits, spending less time watching TV and more time studying. They even procrastinated less.

Now you might be wondering what this miracle drug is.

Photo Credit: Sasin Tipcha AT PixaBay

The treatment was not a drug at all, it was physical exercise.

The participants exercised an average of just on time per week for the first month. Then, they upped it to three times a week — again, voluntarily.

Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that a scientist could hope for. After several weeks, brain scans show significant growth in both gray matter — brain cells — and white matter — which helps neurons to communicate faster.

Now you might be asking how much exercise do you need to reap the benefits.

This is the response of Kelly McGonigal — the best selling author of willpower instinct: “How much are you willing to do?” A 2010 analysis of ten different studies found that the biggest mood-boosting, stress-busting effects come from just 5-minutes of exercise.

Your next question might be, what kind of exercise is the best? To which McGonigal responds: “What kind will you actually do?” Gardening, yoga, swimming, or walking your dog around the block, your brain doesn’t discriminate.

So, go with the activity that you enjoy the most and make it part of your life.

There’s one more hack.

The super workout which significantly increases heart rate variability and willpower.

Photo Credit: Marisa AT PixaBay

3. The Super Workout to Increase Willpower and HRV

This super workout is nothing but meditation. Meditation is one of the major contributors to increased heart rate variability.

That’s not all.

One of the areas in the brain that mediation drastically affects is the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) of the brain which is the seat of all the human feats i.e. imagination and creativity, willpower, decision making, problem-solving, and of course focus.

Brain scans of people who have meditated for just 11 weeks show significant growth in the gray matter of their PFC which translates to having more focus and willpower.

And if you are wondering how you can start meditating, here’s a simple but superbly effective recipe:

To meditate, designate a specific time and place for it.
Sit comfortably with a straight spine and your feet on the ground, Close your eyes and start breathing.
There two major points here. First, you have to focus on your breath. You can focus on the sensation of inhaling or exhaling in your nostrils or you can focus on your chest or belly when your breath moves them.
Second, as soon as your mind wanders and you notice it, take your focus back to your breath.

It is crucial to know what constitutes a successful mediation session: Let’s say you designate 10 minutes to meditation. Even if you spend 9 minutes and 50 seconds of the session thinking about your todo-list or the last season of Game of Thrones, but, even if for once you manage to bring back your mind from these thoughts to your breath, it means you had a successful session.

Increasing your HRV is followed by a boost to your willpower. Think of the possibilities that stronger willpower can open up for you.

Happy thriving.

Summary

Effects of emotions and physiology are mutual.
Your emotions have a physical or biological signature which can be objectively measured.
If you fake the signature of emotion, you will manage to actually induce that emotion onto yourself.
The signature for willpower is increased heart rate variability (HRV).
You can increase HRV temporarily and reap the benefits by the breathing exercise. Namely, lowering your breath to 4–6 count in each minute.
You can permanently increase your HRV by doing exercise.
The most effective exercise to increase HRV and willpower is meditation.

The proper starting point for a massive change — according to Epictetus

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 09:00:00 GMT

We all try to seize every opportunity — like the new year — to commit to bold and lofty ideas. We do this of course because we valorize progressive change and action.

Ironically, an emphasis on getting started, though currently popular, is a bad starting point.

I will draw insight from the first-century Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, as to what constitutes the good starting point:

In every affair consider what precedes and follows, and then undertake it. Otherwise you will begin with spirit; but not having thought of the consequences, when some of them appear you will shamefully desist.

Epictetus does not renounce action. Yet, he believes prior to action must come a careful inquiry of what it actually takes for accomplishment.

He puts forth Olympic games as an example. Though enchanting on the surface, closer scrutiny of what it requires to partake in the event reveals that you must:

…conform to rules, submit to a diet, refrain from dainties; exercise your body, whether you choose it or not, at a stated hour, in heat and cold; you must drink no cold water, nor sometimes even wine.

For the most aspiring ancient athletes, Epictetus implies that such prerequisites would perhaps eclipse the glamor of pursuing the Olympics. But not for everyone as he further adds:

When you have evaluated all this, if your inclination still holds, then go to war.

I am quite fond of this framework for decision making. Mastering the reality before you commit.

My thrill got amplified when I was recently reviewing studies on increasing willpower. Of the many techniques offered, a particularly potent one is quite akin to Epictetus’s advice. That is the if-then plans.

The if-then Plan of Action

Sticking to resolutions requires willpower and willpower is known to be an exhaustible resource.

A smart way to go around the willpower is what psychologists call implementation intention.

The idea is to reduce the amount of time and effort you spend controlling your thoughts and directing your behavior.

You make highly specific plans for automatic behavior in certain situations. For instance, you precisely specify what you will do IF you are tempted by a fattening food at a party.

This method takes a form of if-then:

If x happens, I will do y.

This approach is surprisingly effective and is included in every willpower book you read (Willpower instinct, The marshmallow test, Willpower by Baumeister, etc.)

I find the two following reasons powering such ancient/modern advice:

You armor yourself by anticipating the perils and pitfalls along the way. Thus you won’t be caught by surprise when facing hardships. Hence not being panicked, your subconscious will not dissuade you from continuing the pursuit.
The anticipation of pitfalls and planning for them offloads the cumbersome process of decision-making to automatic processes.

When pondering a bold endeavor, Epictetus teaches:

First master the reality that precedes achieving your goal.

This means that you put aside the allures of your pursuit and embrace the reality of what it actually takes to succeed. I often find this process surprisingly difficult and sobering.

If you acutely attend to this matter, you realize that there are many pursuits for which much knowledge of their reality is readily attainable, yet many ignore this step, jump in, and almost always fail (e.g., writing books, getting hired at a certain company, etc.)

Sometimes we don’t want to know the truth because we already like the plan we have (I run into this problem all the time!).

Most undertakings, if put under scrutiny, will be discarded.

To Epictetus, that’s fine.

What holds significance is that if you stumble upon that rare endeavor for which your affection still holds — even after an acute examination — in the words of Epictetus: “Go to War”

The best strategies to boost your willpower — backed by science

Sat, 01 Jun 2019 09:00:00 GMT

The shared attribute of mega-successful people, I’ve come to notice, is doing the right thing on the right time regardless of what emotions (boredom, anxiety, etc.) they have.

They seem to have forged a superpower which helps them to easily cultivate valuable habits. This superpower, I now believe, is willpower and discipline.

Having strong willpower is quite liberating in that it frees you from the grips of your emotions. As the Navy SEAL commander, Jocko Willink puts it:

Discipline equals freedom. — Jocko Willink

I’ve been studying and experimenting the ways to increase my willpower for 5 years now and I can summarize the three followings as the core strategies of increasing willpower:

Consider your willpower as the fuel in a fuel tank. To increase your willpower, you can take one or all of the following ways:

Refuel when you have no willpower left. — By consuming specific foods that I’ll explain.
Enlarge the fuel tank so that you have more reserves of willpower — By doing specific mental exercises that target your pre-frontal cortex (the seat of willpower)
Optimize the fuel consumption, so that you burn less willpower for the same activities — By leveraging psychological principles.
Finally, you can learn to go beyond willpower by adopting strategies that bypass the usage willpower altogether.

But before I tell you how to increase your willpower, you’d better know what depletes it throughout a day.

I. Killers of Willpower

Sometimes we are devils to ourselves
When we will tempt the frailty of our powers,
Presuming on their changeful potency. — Troilus, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

If you are to have willpower and self-control, you need to have the mental energy for them. Alas, many activities — and not just acts of self-control — draw from the very same source of energy.

Let’s get to know these vampires first.

1. Resisting Temptations

If you decide to quit smoking or go on a diet, it means that you have to frequently resist temptations and impulses. As science has discovered, resisting temptations is one of the most metabolically expensive activities that your brain does.

Put differently, resisting temptations burns a lot of your willpower fuel.

2. Daily Struggles

Don Baucom, a veteran marital therapist, would come up with an odd recommendation for couples in dispute: Go home from work early!

He had figured that people were using up all their willpower on the job, and later in home, they would fight over trivial issues, the issues that could be readily prevented if they had slightly more reserves of willpower.

You might presume you have one reservoir of self-control for work, another for dieting, another for exercise, and another for being nice, etc.

But, you consume the same supply of willpower to deal with wildly different things: frustrating traffic, tempting food, annoying coworkers, demanding bosses, all of which lead to an empty fuel tank leaving you vulnerable to temptations and mood swings.

3. Decision Fatigue

Decision making, especially when the outcome carries heavy importance, puts a hefty tax on the reserves of willpower.

The state where you are drained of all the willpower due to making decisions(like when coming back from shopping) is called decision fatigue.

That is why people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg always wear the same outfit and all the iconic figures have a specific morning routine: To minimize unimportant decision making.

4. Premenstrual Cycle (PMS), and Chronic Pain

During premenstrual part of their cycle (PMS) which is called the luteal phase, the female body starts channeling a high amount of its energy to the ovaries and to the related activities. More energy to these regions means less energy for the rest of the body.

That is why in this phase the body craves food and chocolate and other sweets since they provide an instant jolt of energy.

I have terrible PMS, so I just went a little crazy. — Actress Melanie Griffith, explaining why she had filed a divorce only to immediately withdraw it

Similarly, lack of sleep, anxiety, and chronic pain are among the chief killers of willpower. Thus, by keeping the above in check, you are one step ahead in the game.

The lessons so far are:

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

Thus, as Roy Baumeister — the author of Willpower: Discovering the Greatest Human Potential — suggests:

Focus on one project or habit at a time.

If you’re trying to quit smoking, It would be tremendously harder if you also strive to go on a diet and start learning Spanish.

If you constantly fail at your 5-items new year’s resolution, the problem is not you, it’s your list.

All of the above, if taken too far, leads to a condition called ego depletion. This is the condition where you have diminished all your willpower fuel, hence, you lack the ability to regulate their thought, feelings, and actions.

Ready to take your willpower to the next level?

II. What is the fuel of willpower?

The willpower fuel that I kept talking about is glucose, the simple sugar manufactured in the body from all kinds of foods, not just the sweet ones.

The glucose that is provided by digestion, flows through the bloodstream and in addition to acts of willpower and self-control, it is used by muscles, heart, liver, and immune system.

The immune system consumes gobs of glucose when the body is sick, that is why you feel tired and want to sleep during a disease. Your body is mobilizing all the energy to fight that disease.

Now that we know all the hunters of willpower, the question is what should we do about it?

Photo Credit: Riccardo Annandale

III. How to Refuel The Willpower

Never trust a glucose-deprived brain for anything important.

By now, you know that the more willpower fuel you have in a day the more self-control, analytical power, mood control, etc. you will have.

So a wise thing to do is to begin your day with a full tank. How? With breakfast.

We don’t want spike and crush recipe for breakfast. The ideal breakfast is the one that gradually releases the glucose into your bloodstream throughout the day.

Sweets. Sweets are the worst in terms of providing willpower fuel because they provide a quick boost followed by an immediate crash which will leave you craving even more sweets.

But, you can use it with tact: If you’re trying to quit smoking for instance and you are craving to light up one, you can have a sip of coke the boost of which would help you to resist its temptation.

So if you have a test, an important project, a meeting with your boss, don’t take it without enough glucose.

Gain Steady Willpower Fuel Through Slow-Burn Food

The body converts all sorts of food into glucose but at different rates.

To maintain steady self-control you’re better off eating foods with a low glycemic index, foods that are converted to glucose on a slower and more steady pace, such as most vegetables, nuts (e.g. peanuts and cashews), many raw fruits such as apples, blueberries, and pears. Also cheese, fish, meat, olive oil, and other good fats are among the super-fuels for the brain. Now, it’s time for a more lucrative way to increase willpower.

IV. Enlarging The Fuel Tank

The more the body suffers, the more the spirit flowers. — David Blaine

The practices in this part, focus on enlarging the fuel tank of willpower.

1. Willpower Workouts

In a lucky experiment, Baumeister and his colleagues found out that the bothersome advice — “Sit up straight!” — caused the most significant improvement in the willpower of participant in that it required them to override their habit of slouching.

They found that:

The key to enlarging the willpower tank is to regularly engage with activities that are burdonsome or require overriding a simple habit.

Here are some ideas:

Start using your non-dominant hand for routine tasks. I’m right handed and from three years ago I started brushing my teeth, holding my spoon, opening doors, etc., with my left hand. (This is also a piece of advice from the book: The willpower instinct)
Another training strategy is to change your speech habits, which also require mental effort to modify. For instance, try braking the habit of peppering your discourse with like and you know.

Photo Credit: Thomas Kelley

2. From Strength to More Strength

In laboratory experiments, the main improvements are found in resisting the effects of depletion. Namely, the last acts of self-control when you have exhausted all your willpower reserves.

Have you been to a gym pulling up weights? If so, you probably know that the last reps when your muscles are burning are the ones that are causing the biggest changes.

When I get home from work, totally exhausted, I don’t feel like folding each and single one my clothes. BUT, I know that if I do, it would be like that extra pull up at the gym.

As a rule of thumb, if I don’t feel like doing it, I know that’s what I should do; and in the long run, what happens is that you become comfortable being uncomfortable and that’s the ultimate freedom.

I had desires, I killed them, now I’m the master.

That’s not all, you can take one step further and use mental tactics that help you burn less willpower fuel in the first place.

VII. Strengthening Willpower — Optimizing Fuel Consumption

Mental tactics can help you consume the precious willpower fuel more efficiently or to bypass fuel consumption altogether. These tactics enormously help the sustainability of your resolutions by preventing you from going ego-depleted.

1. Precommitment

I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, no living man, or men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me, But death — not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die! — Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer

Precommitment is an effective strategy that would prevent you from having to rely on willpower in the first place.

The essence of the strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path.

You anticipate that you will face lucrative temptations to stray you from your path; so, you make it impossible — or somehow make it disgraceful, sinful, or unthinkable — to leave the path.

Do you want to prevent yourself from indulging in the social network while you have to focus on your projects? Pre-commit by blocking your access to them.

Do you want to make sure you go to the gym? Pre-commit by promising a friend that you will be at the gym.

Keep precommiting and you will be endowed with something valuable that relieves from having toprecommit or rely on willpower anymore: A HABIT.

2. Put Your Brain on Autopilot — The Power of Priming Effect

When stuck in the rainforest of Africa, his stomach ruined by various infections, his hopes gloomy, Stanley — Africa’s greatest explorer — would wake up every morning and shave his face with cold water.

Why would someone starving to death insist on shaving? It was a typical manifestation of the man’s orderliness, Stanley’s biographer replies.

In addition, Stanely always tried to keep a neat appearance — with clothes, too — and kept all his belongings organized. The creation of order has been an antidote to the destructive capacities of nature all around him.

Orderly habits can actually enhance self-control in the long run by tiggering automatic mental processes that don’t require much energy.

By shaving every day, Stanley could benefit the same subconscious effects of orderliness. He would invoke the spirit of discipline in himself simply through his morning routines.

3. Beyond Self-Control and Discipline

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Navy SEAL commandos have to pass a test called Hell Week which is a continual running, swimming, crawling, and shivering that they must endure on less than five hours’ sleep.

At least 75% of them fail and those who pass the test aren’t necessarily the ones with the most muscle. This is how a Navy SEAL commander points out the common quality of the survivors:

“They have the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear, and ask: How can I help the guy next to me?”

This is the key to following this approach:

Focus on lofty thoughts.

When people are asked to reflect either on why they want to do something or on how they want to do something, “Why” questions elevate the mind to higher levels of thinking which drastically enhances their self-control.

So, in the heat of the moment, when you don’t feel like moving even your finger, all you need to do, to bypass the willpower shortage, is to ask yourself WHY?

Assuming you have a strong “why” for what you’re doing, you will be propelled forward by its magic force.

4. Self-monitoring

Devising ways that make self-monitoring easy and inescapable is of the most effective strategies you can implement to conserve your willpower.

As one of the most prolific novelists in history, Anthony Trollope believed it unnecessary to write for more than three hours a day.

For each of his novels, he would draw up a working schedule, typically planning for 10,000 words a week, and then keep a diary.

“In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labor, so that the deficiency might be supplied. There has been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye,and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”

A blister to my eye. You won’t find anything on psychological literature that would so aptly summarize the impact of self-monitoring.

Those who keep a food diary, loose twice as much weight as those who don’t.

5. Public Commitment

You can take the effects of self-monitoring to its extreme by announcing it publicly.

Public information has more impact than private information. People care more about what other people know about them than about what they know about themselves.

A failure, a slipup, a lapse in self-control can be swept under the carpet pretty easily if you’re the only one who knows about it. You can rationalize it or just plain ignore it. But if other people know about it, it’s harder to dismiss.

6. Sacred Discipline

Religious people are less likely to develop unhealthy habits such as getting drunk, indulging in risky sex, smoking, etc.

They also score much higher in self-control than normal people.

The key to their self-control is discovered by McCullough:

The believers’ self-control come not merely from the fear of God but from the system of values they’ve absorbed, which gives their personal goals an aura of sacredness.

Photo Credit: Nik

You don’t have to be religious to reap the fruits of self-control; whether you are an agnostic or atheist:

Look for you own set of hollowed values.

That hallowed value can be a devout commitment to help others, a burning desire to improve others’ health or preserve the environment for future generations.

The more self-transcendent your value, the more motivation and fuel it will bring you.

7. The Mighty if-then Rules

I explained that making decisions consumes lots of energy and in case of being low on willpower, you will probably be a victim to decision fatigue and ego depletion.

A smart way to prevent this what psychologists all implementation intention.

The idea is to reduce the amount of time and effort you spend controlling your thoughts and directing your behavior.

You make highly specific plans for automatic behavior in certain situations. For instance, you precisely specify what you will do IF you are tempted by a fattening food at a party.

This method takes a form of if-then:

If x happens, I will do y.

So, before you are lured by that delicious chocolate cake at the party, you can prepare yourself with a plan like: If they serve chocolate cakes, I will refuse them all.

Or: If there is a buffet, I will eat only vegetables and lean meat

This approach is surprisingly effective and is included in every willpower book you read (Willpower instinct, The marshmallow test, Willpower by Baumeister, etc.)

The reason it works is that you outsource the mentally-demanding and uncomfortable rejection of the temptations to an automatic process.

8. Never Say Never

The promise not do do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. — Mark Twain

I saved the most cheery technique for the last.

When you are facing a powerful temptation such as giving in to food or to have another cigarette, the most effective way to confront it is to tell yourself I can have this later.

In the mind, it would be a bit like having it now and satisfies your cravings to a great degree.

It takes willpower to turn down a dessert, but according to studies, it’s less stressful on the mind to say Later than Never.

So:

When it comes to food, never say never. When the dessert cart arrives, don’t gaze longingly at forbidden treats. Vow that you will eat all of them sooner or later, but just not tonight.

VII. Conclusion

The benefits of willpower are stark. In the realm of prosperity and personal development, you can sum up a large body of research in the following sentence:

The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.

Even though the role of willpower is vital, you should not utilize it as your main strategy.

Studies about people with the most willpower are thought-provoking.

People with the most self-control spend less time resisting temptations than others. This was puzzling to the researchers until the explanation emerged:

People with the most self-control have less need to use willpower because they’re beset by fewer temptations and inner conflicts. They’re better at arranging their lives so that they avoid problematic situations.

You will need to cultivate your willpower muscle (enlarging the tank) which in turn gives you tremendous possibilities and will to act.

You will then use this “will” to make habits and then those habits will make your life for you. Take the first step to change, and your life will start to change.

Rule your mind, or it will rule you — Horace

You are born to resist temptations- here’s how

Wed, 01 May 2019 09:00:00 GMT

How often do you find yourself in a war between a part of you that wants to be healthy and productive and the other part of you that wants to devour the cheesecake while lounging on the couch watching Netflix?

In this war, sometimes the warrior inside you wins, and sometimes the cheesecake-loving monster.

Science has now discovered that winning this war is often determined by the state of your physiology. And the good news is that you can actually learn to deliberately shift your physiology into that state.

The best part?

You can train your body’s capacity to stay in this mighty state so that when temptation strikes, your default response would be that of self-control and discipline.

So, let’s see how you can awaken your inner warrior.

But first, you need to understand what does strawberry cheesecake have in common with a saber-tooth tiger.

A Tale of Two Threats — Cheesecake and Saber-Tooth Tiger

Imagine you’re strolling in the jungles of Amazon. Then you hear the bushes behind you jiggling. Suddenly, holy shit! A tiger jumps out and charges at you. What do you think at that moment? That’s right, you don’t think, you just run.

Fortunately, your ancestors had to deal with such threats and you inherit from them the mechanisms to for rapidly confronting them.

It is called fight-or-flight.

Here’s what actually happens in your brain in the words Daniel Goleman — the best selling author of Emotional Intelligence:

A visual signal first goes from the retina to the thalamus, where it is translated into the language of the brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual cortex,
where it is analyzed and assessed for meaning and appropriate response; if that
response is emotional, a signal goes to the amygdala to activate the emotional
centers. But a smaller portion of the original signal goes straight from the
thalamus to the amygdala in a quicker transmission, allowing a faster (though less precise) response.

On the sight of Danger, your amygdala controls your behavior before you are even aware of it.

He then continues to add — and this is critical to understand:

Thus the amygdala can trigger an emotional response before the cortical centers have fully understood what is happening.

So basically, your amygdala — the brain’s alarm system — inhibits your deliberate and thinking brain (the pre-frontal cortex) which is responsible for rational thinking and impulse control.

This rapid and autonomous state of your physiology is called fight-or-flight response. It makes sure that your slow and thinking brain does not get in the way by overthinking an escape plan.

But, what does it have to do with cheesecake and resisting temptations?

Cheesecake — A New Kind of Threat

Imagine now, you’re walking around the block and then BAM! Your gaze locks onto a delectable cheesecake on the bakery display case.

Photo Credit: thebusybaker

Before you can say “Oh, I’m on a diet”, you’re already pulling the handle, and the owner welcomes your tongue-hanging, mouth-drooling arrival.

What happens to your brain now? This is how Kelly McGonigel describes the situation in her best-selling book The Willpower Instinct:

At the sight of the cheesecake, your brain gives you a shot of dopamine which is embraced by the areas of your brain that control you attention, motivation, and action. Those dopamine messengers tell your brain that “You must have the cheesecake NOW, or you will suffer a fate worse than death.”

This is where we face a new threat. While you are being lured by the delicacy of cheesecake, part of you recalls that you have bigger goals, such as health, fitting into your jeans, etc. This part of you recognizes that cheesecake threatens your long-term goals.

But, unlike the tiger situation where you just flee from it, the automatic fight-or-flight response is the last thing you want.

So, what should you do now? Has the evolution endowed you with weapons to combat such threats as well?

The Willpower Instinct: Pause-and-Plan

Suzanne Segerstom, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, has found that, just like stress, self-control has a biological signature.

Self-control cascades series of changes in the brain and body that help you resist vicious temptations. Segerstom calls those changes the pause-and-plan response.

The pause-and-plan response has a crucial difference with fight-or-flight: It ignites with the perception of internal threat rather than external.

Inner-conflict

You are tempted to do one thing (smoke a cigarette, visit an inappropriate website at work, etc.), but you shouldn’t. Or you should do something important (finishing a project, writing your next blog post, etc) but you don’t feel like it.

This internal conflict rings the alarm; an alarm to protect you from your own self.

In such situations, the most beneficial response is to slow down, not to speed up (as the fight-or-flight does). Pause-and-plan is an instinct to help you put the breaks on your destructive impulses.

Here’s the catch though.

Even though like the fight-or-flight, the pause-and-plan is innate to human nature, you probably know from experience that it doesn’t always feel as instinctive and compelling as the cheesecake.

But there’s a fix!

HRV: The Body’s Mighty Willpower Reserve and How to Unleash it

The best and most accurate measure of pause-and-plan response is a weird thing called heart rate variability (HRV).

Heart Rate Variability — Photo Credit: firstbeat

The time between every two heartbeats slightly varies.

Astonishingly enough, when you are in a fight-or-flight state, heart rate goes up but the HRV is reduced, i.e. the time between each heartbeat is more orderly and equal.

But, when you exert self-control to resist a temptation, your heart rate goes down, but variability (HRV) goes up.

Heart rate variability is such a good criterion for willpower that you can rely on it to predict who will resist temptation and who will give in. For instance, recovering alcoholics whose HRV goes up on the sight of alcohol are more likely to stay sober.

People with higher HRV, studies show, are better at ignoring distractions, delaying gratification, and dealing with stressful situations. They are less likely to give up on difficult tasks even if they initially fail and receive critical feedback.

The ugly fact is thatو more than others, some people are lucky to have higher heart rate variability and as a result, more willpower.

This is why in the words of Segerstom:

Many factors influence this willpower reserve, from what you eat (plant-based diet, unprocessed food helps, junk food doesn’t) to where you live (poor air quality decreases heart rate variability — yes, L.A.’s smog may be contributing to high percentage of movie stars in rehab). Chronic illness and pain also drains your body and brain’s willpower reserve.

So, If you have more HRV, you have more willpower. Now the million-dollar question? How can you increase your HRV?

Breath Your Way to Increased HRV and Willpower

What follows is a simple breathing technique and is one of the few quick fixes you can find to actually boost your willpower in the heat of the moment.

In the face of temptation, slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute. That would be ten to fifteen seconds per breath.

Heart rate variability steadily increases as your breathing rate drops below twelve per minute.

Do this for just 2–3 minutes and you will marvel at results.

Pro tip 1: Do not hold your breath when trying to slow down your breathing. Otherwise, it sparks stress.

Pro tip 2: It would be much easier to control the exhale. If you had trouble, focus on slowing down your exhale (imagine you’re venting off the air through a straw in your mouth).

Slowing down the breathing activates a brain region called prefrontal cortex — the seat of willpower — and increases the heart rate variability. Consequently, it shifts your body brain and body from a state of stress to self-control.

Research shows that regular practice of this technique makes you more resilient to stress and strengthen your willpower.

It is such a powerful that there are HRV training programs to help cops, stock traders, and customer service operators to increase their willpower and self-control.

As an added bonus, it gives you a clear and calm mind in the face of stress and anxiety.

Summary

Both the fight-or-flight and pause-and-plan are the body’s way of managing the energy but in totally different ways.
When you have stress, you are in figh-or-flight state in which the body redirects energy to your muscle, leaving your prefrontal cortex hungry. As a result, you switch to an autopilot mode where you cannot think rationally.
Stress, then, is inherently incompatible with willpower and self-control.
The best measure of willpower is high heart rate variability (HRV). The higher the HRV, the higher your self-control and willpower in face of temptation.
A quick fix for boosting your HRV and willpower is to slow down your breathing to four to six breaths per minute.

When you are tempted a lot, all you need is to slow down.

The two best strategies to measure your productivity [and constantly increase it]

Wed, 01 May 2019 09:00:00 GMT

What do you think separates the most productive people you know from others?

Here are two clues from two of the most productive people that I know:

“I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.” — Elon Musk

And here’s the second one from Chris Brailey the author of Productivity Project:

What separates the most productive people from everyone else is that they make course corrections every week to gradually get better at everything they do. — (emphasis by me.)

So, the answer seems obvious: constantly make changes in your working routines and see how they affect your productivity.

But something crucial is missing here.

How do you measure your productivity? If you make some changes in your routine — let’s say waking up earlier — how do you know objectively if it has increased or decreased your productivity?

As the management guru, Peter Druker puts it:

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It.

Here are the best ways to actually measure your productivity which consequently, helps you hack and tweak it as you go.

The Two Strategies to Measure Your Productivity

In my quest to increase my productivity, I have found two useful ways that help me measure it in a tangible way:

Tracking Milestones: For example, the number of articles to write in a month.
Tracking time spent on working toward the milestones: for example, you can track the sum of the hours you spent on writing those articles.

But, which one is a better way to measure productivity?

This question plagued me for a long time until I figured:

It depends on the nature of your goal or task …

1. When to Measure Productivity by Tracking Milestones?

To know if tracking milestones is a good yardstick or not, ask yourself this simple question:

Is the task I’m going to finish, predictable?

If you have a lot of experience with the task, and the task has few unknows(like writing an article, or gathering sales data, etc.), then you will have a more sense of how productive you are, if you track milestones.

You know, for instance, writing an article is something that you can finish in a finite period of time. Therefore, you can use the number of articles you finish as the yardstick to measure productivity.

Now that you know how to measure your productivity, you can start experimenting with different hacks to see what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s an example:

A Case Study of How I Used Milestones to Measure and Increase My Productivity

When I started my blog, I would write 3–4 articles per month. So I decided to adopt Elon Musk’s advice and try to be more productive.

Followings are the simple hacks I practiced to increase my productivity. And thanks to my yardstick (number of articles written per month), I could measure and judge if the hack worked or not:

Initially, I would arrive home from work at 8:30. Then, I would have a dinner followed by a 20-minute nap (charged me for hours). After I woke up, I would start writing (from 9:15) until 12:00 PM. This way, I would produce 3–4 articles per month.
Then I started changing things. Instead of having a nap and waking up to start writing, I decided to sleep (around 9:30 PM) and instead wake up on 5:00 AM for writing. What a remarkable move I proudly thought. But it didn’t work. In the month that I followed this approach, I wrote only 2 articles.
The third approach I tried, led to a huge leap in my productivity. I usually finish work (my day job) at 7:00 PM. As a change, I decided to leave at 6:00 PM. Again, I would arrive home, have dinner followed by a nap and then start writing. But, this one hour of leaving work earlier, made a huge difference. In the month that I tried this approach, I wrote 6 articles.

This is why I believe that the bedrock of constantly increasing productivity is a solid system to measure it.

But there’s a subtle problem with using milestones to measure productivity.

Let’s say your goal is to prove a new mathematical formula or to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.

How do you know you’re being productive in such cases and how do you measure it objectively?

2. When to Measure Productivity by Tracking Time Towards Milestone?

Like the previous method, to know if you must track your time or not, you must ask this question:

Is the task I’m going to finish, predictable?

If the answer is no, you will have a better sense of your productivity if you track the hours towards finishing your task.

This is also one way that Cal Newport, the author of the best selling book deep work, follows:

The advantage of tracking hours, […] is that many of the important but non-urgent projects I pursue cannot be forced. I can commit, for example, to finishing a proof in a week, but this doesn’t mean I will succeed. Some proofs never come together; some take months (or years); others fall quickly. It’s hard to predict.

As a rule of thumb, if your task has a large number of unknowns and uncertainty, you can best measure your productivity by tracking hours of working hard on it. For me, such tasks are solving a programming problem, finding a vulnerability in an application, or doing research for an academic paper, etc.

This is how you can actually use this measurement system:

A Case Study of How I Used Time-Tracking to Measure and Increase My Productivity

To increase my productivity in my career, most often I track the duration of my focused-time. Here’s the sheet I use for this purpose:

The vertical axis is the hours (each square represents 30 minutes of focused work). The horizontal axis is the days of the month.

My goal each day is to make the colored bar taller and taller (which I find also motivating). Then, I make changes in my working routine to see what hack makes the bars grow.

You see the numbers 1 and 2 on the horizontal axis? On those two points, I have noticed an increase in my productivity and I have made notes on what I have done differently on those days.

What I had tried differently in those cases has been to start my days by planning every single minute of the day. Even though I was skeptical, it proved to be very effective. (I have written before on the amazing power of writing down your intentions and pre-commitment.)

That’s not all there is to tracking milestones or time.

In addition to being perfect measurement devices, both have other benefits.

The advantage of tracking milestones, for example, is the urge that comes with it to make you hustle and hammer down the task till it’s finished.

Whenever a task of mine (predictable) hits stasis or fall prey to procrastination, giving it a deadline is almost ensures that I get it done.

But there’s an evil lurking behind setting deadlines.

If your task lies in uncharted territory (like finding proof for a mathematic formula), and you set a deadline for it, you will most probably procrastinate on doing it (our brain hates ambiguity).

This is where time-tracking comes to rescue.

Again, in the words of Cal Newport:

Tracking hours ensures, at the very least, that these projects are getting a good share of my time, even if I can’t predict what will finish and when.

I believe just about anyone can tell which category a task belongs to, and that tells you how to measure and optimize its execution.

Flow: A productive antidote to anxiety and boredom

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 09:00:00 GMT

I discovered a gem in my obsessive pursuit of productivity. A marvelous concept called flow, and autotelic personality.

This concept of flow, or to put it more precisely, this framework, ended up being something far more than just a productivity tool. It bestowed me with a framework for both a productive and happy life. A framework that if you tap into, robs you of all the anxiety and boredom and fills the void with pleasure, joy, and growth.

When it comes to flow, the ultimate goal is to cultivate a personality which makes you capable of entering the flow whenever you desire. Such a person is called autotelic.

Autotelic people can enjoy situations that ordinary persons would find unbearable.

Autotelic people can manage to be happy even if lost in a desolate island or confined to a prison cell. They transform their agonizing conditions into a manageable and even pleasurable struggle and unlike other people, they do not succumb to the ordeals.

An autotelic person can turn a boring party into a vibrant one, a plateaued sex-life into a passionate one, a dull career into an engaging one, and a dreadful situation into a tranquil one.

As an autotelic person, you can invoke the flow as an antidote to any circumstances that might be plagued by boredom or anxiety.

To cultivate an autotelic personality, you have to first, know what flow is, and what are the comprising elements.

What is Flow?

Flow is the state in which you are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the concentration is so intense that there is no attention left to think about anything else, or to worry about any problem.

While you’re in the flow, self-consciousness disappears and you lose the sense of time, you are unaware of any stress or anxiety, and the experience itself fills you with delight.

In addition, flow-activities are intrinsically rewarding, the more you practice them, the more you seek to replicate similar experiences.

Flow — Photo Credit: Giphy

Flow, a productive antidote to anxiety and boredom

I have experienced all sorts of uncomfortable emotions for a prolonged duration of time, and anxiety has been the most torturous one.

There can be many reasons behind anxiety. But, all those reasons share the same root and that is the human’s ability to think about the future. This projection into the future, psychologists suggest, makes the mind chaotic. To alleviate anxiety, then, is to establishing order in consciousness.

One can establish this order in his/her mind by following one of the three paths. The path you choose to step into, can either make or break you in the long run.

Generally, there are three different paths that you can take to establish order in your consciousness and expel away the anxiety and/or boredom.

The destructive path: Examples include using alcohols, cigars, or drugs. Indulging in such activities momentarily establishes an order in mind that numbs the anxiety, and needless to say, at extreme costs.
The degenerative path: The second way to relieve the anxiety is through less destructive activities such as watching TV, Netflix, playing video games, and so on. And no, these activities are not benign. If you consider how much time you put into such activities and if you evaluate the long-term consequences you will realize that slowly and steadily you are degenerating. As Bob Dylan puts it:

“If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”

The Productive Path: The third way to banish anxiety or extinguish boredom, is to immerse yourself in a flow activity. Such activities in addition to relieving you of anxiety and boredom will cultivate and enrich your personality and character.

Almost everyone can experience flow through different activities. I, for instance, enter the flow most readily when I’m solving a programming problem. Dancing, rock climbing, chess, making music, reading an engaging book, etc. are some other examples of flow activities.

The question, now, is, what makes such activities flow-friendly, what are the conditions, and how can you design a flow activity of your own?

The Elements of Flow

An activity has to have three elements to provide a room for the flow. These elements are:

A Vivid Goal or Challenge — If you want to enter the flow through an activity, it has to have a specific and vivid goal. If you are trying to play the Piano, you know that the goal is to master a specific note. Or when you are practicing shooting, you know the ultimate success is to hit the bulls’ eye. But having just a goal doesn’t guarantee you to reach the flow which takes us to the second element.
Feedback and Measuring — For the goal you chose, you have to specify a way to measure your progress towards that goal. Having this feedback is essential to create the flow. In the case of shooting, gaining feedback is as simple as looking at the score panel. In the case of playing the Piano, you are constantly noticing how close you are getting to figuring out the note.
Matching the Challenge with Skills — If the challenge of reaching the goal you have chosen is far beyond your current skills, it will cause you anxiety. For instance, if as an amateur, you choose to play a complex Piano note, instead of entering the flow, you will be repelled by anxiety and frustration. If, on the other hand, the challenge of achieving the goal is far below your skills, it will cause you boredom. As a way of illustration, if you choose to play football with kids, the lack of challenge would soon drift you into boredom.

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

The flow channel

Flow and the Autotelic Personality

As I mentioned earlier, the ultimate goal here must be to reach the ability to enter the flow at will. The person who can achieve flow on demand has cultivated an autotelic personality. Autotelic persons live the happiest life.

Before I elaborate on what makes up for an autotelic person, there are some caveats I must point out that might prevent some people to cultivate an autotelic personality.

Internal barriers to flow

Some people might be constitutionally incapable of experience flow. Schizophrenics, for instance, suffer from anhedonia which literally means “lack of pleasure.” This symptom, psychiatrists suggest, seems to be a product of “stimulus overinclusion,”. This means that schizophrenics are condemned to notice irrelevant stimuli and to process information, whether they like it or not.

A profound implication lies in the above, if we fail to direct our attention we may, too, suffer from anhedonia or “lack of pleasure.”

A less drastic impediment to flow is excessive self-consciousness. A person who is concerned about how others perceive him. A person who is worried about creating the wrong impression, or indulging in something inappropriate is condemned to the same faith as schizophrenics: a cold an joyless life.

In addition to Schizophrenics and excessive self-conscious people, there is a third attribute that obstructs flow: being self-centered. Such people evaluate everything merely in terms of how it can benefit them. A flower is not worth a second look unless it can be used; anyone who cannot advance their desires and interests does not deserve further attention.

Both self-centered and self-conscious people fail to direct psychic energy towards achieving flow.

Towards becoming autotelic: How to enter the flow

Richard Logan, who has studied accounts of many people in extremely difficult situations, concludes:

People in harsh conditions survived by finding ways to turn the bleak objective conditions into subjectively controllable experience. They followed the blueprint of flow activities.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the author of the book “flow”, this is the behavior of autotelic people:

First, they pay close attention to the most minute details of their environment, discover in it hidden opportunities for action that matches their capabilities given the situation and circumstances.
Second, they set goals appropriate to their precarious situation, and closely monitor progress through the feedback they received.
Third, whenever they reach their goal, they up the ante and set increasingly complex challenges for themselves.

Christopher Burney, a prisoner of the Nazis who spend a long time in solitary confinement during WWII, recounts a fairly similar experience:

If the reach of experience is suddenly confined, and we are left with only a little food for thought or feeling, we are apt to take the few objects that offer themselves and ask a whole catalogue of often absurd questions about them. Does it work? How? Who made it and of what? And, in parallel, when and where did I last see something like it and what else does it remind me of?…So we set in train a wonderful flow of combinations and associations in our minds, the length and complexity of which soon obscures its humble starting-point…. My bed, for example, could be measured and roughly classified with school beds or army beds…. When I had done with the bed, which was too simple to intrigue me long, I felt the blankets, estimated their warmth, examined the precise mechanics of the window, the discomfort of the toilet…computed the length and breadth, the orientation and elevation of the cell.

The very same ingenuity in finding mental challenges and setting goals is similar to the experiences recounted by other survivors of excruciating circumstances, from diplomats captured by terrorists to elderly imprisoned by Chinese.

Freedom of thought

Eva Zeisel, a prisoner in Moscow during Stalin’s reign preserved her sanity by trying to figure out how she could craft a bra out of materials at hand, playing chess against herself in her head, hold imaginary conversations in French, and memorizing poems she composed.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s cherished architect, maintained his tranquility in Spandau prison for months by pretending he was taking a walking trip from Berlin to Jerusalem along which he tried to imagine as many events and sights as possible.

When adversity strikes and it shatters our serenity, or when boredom sneaks in and feeds on our soul, we must find new ways in which to invest the psychic energy. Otherwise, our chaotic minds will become our living hell.

Even if we might be objectively slave, subjectively we can be free.

Richard Logan provides further insights into what other elements constitutes an autotelic personality based on the writings of many survivors, including those of Viktor Frankel and Bruno Bettelheim. He concludes:

Most important trait of survivors is a “nonself-conscious individualism,” or a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking. People who have that quality are bent on doing their best in all circumstances, yet they are not concerned primarily with advancing their own interests. Because they are intrinsically motivated in their actions, they are not easily disturbed by external threats. With enough psychic energy free to observe and analyze their surroundings objectively, they have a better chance of discovering in them new opportunities for action

So far we can conclude that a key factor for cultivating an autotelic personality is to be free of excessive self-consciousness and individualism. This is how Bertrand Russel, one of the greatest philosophers of our century, describes his path to achieving personal happiness:

Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”

Around the concept of flow, the bottom line for me is that I must learn how to create flow in every situation. Whether it is walking around the block, being stuck in traffic, it is up to me to take charge and give structure to my thoughts.

And now thanks to the framework of flow, I know how to establish order in my mind an enjoy the moment, regardless of the situation or circumstances.

In summary:

Entering the flow requires three elements: clear goals, having feedback on the progress towards that goal, and the challenge of reaching the goal must exceed our skills to keep us hooked.
We can achieve flow in EVERY situation if we take charge of our attention and using the framework of flow, give structure to our mind in the given circumstance.
Autotelic people can easily achieve flow even in dreadful situations like Nazis concentration camps.
Three groups of people have a hard time to cultivate an autotelic personality: Schizophrenics, overself-consciousness people (who are obsessed with the opinions of others about them) and self-centered people.

Forge these [2+3] habits to guarantee massive productivity

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 09:00:00 GMT

There just isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done!

I often used to find myself frustrated, and occasionally, this frustration would escalate to anger.

Another precious day passed with little productivity I kept telling myself.

Fortunately, I studied and emulated the work habits of great achievers (Tim Ferriss, Chris Bailey, David Allen, etc.) and now I ace each day filled with the joy of my massive productivity.

Here are the 5 habits through which you can guarantee productive days and life.

I. Massive Productivity: The Two Core Habits

I call the following two habits the core habits of massive productivity. These two habits ensure not just a productive day but also a productive and fulfilling life.

1. Decide On A High-Value Producing System

If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. — Scott Adams

I have recurringly noticed this pattern that almost all the extraordinary achievers have a system with these three elements:

A vivid idea of what is their core high-value task.
A robust schedule for practicing that core high-value task on a regular basis.
A tangible self-monitoring system to track and monitor their system.

Depending on what you want to accomplish in the long run, before everything else, you must identify your core high-value tasks.

Then, you must design a system which constantly supports and guarantees the execution of your core high-value tasks. Otherwise, you will fall victim to the banalities of trivial checklists and to-do lists.

For instance …

If you’re a Ph.D. student, your core high-value task must probably be to read and synthesize valuable academic papers.

So in your system, you must designate fixed and specific hours to this task on a regular basis.

If you’re a blogger, your core high-value task must be writing for specific hours on a daily basis. This is one of the major habits of iconic figures.

One of the most prolific novelists in history, Anthony Trollope had cultivated the habit of writing each day for 3 hours early in the morning.

As for the self-monitoring, for each of his novels, he would draw up a working schedule, typically planning for 10,000 words a week, and then kept a diary:

“In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labor, so that the deficiency might be supplied. There has been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.”

A blister to my eye. You won’t find anything on psychological literature that would so aptly summarize the efficacy of self-monitoring.

My own high-value task that I practice daily is practicing programming or devouring related tutorials and this is how I conduct the self-monitoring part:

This simple sheet drastically motivates me to each day compete with myself and try to stretch my abilities and productive hours.

Given such a rigid systematic working ethic, what happens to creativity, you might ponder?

I had the same thoughts when I was reading Murakami’s book what I talk about when I talk about running:

If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy: focus — the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value. — Haruki Murakami

2. Time-Block The Portion of Your High-Value Task

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. — Alexander Graham Bell

Our mind is capable of forging marvels. But, only under one condition: If it is provided with a laser-focus on the material or the task at hand.

For instance, it is known between the expert programmers that you need at least 30 minutes of undivided attention before you can get to the zone where your mind is working with peak performance.

Even if for brief moments (1–2 minutes), you jump from the task you’re doing to something irrelevant (social networks, emails, answering a phone call, etc.), you will lose the optimal performance and you have to start over again.

So, block your time (absolutely no phone call, no social network, no e-mail, etc.). Guard your time block as if it’s sacred and you will reap the sweet rewards of your undivided attention.

If you want to see real magic, just designate 2 blocks (each of 2 hours) of dedicated focus to a task and you will definitely be astonished by the gargantuan progress you will make.

II. Massive Productivity: The 3 Supporting Habits

Keeping up with the two core habits may not be easy. But, we can make them much easier.

I have found that following much easier habits drastically help you to forge the two core habits.

1. Establish Your Signature Routines

There are many books dedicated just to this subject such as Daily Rituals: How Artists Work; and if you dig enough, you’ll notice that all the great achievers have some sort of rituals.

So, why is there so much emphasis on routines and rituals?

Imagine you wake up, take a cold shower, then move on to brew your coffee and then you get to work (assuming you work at home).

If you repeat the same process for a few days, your ritual (shower, coffee) gets associated with what comes immediately after it which is your work.

Next time when you take your shower and start sipping your coffee, your mind shifts into working mode. This is called priming effect and you can take huge advantage of it.

Federer Serving Routine

To switch to optimal performance, professional athletes like Roger Federer perform specific routines:

This routine quickly puts them into the optimum state.

In my programming sprints, I always listen to the same and single music on repeat.

Consequently, my brain has linked my mind’s deep state of programming to that music.

As a result, instead of having to work for 30 minutes to enter the zone, as soon as I play the music, my brain shifts the gears to a high-performance level I want. — This is one of the techniques that Matt Mullenweg used when he was creating the WordPress.

As a side note:

For the music ritual,you should not listen to it on any other occasions. Otherwise, you risk breaking its association to the high-performance zone.

2. Leverage Your Environment to Work For You, Not Against You

Following time blocks (the second core habit) is not easy.

You will be distracted by numerous stimulus (phones, colleagues, etc.)

You will be tempted by countless impulses (checking e-mail, facebook, twitter, etc.)

The simple technique I’ve found to be bulletproof for me to stick to my time blocks is to exile all the distractions in the first place.

The key to this habit is this: make it as hard as possible to indulge in or access the distractions.

In his book the happiness advantage, Shawn Achor suggests:

We are far more likely to procrastinate on doing things that take us more than 20 seconds to start.

So, you can procrastinate productively.

Turn off your WiFi modem and your network card if your work doesn’t involve the internet.

If you have to use the internet, white list the websites you might need using free extensions like StayFocused and make it hard to disable it.

Not having to deal with distractions and temptations has another crucial value. You will preserve your precious and limited willpower which you will need to tackle mentally-demanding tasks.

3. Consolidate and Shrink The Maintenance Tasks

Even as a college student I used to grow long lists of non-academic tasks. Laundry, making dinner, paying the bills, returning the library books, etc.

These can add up and infinite stress.

They can also shred your concentration by forcing you to keep wasting time pondering unfinished tasks. According to the Zeigarnik Effect:

Unresolved and interrupted tasks thieve the attention of your brain until you have a clear — if subconscious — proposal of what you’re going to deal with them.

What I do is designating one day of the weekend for dealing with such maintenance tasks.

But that’s not it. I designate a very limited amount of time to them lest I fall prey to the Parkinson Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So, to dodge the vicious pitfal of Parkinson law I allocated a limited pre-defined time for completing such necessary but low-value tasks.

Final Thought

I believe that stretching oneself to become a productive person is one of the best investments one can do.

To be massively productive you need to grow your discipline, get clear on what you want, and carve out a systematic lifestyle and in the end, each of these end up serving you in all domains of life.

Productivity is my passion in that nothing makes me more fulfilled and joyous than a productive day and life.

Happy thriving

In summary

Think and figure out your high-value tasks. What activities generate the highest returns on the time you invest.
Allocate specific and regular time-blocks to your high-value tasks.
Establish a monitoring system to track how much you engage with your core high-value tasks
Establish routines before starting your day and before engaging with your high-value task to enter the zone more swiftly and avoid being side-tracked.
Exile all distraction to better stick to your time blocks. Remember that laser travels far because the photons are focused towards the same direction.
During the week, collect all the maintenance task you have to take action on (shopping, washing clothes, paying the bills, etc.). Then designate a limited amount of time on the weekend to strike them all out at once.

Why you must embrace trauma

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 09:00:00 GMT

When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. — Meng Tzu, Chinese philosopher

Trauma is an under-appreciated blessing.

According to adversity hypothesis in order to grow, you must endure adversity and trauma.

It, further adds that sky-high levels of growth and development are only open to those who have undergone great adversity and triumphed out of it.

A Transition Through Trauma

Not long ago, I underwent the darkest and gloomiest days of my life.

My chronic anxiety reached a point where it caused me ulcers. I was in such a depressed mood that I had not even the courage or the will to get out of my bed.

Now, four years later, looking back at those days, I smile with utmost delight.

I can now firmly attest that this era and embracing the pain that came with it, has been the blessing of my life. It’s altered me in such a way that now, whenever anxiety or frustration kicks in, it makes me happy.

Traumatic events can unleash your untapped potential and mark a significant turning point in your life.

Back then, my only escape from anxiety was to just go outside and run. When I was running and running, I felt like my rapid heart rate is pumping out some poison which was a momentary relief.

One of those days, before I went running, I thought to myself, maybe I could listen to an audiobook along the way. So I surfed the web and stumble upon an audiobook.

That book was the beginning of an end. An end to a torturous era and a nudge towards a transformation.

The Adversity Hypothesis

Any traditions have some notion of fate. Hindus believe that upon the day of birth, God writes the destiny of the child on his or her forehead.

Now, suppose, on the day your child is born, the angles give you two gifts: the first gift is a pair of glasses through which you can read this written faith, the second gift, is a magic pen with which you can alter this fate in any way you desire.

Now, imagine wearing the glasses and glancing over this written fate; this is the list you see:

At eighteen: graduates high school top of the class, At twenty: car accident while driving drunk which leads to amputation of the left leg. At twenty-four: becomes a single parent. At twenty-nine: marries. At thirty-two: publishes a best-selling novel. At thirty-three: divorces; and so on.

As a parent, what would you change on that list? Which parent, after all, would stand such harsh events in his or her child’s life? And who would hesitate to lessen the misery?

Regardless of your intuition and inclinations, you must be very careful with what you change with this magic pen.

Your good will might just turn into a curse for the child. If Nietzsche is right that “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger,” then removing the adversity from your child’s fortune would leave them weak and underdeveloped.

The adversity hypothesis has two versions. Weak and strong. In the weak version, it posits that adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement. — This weak version is well-supported by research.

The strong version of the hypothesis is more unsettling: It states:

In order to grow, people must endure adversity. It, further adds thatextaordinary achievement, growth, and development are only open to those who have undergone great adversity and triumphed out of it.

Crazy as it may sound, science has shed light on three ways that adversity and trauma can change your life for a better one

Post Traumatic Growth

#1. Embracing the trauma unleashes your potential

When the trauma strikes, rising up to the challenge reveals your hidden abilities and untapped potential. Often times if we are not forced out of our comfort zones, we do not know how capable we are.

You might say no, I will die if X happens or I can’t continue if I lose Y. But in reality, upon facing X or Y, your heart would not stop beating and you have to face the world as you find it.

The common lesson people derive from trauma is that they are much stronger than they realized, and this new appreciation of their strength provides them with a greater sense of confidence.

People who have suffered severely through battle, rape, concentration camps or traumatic personal losses often seem to be inoculated against future stress: they recover more quickly because they now know they can cope.

Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. — Jonathan Haidt

#2. Trauma separates the gems from the mud

The second class of benefit involves relationships. Adversity is a filter. When a person is diagnosed with cancer, or a couple loses a child, some friends and family members rise to the occasion and strive to support them in any way they can.

Adversity does not just separate the fair-weather friends from the true; it strengthens relationships and it opens people’s heart to one another.

We develop love for those we care for, and we feel love and gratitude toward those who cared for us in the time of need.

#3. Trauma equips you with a new pair of eyes

Trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present (“live each day to the fullest”) and toward other people.

We are all familiar with stories of rich and powerful people who had a moral conversion when faced with death. This is how Jonathan Haidt recounts this in his book “The happiness hypothesis”:

A great many people facing death report changes in values and perspectives. A diagnosis of cancer is often described, in retrospect, as a wake-up call, a reality check, or a turning point. Many people consider changing careers or reducing the time they spend at work. The reality that people often wake up to is that life is a gift they have been taking for granted, and that people matter more than money.

How Trauma Transformed Me

My anxiety at the time was rooted in several issues. I was suffering from a poisonous relationship that had lasted for two years and had ended with a traumatic discovery about her affairs!

I was under huge pressure for finishing my master’s thesis. I also had a project with a company that was on the brink of failure.

I was also putting an extra burden on me by projecting myself too far into the future and kept torturing myself about how distant I am from my ideals.

In retrospect, I feel embarrassed to have been traumatized by such trivialities (these trivialities literally caused me ulcers).

The audiobook that I mentioned earlier was “How to stop worrying, and start living,” by Dale Carnegie.

When I read the book, applied the techniques on how to manage stress, learned how to live in the present and how to build time-walls around the past and the future, my stress level plummeted from a boiling 100 to a bearable 10.

That day, that book, that 100 to 10 reduction of stress was the turning point in my life. I learned that all of our sufferings are rooted in our ignorance whether the suffering is financial, emotional to health-related or it’s our relationship.

From that day on, I became a voracious reader. Ever since I never skipped a day without reading at least one hour.

Confidence, high self-esteem, tranquil and happy spirit, being financially comfortable are just a few fruits of triumphing out of those “traumatic” days.

To those “traumatic” days I owe, whatever I’ve achieved and whatever I am to achieve. Those days plowed my soil and made me ready.

I don’t want to celebrate suffering, prescribe embracing pain for everyone, or down-play its soul-piercing torture.

Drawing upon my own experience with long stretches of suffering and chronic anxiety, I merely want to make the point that suffering is a mixture of good and bad, and those who manage to find and carve out the good will end up with something precious: A key to moral and spiritual development. As Shakespeare wrote:

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

Conclusion

If the strong version of the hypothesis is correct (sky-high growth requires undergoing adversity and triumphing out it), it has a striking implication as to how we must pursue our lives.

It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats.

It means that overprotecting children and depriving them of tasting the bitter events of life condemn them to a life of mediocrity at best.

What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.

Bulletproof willpower: Three lessons from the titans

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 09:00:00 GMT

If you often get mad at yourself for lack of willpower and discipline, then let me tell you upfront: you are not lazy you’re just missing 3 essential elements that are required to ignite your willpower engine.

I personally kept thinking that laziness is woven into the fabric of my genes.

That is why I have been studying the subject of willpower obsessively in the past 5 years; and here’s the biggest revelation I had that finally unleashed my iron will.

Willpower is an extremely powerful engine of self-control inside the head of EVERYONE. But to get that engine started, you have to satisfy the following conditions:

1 & 2. Vivid and non-conflicting goals

Pre-commitment

If you carefully employ these 3 elements, crushing the temptations would be like cutting butter with a hot knife.

And of course, there’s also the hard-way of increasing willpower through which you literally change your brain structures (e.g. increasing gray matter in the pre-frontal cortex — the seat of willpower). But we’re gonna take the smart way.

I. The Critical Importance of Vivid Goals for Willpower — David Blaine

The more the body suffers the more the spirit flowers — David Blaine’s philosophy, borrowed from St. Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century ascetic who lived for decades atop a pillar in the Syrian desert.

When he is not performing his magic tricks, David Blaine works as an endurance artist:

Vertigo Act — David Blaine

He stood for 35 hours eighty feet above Bryant Park of New York atop a round pillar of just twenty-two inches wide with no sleep and no safety harness.
He spent sixty-three sleepless hours in Times Square encased in a giant block of ice.
One of his records published in the New England Journal of Medicine is a loss of fifty-four pounds in forty-four day of fasting with only water. Meanwhile, he was entombed in a sealed transparent box above Thames River where the temperature ranges from subfreezing to 114 Fahrenheit.

In an interview, while echoing St. Simeon’s notion — that suffering makes the spirit flower — he added:

Breaking the comfort zone seems to be the place where I always grow.

Now the question is how David Blaine pulls off such feats of endurance and willpower?

If we can figure out how he manages to fast for forty-four days, then we can use the same principle to help us last through until dinner perhaps.

1. The Secret of Blaine’s Crazy Willpower

Self-control without goals and other standards would be nothing more than aimless change, like trying to diet without any idea of which foods are fattening. — Roy F. Baumeister

This is how Blaine replies when asked about the secret to his willpower:

Now that I think about it, when I’m training for a stunt and I have a goal, I change everything. I have self-control in every aspect of my life. I read all the time. I eat perfectly. I have a whole different energy. Complete self-control. I eat food based on nutrition. I don’t overindulge. I don’t drink. I don’t waste time.

And here’s the revelation:

But as soon as I’m done with my goal, I’m not able to sit down and read for the same amount of time. I can’t focus the same way. I don’t use my time the same way. I waste a lot of time. I’ll drink. After a stunt, I’ll go from 180 pounds to 230 pounds in three months.

Define crystal clear goals, what is it exactly that you want to accomplish and why do you want to accomplish it?

II. Keep Your Goals Limited and Non-Conflicting — Benjamin Franklin

For most of us, absence of a vivid goal is not the problem, but rather, it’s too many of them; And as the intuition instructs, we often capture them on our daily to-do lists.

Franklin demonstrated one of the greatest pitfalls of the modern to-do lists: Striving to carry out too much at once is bound to failure:

He had decided to reach moral perfection by practicing 13 virtues.

Franklin tried a divide-and-conquer approach. He drew up a list of virtues and wrote a brief goal for each one, like this one for Order: ‘Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.’

Franklin’s divide-and-conquer attempt to reach the moral perfection by upholding to 13 virtues: Order, Temperance, Silence, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility.

But soon, he noticed a problem:

For instance, if he exercised Frugality (“Waste nothing”) by always preparing his own food and mending his own clothes, there would remain less time for Industry at his job.

So, if you’re trying to have both quality-time with your family and work up your way on the ladder of career success, you are going to experience some difficulties.

The result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action. — Robert Emmons

How to avoid the trap of conflicting goals

Baumeister — author of the seminal book, willpower — recounts an experience where a psychologist was about to give a talk on managing resources and time to the audience at the Pentagon.

He decides to warm up the audience with a brief exercise — all of whom were laureate elites and generals.

He asked them all to write a summary of their strategic approach limited to 25 words.

The only general who managed a response was the lone woman in the room. She had already had a distinguished career, having worked her way up through the ranks and been wounded in combat in Iraq. Her summary of her approach was as follows: ‘First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.’”

To avoid the trap and consequences of conflicting goals, keep your to-do list short and prioritize your items. As James Collins famously said:

If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.

III. Pre-Commitment — Henry Morton Stanley

Self-control is more indispensable than gunpowder. — Henry Morton Stanley

My favorite technique by far is pre-commitment and I find it to be a bulletproof willpower technique. Let’s learn it from Henry Morton Stanley whom Africans call Bular Matari: Breaker of Rocks.

While on a mission in Ituri rain forest, Stanly and his men suffered through torrential rains and waist-deep mud while trying to thwart the never-ending swarms of stinging flies and biting ants.

They were weakened by a prolonged hunger, crippled by infected sores, and incapacitated by malaria and dysentery. They were hunted and killed, and sometimes eaten, by natives who attacked them.

Henry Morton Stanley, Bular Matari — Breaker of Rocks

Many suggest that you barely can name any explorer in history who have endured such sustained misery and terror.

Stanly’s Europian companions marveled at his “strength of will”, and it was through the torturous expeditions that he earned the title of Bilar Matari: Braker of Rocks.

6 month into his mission, struggling with malaria and dire sickness, while he was constantly being warned by natives that he will die if continues, in one evening he writes:

I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, no living man, or men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me, But death — not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die! — Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer

The act of writing his resolutions was the major strategy to preserve his willpower that Stanley used over and over with success.

This is called pre-commitment. An insanely effective strategy that would prevent you from having to rely on willpower in the first place.

The essence of the strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path.

You anticipate that you will face lucrative temptations to stray you from your path. Thus, you make it impossible — or somehow make it disgraceful, sinful, or unthinkable — to leave the path.

Pre-commitment is what Odysseus did to get passed the luring and deadly songs of the Sirens.

He had himself lashed to the mast with orders not to untie him regardless of how hard he pleaded to go to the sirens.

His men pre-committed differently, by plugging their ears that would make them oblivious to the enchanting songs of the Sirens.

3 Ways to Use Pre-commitment

Write it down with date and time. This simple technique almost never fails me. If it is something that I keep procrastinating on such as the desire to start a new online course, going to gym etc, guaranteeing the execution is as simple as writing my decision down and specifying an exact date and time. If it is something long term, I simply write it down in a form of a creed or something: I, Amir, make a pact with myself to …
Pre-commit the Odysseus way. Do you want to prevent yourself from indulging in the social network while you have to focus on your projects? Pre-commit by blocking your access to them. Or if you want to be a bit more extreme, abandon them altogether. (Works like a charm)
Pre-commit publicly or pre-commit to an accountability partner. I am so tempted to say this works 100% of the times. Let me suffice to say it is perhaps the most bulletproof of all. If for instance, you want to go to the gym, pre-commit by telling your friend to let’s go together. I once decided to go on three-day fasting and I made it easy to stick to it by simply letting EVERYONE around me to know that I’m gonna do this.

Final Thoughts

I have been obsessed with willpower and discipline and have always had this belief that to be human is to have discipline.

Nevertheless, I finally came to realize that willpower without a solid goal has absolutely no meaning.

In all the lapses of mine, I kept blaming myself over a delusion — that I did not have enough willpower.

But I was getting it wrong.

Fortunately, my obsessive reading of the subject revealed to me that if my willpower to work, I must know what it is exactly I’m trying to accomplish and why. As Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote:

He who has a why can bear almost any how.

I have experimented with numerous techniques to increase willpower. But, these three elements are the only things that I believe one might ever need to accomplish anything of his/her desire:

Vivid goals
None-conflicting goals
Commitment

Get clear on your goals; focus on a few of them at a time, and ensure a disciplined execution by committing through writing down your resolution in form of a creed, or pre-commit through an accountability partner.

Be the next breaker of rocks.

How to resist temptations and overcome procrastination — a willpower hack that works almost 100%…

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 09:00:00 GMT

Are you frustrated with giving in to temptations or failing with your resolutions?

Do you keep procrastinating on a goal or a task you have set for yourself?

Well, the good news is …

If you lapse, the problem is not you or your willpower. The problem is the way you are using your willpower.

In this article, I’m going to share with you a willpower technique — called pre-commitment — which helps me crush my temptations and pierce through procrastination almost 100% times.

What is Pre-Commitment?

Willpower is not about resisting, forcing, or controlling — it’s about choosing. — Penney Peirce

Pre-Commitment is when you decide in advance what you are going to do in a particular situation.

Or,

Pre-commitment is when you actually make the decisions in advance so that when you face a tempting or boring situation, you are only left with the virtuous path.

But the best part?

Pre-commitment actually relieves you from having to rely on willpower in the first place.

There’s a serious problem with relying on willpower:

Every act of yours that might require willpower — whether you want to stick to your resolution, or rejecting a temptation — involves decision making.

Making decisions is metabolically VERY EXPENSIVE. Namely, it consumes lots of energy from your brain.

Therefore, your brain naturally tries to dissuade you from having to make such decisions by creating some feelings of discomfort or as Steven Pressfield calls it: resistance.

When you pre-commit, you make all the decisions in advance. Thus, when the occasion calls, you no longer have to rely on your willpower to make the decision that scares off your brain.

That is the power of pre-commitment, it frees you from the bounds of willpower.

The following are the three variations of pre-commitment I’ve experimented with on which you can actually rely.

3 Simple Ways to Use Pre-commitment

“Motivation is what gets you started. Commitment is what keeps you going.” — Jim Rohn

1. Write down your resolution with a specific date and time.

This simple technique almost never fails me.

If it is something that I keep procrastinating on such as the desire to start a new online course, going to the gym etc, guaranteeing the execution is as simple as writing down my decision and specifying an exact date and time.

So, if the task is a chronic victim of procrastination, you can ensure its execution by simply writing your task down and designating it a specific date and time.

How effective this technique is?

So much so that I went a step further and adopted the bullet journaling system which is now an extension of my brain and since then, I am experiencing massive productivity.

But that’s not all there’s to this technique.

If what you are striving to start or accomplish needs to be done on a regular basis and for a long stretch of time, you can do the following:

Write down your decision in form of creed and sanctify it.

For instance, since I was ashamed of hitting the snooze button 10 times in the morning, I eliminated it from my life by this simple line:

I, Amir, hereby make a solemn oath not to use the snooze button ever again!

There’s a subtle catch to this sanctification process.

Don’t go for some form of banal writing like: I promise to go to the gym every day.

You must sanctify it with an attribute or quality that genuinely and deeply matters to you.

whether it is your pride or your sense of morality or, etc., it has to trigger you.

For me, when I write that I make a solemn oath to … it both engages my sense of pride and morality which guarantees its effectiveness.

It is now my conviction that:

writing down elicits commitment and commitment crystalizes into action.

2. Pre-commit the Odysseus way.

Pre-commitment is what Odysseus did to get passed the luring and deadly songs of the Sirens.

He had himself lashed to the mast with orders not to untie him regardless of how hard he pleaded to go to the sirens.

His men pre-committed differently, by plugging their ears that would make them oblivious to the enchanting songs of the Sirens.

What Odysseus did was to eliminate the possibility of indulgement in the first place.

Even if he wanted, he wouldn’t be able to give in to temptations!

Do you want to prevent yourself from compulsively using social networks and instead focus on your projects?

Then, pre-commit by blocking your access to them. Or if you want to be a bit more extreme, abandon them altogether.

So, how do I use the Odysseus way?

I have removed all the social media apps from my mobile and when using my computer, I use the StayFocusd extension which blocks the access to the irrelevant websites.

That’s not all there’s to this technique.

Oddyseuss way, too, has the added value of preserving your precious willpower and psychic energy since it relieves you from having to rely on it.

In fact, studies show that people with the most self-control spend less time resisting temptations than others. This was puzzling to the researchers until the explanation emerged:

People with the most self-control have less need to use willpower because they’re beset by fewer temptations and inner conflicts. They’re better at arranging their lives so that they avoid problematic situations.

Finally, I reserved the best for last.

3. Pre-commit publicly or pre-commit to an accountability partner.

I am so tempted to say that the technique works 100% of the times. Let me suffice to say it is perhaps the most bulletproof of all.

This technique actually saved me from my severe depression.

Back when I was terribly depressed and overwhelmed by anxiety. I knew that exercise would dramatically help me with my situation.

But there was a serious problem.

I didn’t have the courage nor the will to go for running. The comfort of my bedroom felt much better actually.

So, I forced myself out of comfort zone by simply promising my father to join him on his morning running ritual.

Did you notice the tremendous effect of this technique here?

When you are experiencing depression, sometimes you don’t have the will and the mood to even eat food let alone going for a run on 6 AM. But this technique helped me bypass my dead willpower.

But that’s not my biggest feat using this technique.

In another occasion, I decided to go on three-day fasting (water only) and I made it easy to stick to it by simply letting EVERYONE around me to know that I’m gonna do this.

Final Thoughts

I have been studying technique to increase willpower and discipline for almost 5 years now.

In my lapses, I kept thinking I haven’t cultivated my discipline enough.

Until I learned that you cannot just brute-force your way to achievement through the sheer use of willpower.

You must know that willpower is a limited resource and it gets depleted as you use it throughout a day.

I also learned that to have bulletproof willpower I must have a crystal clear goal and approach it with my whole focus.

So, if you lapse, don’t burn yourself out — as I once did — thinking to yourself that you’re lazy. You just have to know how willpower works and then use it smartly.

In Summary

Pre-commitment is the most powerful technique that helps you with your willpower and discipline.
Willpower is a limited resource and unless you have strengthened it through rigorous practice you cannot rely on it.
The hard thing about willpower is that it requires decision making which is metabolically a very expensive act.
Pre-commitment relieves you from having to rely on willpower by making decisions in advance.
There are three ways you can use pre-commitment:

Write down the things you want to start doing by designating a precise date and time. If it is something you want to on a regular basis, write it down in form of a creed or oath.
You can pre-commit by eliminating the sources of temptations e.g. blocking your access to social media.
You can pre-commit publicly or to an accountability partner.

The art of high-value productivity: Three lessons from Woody Allen

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 09:00:00 GMT

Never mistake motion for action — Ernest Hemingway

There has been a lot of hype surrounding checklists and task lists in the past couple of decades.

They are supposed to make us both productive and happy.

But, how many times have you ask yourself these questions:

How valuable are the items on my list?
What will I accomplish and who will I become in the long run, if I keep designing and executing such a checklist?

There’s a critical distinction to make here. If we are to conquer the mountaintop of success in a knowledge economy, we must differentiate task-productivity (the ability to organize and execute non-skilled obligations) and value productivity (the ability to consistently produce highly-skilled, highly-valued output).

As the productivity guru, Cal Newport — the best selling author of deep work — suggests, if we are to go high on the ladder of achievement we have to consistently produce high-value results.

Producing-high value results require that in our lists, we give the priorities to the items that end up producing a valuable and precious outcome.

If you are an academic person, it would mean that you spend most of the time deeply devouring academic papers and reflecting on them.

If you are a writer, it means that you must designate the majority of your time writing (instead of getting wrapped up with the trivialities such as growing your twitter account).

Woody Allen is a shining embodiment of high-value productivity. He has written and directed 44 movies in 44 years and has earned 23 Academy Award nominations along the way. So let’s explore what we can learn from him.

I was fortunate to stumble on a documentary on the life and habits Woody Allen which I watched with a prying eye for hints and strategies on productivity.

Lesson #1: Keep The Chain Connected

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals. — Jim Rohn

One of my all-time favorite and bombastically effective productivity hacks is what Jertt Seinfeld calls “don’t break the chain” strategy.

A key habit of Woody Allen as it turns out is practicing this strategy to its perfection: Writing every single day for a fixed amount of time.

He explains:

If you work only three to five hours a day you become very productive. It’s the steadiness of the practice that counts. Getting to the typewriter every day is what makes productivity”

I believe, such a habit is the cornerstone of high-value productivity which is crucial when your project or goal is a non-urgent but high-value project.

In absence of such a discipline to practice what is of high-value, we will find ourselves taking the path of least resistant and falling back into the banalities of regular to-do lists and we will end up filling our day with urgent and low-value tasks.

Lesson #2 Be Lofty in Vision, Pragmatic in Execution

Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big success. — David Joseph Schwartz

Allen is lofty in conceiving a project. Once he initiates the execution though, he shifts the gears of his focus to doing whatever it takes to ship a finished product within the designated budget and time. In the words of Steve Jobs: Real artists ship.

He banters:

You always set out trying to make Citizen Kane. By the time you get to the editing room, you try just no to be humiliated.

It is crucial to maintaining the balance between the lofty vision and pragmatism.

If you just want to ship for the sake of shipping, you will probably end up adding more to the truckload of mediocrity out there.

Meanwhile, if you become too wrapped up in the barbs of your own hype, you will probably fall prey into perfectionism.

Lesson #3 Focus on High ROI Activities, not Twitter

The amateur tweets. The pro works. — Steven Pressfield

The critical habit that Allen forged in the early days of his career was constantly pondering what activities generated the highest returns on investment (ROI) of his time.

Then he ruthlessly converged his focus on doing that high-ROI activities and excluding other distractions.

This strategy is the embodiment of Warren Buffet’s 5/25 rule.

To achieve massive success, Waren Buffet suggests that you list your top 25 endeared goals for the foreseeable future.

Then you must prioritize them in the order of importance. And here’s what gets interesting:

The top 5 items will be at the center of your focus and the remaining items join the avoid-at-all-cost list.

By simplifying his work hours to the core elements with the highest ROI, and removing from his life the burdensome question of “what should I do next?”, Allen ensures massive high-value productivity.

But what about chilling out on social media? After all the mind could benefit some entertainment. Well, Allen never owned a computer, to begin with…

In Summary

Make the distinction between task productivity and high-value productivity.
High-value productivity means designating the majority of your time to the tasks that leads to a valuable and precious outcome.
Find out in your personal and professional lives, what is the most valuable outcome you want to reach and what high-value task, if done consistently, will lead to that outcome.
Whatever you resolve to do, do it consistently, on a daily basis. This is the distinction between the mediocre and extraordinary achiever.
Keep the balance between lofty visions and pragmatism.
Focus intensely on high-value tasks and dismantle all the low-value distractions like social media (unless you earn money on social media).

How the internet is tearing your focus apart and 3 ways to claim your focus back

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 09:00:00 GMT

Do you get bored after reading just a couple of paragraphs from a text?

Do you step into your room just to forget why you’re there?

And do you constantly have this craving to jump off from a mentally-demanding task to open up your Facebook or Instagram?

If your answer to one of the above is yes, you are probably suffering from a shattered focus.

Neuroplasticity and How it Defines Our Behaviors

Think of your brain as a power grid with streets, roads, and highways. Each time you think, feel, or act, a combination of those pathways are lightened up.

Some of those pathways are more traveled. Those are our behavioral habits such as smoking or exercising or mental habits such as being constantly anxious about the future or being optimistic and seeing everything through a rosy lens (Yes these are habits too and can be changed).

Strong vs Weak Pathways — Photo Credit: Alta Mira

Each time you think a thought, feel an emotion or act on a specific task, you are strengthening their pathways in your brain. Repeated enough, those pathways become so strong that the corresponding thought, emotion, or action becomes automatic.

Let’s say you’ve had enough of constantly suffering the terrors of a vague future and the anxiety that comes with it and you want to change that.

Given that the antidote to anxiety is keeping your focus on the now, you must strive to master your mind and keep it in the present.

When you are trying to do so, you are building new neural pathways around that old dreadful pathway of constant anxiety.

Initially, creating this new pathway requires substantial effort and attention. The same way that driving on an unpaved road is more laborious than on a highway, practicing this new habit would be more difficult than simply giving in to the old habit.

BUT …

Each time you practice the new way of thinking, you are making its pathway stronger and smoother. Meanwhile, the underlying pathway of the undesired habit is gradually beginning to decay.

This process of rewiring your brain is called neuroplasticity. In other words, our brain is plastic and we can potentially modify its structure.

It is crucial to note the word we use is plastic, and not elastic. This means that forming new pathways is arduous. Once they’re formed with depth, they can lock you in specific behaviors or thought patterns and.

Once we wire a new neural circuit (pathway) into our brain, we long to keep it active. — Nicholas G. Carr

Given the concept of neuroplasticity and its power, let’s see how impulsive usage of the internet is rewiring our brain and breaking down our focus.

How the Internet is Destroying Your Focus

The internet seizes our attention, only to tear it into pieces. — Nicholas G. Carr

Before the proliferation of the media, internet, and now the social networks, the primary medium for absorbing information was reading.

Reading books, for instance, requires a practice of thought, one that demands sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object. It requires you to place yourself at what T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, would call “the still point of the turning world.”

Now, look at the practice of reading books from the lens of neuroplasticity. When trying to retain our focus, we are keeping the neural circuits (pathways) of focus active, hence making them stronger.

Unfortunately, this habit of reading took several massive hits with the shifts in the technology of information medium. Initially, the emergence of Radio, TV, and now the internet and social media.

Now, bring into your mind the type of content you consume on the prevalent social media networks i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.

How much time do you spend on every single content on those networks before you move on to the next?

How much effort and focus do they demand?

And how often do you get engaged with these networks throughout a day?

Short Duration of Attention Spent on So many Attention Seekers

For me this realization was horrifying.

We are constantly jumping from one small fragment of content to the other. One-minute video on Instagram, followed by less than 10 seconds of view of other posts. Jumping to Facebook to scroll through the feed and consuming nugget-sized content.

Take a step back and look at the big picture of the way you use the internet

Do you see what’s happening?

One minute here, two minutes there, jumping and jumping from task to task, content to content and each jump endures in matters of minutes if not seconds. This multitasking is an inherent product that comes with using the internet and has become a habit that drains and destroys our focus.

This is how our attention span is breaking down. We are rewiring our focus circuits and creating attention spans of trivial length and power.

This is the part where I’ve seen people and friends smile as they resonate with the examples of a broken focus:

You start to read a book or a lengthy article; after reading a paragraph or so, you feel a sense of restlessness, or you feel bored and you crave to jump to another tab on your browser or move on to the next content in your feed or simply jump off to your phone and scour your Instagram.

The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem. You become more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought. — Don Tapscott,

Thanks to neuroplasticity though, rebuilding your focus is feasible.

How to Rebuild Your Focus

1. Strengthen Your Focus the Natural Way

Perhaps you have been to a gym or at least seen the scene where people pull up weights.

When you repeat lifting up a weight, which is heavy for you, you will feel a slight pain in your muscles.

You feel the pain or burning of the muscle because your cells are literally breaking down.

After that, when you rest, your body notices the broken-down cells. This tells your body that there are higher demands from it.

What happens next is your body, in addition to rebuilding those cells, builds an extra layer of cells atop them as well, and provides you with more muscle power. This is why bodies grow in size after a period of working out.

This process is analogous to rebuilding focus. The practical point is this:

Blueprint. Next time that you start to read a book or text and the boredom monster creeps in, do not give in to it. Instead, try to at least keep on reading for a couple of minutes more. These extra couple of minutes are precisely where you are stretching your focus and making it stronger.

After several trials, what you will notice during the next attempts on reading is that you won’t get bored as quickly as before. This means that your attention span has grown slightly and can keep out the boredom monster a bit longer.

This is the natural way of rebuilding focus like the way a swimmer builds his/her body without having to attend the gym. There is, however, a more direct way of strengthening focus which resembles going to the gym directly and pulling up weights.

2. Prefrontal Workout for Improving Focus

Prefrontal workout is a fancy name for meditation.

Brain scans of people who have meditated for just 11 weeks show significant growth in the gray matter of their PFC which translates to having more focus capacity.

Blueprint: To meditate, designate a specific time and place for it. Sit comfortably with a straight spine and your feet on the ground, close your eyes and start breathing. There two major points here. First, you have to focus on your breath. You can focus on the sensation of inhaling or exhaling in your nostrils or you can focus on your chest or belly when you breath moves them. Second, as soon as your mind wanders and you notice it, take your focus back to your breath.

3. Be Protective Your Focus in the First Place

Now that you know how your daily seemingly-benign behavior can turn into a mental habit, you can approach things more mindfully. Always ask yourself:

How is this approach, behavior, attidude of mine, going to change me over the time.

Do you use GPS like me? Do you outsource your memory to digital devices as well?

On the surface, such behaviors might seem harmless. But, collectively, and in the long run, how are they going to reshape us?

I would like to end this article with a quote from the Roman poet Horace:

Rule your mind, or it will rule you.

In Summary

We are what we repeatedly do. Our repeated actions and thoughts become imprinted in our brain in the form of neural circuits. After they are formed, we long to keep them active and they operate on their own without asking our repetition.
Neuroplasticity enables us to make new neural pathways in our brain and bypass the old habits.
Constant exposure to social media and consuming nugget-sized content repeatedly is fragmenting our focus and attention span.
With a shattered focus, we cannot concentrate on any subject for a long span of time and we get bored quickly.
Continuing a couple of minutes more when feeling bored, is like pulling up weights for our focus and makes it stronger over time.
Meditation is a perfect workout to directly improve concentration and focus.
With whatever new technology, medium, etc., you get involved, pause a moment and ask yourself: How is it going to change me in the long run …

The Talent Code: Greatness isn’t born. It’s grown and here’s how

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 09:00:00 GMT

There exists a zone of accelerated learning, in which you learn super fast, and retain a lot more. Prodigies like Mozart, Davinci, etc., were only lucky enough to know how to enter that zone deliberately. In other words, they had cracked the talent code. In this article, I will share with you how this life-altering secret.

What You Will Learn:

What really is talent, and how it is grown?
How you can drastically speed up acquiring a talent using deep practice.
How you can create the motivation that pushes you forward.
A new mindset that literally changes you into believing if it is humanly possible, it is within your reach as well.

Before stumbling on the Talent Code book, I believed that innate talent has always been a major element of success and extraordinary achievement. From that decisive and brilliant leader who makes accurate snap judgments to those kids who solve the Rubik under 10 seconds, I always used to think, gosh, they’re so lucky to be so talented. But I was wrong, terribly wrong.

Viewing skills and accomplishments in this is quite limiting and prevents us from even trying.

Luckily for me, I read this amazing book which debunked lots of dangerous and self-limiting myths about talent and achievement.

What Really is Talent?

What we refer to as talent, as scientists have discovered, involves a neural insulator called myelin and is now considered to be the holy grail of cultivating skills.

From the simplest skill, such as flipping a coin, or riding a bike, to complex ones such as programming, proving a mathematical formula, playing the piano, etc., each human skill involves chains of nerve fibers and neural circuits that carry tiny electrical impulses.

Simply put, each skill involves traveling of signals through specific circuits of neurons.

Myelin critical role is to wrap around those nerve fibers and circuits. Think of it in the way rubber is wrapped around a copper wire.

The more myelin is wrapped around those fibers, the faster and stronger those tiny signal travel through the circuits. Hence, you become faster and better at the task.

In addition, this myelination and insulation of fibers make you more accurate by preventing the electrical signals from leaking out.

Fig -1 Action potential travels much faster in a myelinated neuron (the right one) than unmyelinated neurons (the left one) — Wikipedia

But How Are These Myelins Created?

If more myelination means becoming faster, better and more accurate, you would definitely want to know how it is created, and how we can influence it.

First, let’s see how it is created.

Imagine you want to try to swing a bat or play a note; if you do it correctly, your brain responds by wrapping myelin around the involving circuits (the circuits that successfully led to your desired outcome).

Each time you repeat the task another thin layer of meyelin is added to the involving circuits, making you even faster and better.

There are several critical facts that make mayelin important:

It’s universal: everyone can grow it, throughout life.
It’s indiscriminate: its growth allows for all kinds of skill, mental or physical.
Most importantly, now that you know what myelin is and how it is created, you will experience a radical shift in your thinking about skills and talent. (that is exactly what happened to me.)
All skill acquisitions, and thus, all talent hotbeds, are operating within the same principles, no matter how magical they might seem.

Although everyone can grow myelin, there are certain rules about practicing, that makes its growth much faster. And those prodigies that you see (from Michelangelo to Michael Jordan) are following those specific rules while they practice.

In fact, success or mediocrity depends most on the way you practice, not the already built-in brain power.

How to Cultivate Skills Faster, by Following Deep Practice Rules

You will become clever through your mistakes

The best way to learn Deep Practice is through a real example. You will then see for yourself how critical is the way you practice.

Spend a few seconds looking at column A. Then spend the same amount of time on column B.

Fig — 2 Deep practice in action

Now without looking at the table, try to remember as many pairs as you can.

From which column you can do you recall more words?

If you are like most people, it would not be even close. You will remember far more from column B than column A.

Scientists have measured that on average, you will retain 300% more from column B.

Your IQ does not increase while looking at column B. But, when you look at its items with fragments and blanks, something profound takes place in your brain:

You stumble briefly
You figure it out
You experience microseconds of struggle

And it is these microseconds of struggle that make all the difference. You didn’t practice harder, you practiced deeper.

In essence, practices in which you are forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them, end up making you swift and graceful without you even noticing it.

As Robert Bjork (the creator of the example) puts it:

We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it’s really a terrible way to learn.

And now the three rules of deep practice.

Rule 1: Chunking

While growing up, we have heard millions of times: “Just take it one step at a time”. This simple and intuitive technique is crucial to deep practice but that’s not all.

Chunking itself involves three steps:

First, you must look at the task as a whole. For instance, if you want to learn to play a melody with piano, you have to listen to it attentively to have a sense of what it sounds like as a whole. Or if you want to learn backhand in ping-pong, you must first, see and absorb the move in action. This one big chunk is the mega-circuit you want to eventually build.

Second, you must divide it into its smallest component. In Meadowmount School of Music, it is famous that children learn a year’s worth of material in just seven weeks. A 5-fold increase in learning speed.

Teachers in Meadowmount take the idea of chunking to the extreme.

Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips, put it into an envelope, take out one strip randomly. Further, they break those trips into smaller fragments by altering rhythm. In this way, they are focusing on a sub-circuit.

Third, slow down: you must slow down the action and play with the time. Slow down, then speed it up, to learn its inner architecture.

As a rule of thumb, in Meadowmount, teachers say: if a passerby can recognize the song being played, it’s not being practiced correctly.

Why Does Slowing Down Work?

For two reasons:

Going slow allows you to attend more closely to mistakes, forging a higher order of precision. When it comes to myelin, precision is everything.

Going slow helps you gain a deeper perception of the skill’s internal blueprints and architecture.

Rule 2: Repeat It

Repetition is the mother of skill. — Tony Robins

Biologically speaking, there is no substitute for attentive repetition. It is invaluable and irreplaceable. There are a few caveats though.

Conventional thought might suggest: more is always better: hitting two hundred forehands a day is presumed to be twice as good as hitting a hundred forehands daily.

Deep practice, does not obey the same math.

According to Ericsson’s research (the one who came up with the theory of 10000 hours rule), world-class experts in any field (pianist, chess players, etc.) practice between three and five hours a day.

Deep practice tends to make you exhausted after a couple of hours.

Rule 3: Learn to Feel It

The point here is to get a balance point where you can sense error when they come. To avoid the mistakes, first, you have to feel them immediately.

This is a vital phase of deep learning. Getting feedback, and correcting the course.

So far, we have learned about deep practice. But, deep practice is not a piece of cake. As you might have noticed, it requires lots of mental energy which in itself can be painful.

In other words, deep practice often requires another driving force behind it. You guessed right! It is motivation and enthusiasm.

Motivation is the second element of the talent code. In the next section, we will how motivation is created and sustained, through a process called ignition.

Ignition: Fueling Deep Practice by Motivation

Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is a triumph of some enthusiasm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ignition provides the energy, while deep practice transforms that energy over time into progress, a.k.a, wraps of myelin.

While the deep practice is all about baby steps, ignition is about the set of signals and subconscious forces that create our identity. The moments that lead us to say that that is who I want to be.

If you already are fond of a specific skill (music, sports, programming, etc.), there are specific steps you can take that would provide you with the required fuel.

Some of this ideas are coming from the Talent book I am writing this review on. But there are other techniques as well which I have learned along the way from the books like Mastery, by Robert Greene, Pick by Ericsson, etc.

So let’s examine some of the effective techniques

1. Exposure: One effective way is to be constantly engaged with figures that you admire. For instance, if you aspire to become a pianist, you must surround yourself with reminders of prodigies of this field.

Constantly listen to their masterpieces and let the enthusiasm grow within you.

Read their biographies, watch their performance and embrace the passion that sparks in you.

Install cues that constantly remind you of your ideal self. This technique is critical in that it keeps the flames of passion on.

2. Visualization: The second powerful technique is to travel to the future with your mind’s eyes and see yourself at the pick performance. Visualize with great details your ideal future self.

3. Accelerated cycle return: In his book, mastery, Robert Greene elaborates on the concept of accelerated cycle return.

It states that by keeping practicing and practicing attentively with intense focus, your brain reaches a state called “accelerated cycle return”.

In this state, you not only don’t see the practice as a burden but also feel a constant craving to get back to work and continue cultivating your skills, whether it is math, playing an instrument, etc.

So, if initially you merely like a subject and seek immense motivation to take to a higher level, keep practicing attentively and have in mind that you will eventually reach this holy accelerated cycle return.

Summary

Talent is merely myelination of neurons.

You can grow myelins faster by doing deep practice.

The deep practice has three rules:

Chunking
Repetition
Slowing down

Deep practice is mentally demanding and unless we don’t have passion and motivation, our brain wouldn’t like it.

To spark motivation, you must:

Constantly expose yourself to figures that inspire you and you admire them.
Visualize your ideal self in the future.
Practice attentively with focus till you reach the accelerated cycle return.

I hope you enjoyed the review. Share your thoughts in the comments. I would be curious to know if you know techniques that help you learn faster.

Also, I would like to know in what domains would you use the deep practice techniques? Share with me.

The 5 elements of a captivating writing

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 09:00:00 GMT

I’ve been always enchanted by the writings that hook my attention. What is the mystery? What are the secret elements that those adroit writers weave into the fabric of their prose?

A superb writer must initially be a superb reader, Steven Pinker a Harvard psycholinguist suggests. Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

Hence, join me and Steven Pinker on a short journey to unearth some elements of a fascinating prose from a marvelous excerpt written by Richard Dawkins.

Good Writing

Opening Lines of Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

I. Good Writing Starts Strong and Provokes Curiosity

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

Contrast this sentence with a banality (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the …”).

He begins strong, and further, he hooks your attention: We’re lucky because we’ll die? Who wouldn’t want to find out how this mystery will be unfolded?

The starkness of the paradox is reinforced by the diction and meter: short, simple words.

II. Parallel Wording is A Powerful Trope

Most people are never going to die. because they are never going to be born.

The resolution to the paradox — that a bad thing, dying, implies a good thing, having lived — is revealed with a parallel construction: never going to die … never going to be born.

In his classic book — Elements of Style — Strunk, too, hinted on delicacies of using parallel constructions:

Parallel construction, requires that expressions of similar content and function should be outwardly similar. The likeness of form enables the reader to recognize more readily the likeness of content and function. — William Strunk

III. Good Writing is Understood With The Mind’s Eye

The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.

Dawkins constantly makes you conjure images in your mind’s eyes: People who never see the light of the day. With a touch of the poetic — the sand grains of Arabia — he seeks to invoke a grandeur rather than opting for a colorless adjective like massive or enormous.

unborn ghosts. A vivid image to convey the abstract notion of a mathematically possible combination of genes, and a wily repurposing of a supernatural concept to advance a naturalistic argument.

IV. Good Writing Can Flip The Way The World is Perceived

In six sentences Dawkins flips the way we think of death, and has stated a rationalist’s case for an appreciation of life in words so stirring that many humanists have asked that it be read at their funerals.

V. Good Writers Enliven Their Prose With Judicious Insertion of Surprise Words

According to studies of writing quality, the two following are distinguishing features between sprightly prose and mush:

A varied vocabulary
Use of Unusual words

However, trying to appear smart or cultivated through turgid prose stuffed with polysyllabic Latinism (cessasion for end, eventuate in for cause) and flabby adjectives (is contributive to instead of contributes to, is determinative of instead of determines) often backfires and one would appear pompous and occasionally ridiculous.

The key is a phenomenon called: phonaesthetics, the feeling of sound. The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation.

Just listen to your voice and sense your muscles as you articulate your writing to judge whether you have opted for proper words. Consider the following example:

Voluptuous has a voluptuous give-and-take between the lips and the tongue, and titillating also gives the tongue a workout while titillating the ear with coincidental overlap with a naughty word. These associations make a sea of voluptuous models and titillating cover lines more lively than a sea of sexy models and provocative cover lines.

On the other hand, a sea of pulchritudinous models would serve as a lesson on how not to choose words: the ugly pulchritude sounds like the opposite of what it means, and it is one of those words that no one uses unless they want to show off.

In summary, the study of good writings reveals similar patterns of practices:

An insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary.
Attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze
the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs
the use of parallel syntax
the occasional planned surprise
the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement
the use of mete and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood

Good writers do not write as if they have something important to say, rather, they write as if they have something important to show.

Happy writing.

Make It Stick: The science of successful learning

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 09:00:00 GMT

Learning faster, and remembering more, is a lofty goal endeared by any ambitious individual. Unfortunately, our default way of learning is terribly ineffective.

Perhaps this has happened to you as well, asking a person’s name just to forget it a minute later. What’s worse is that we think to ourselves, gosh, I have a very bad memory. Just if I was a bit smarter…

After reading more than 15 books on learning and pick-performance, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern: when it comes to learning, it doesn’t matter what kind of brain you have, what matters is how you use it.

In fact, from Einstein, Mozart to Elon Musk, studies have demonstrated that world-class performers and prodigies reach that level of achievement due to the learning methods, practicing strategies, and the mindset they have, and not something that they are born with.

I. What you will learn in this review

How our intuition fools us into adopting ineffective learning strategies.
5 practical learning strategies proven by neuroscience to significantly amplify your learning speed.

II. The Illusion of learning

Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.

This is how most of us initially study and try to learn: We start reading the text, underline and highlight the material.

Then we dedicate our time to rereading them. We get fluent in the text and terminology which feels like learning.

This familiarity with a text which is the product of rereading creates an illusion of learning. This fluency with the text is a misleading indicator of what you have learned, and how much you will remember.

This way of learning is often very easy and comfortable. In fact, many teachers believe that learning should be made easier and faster.

This intuition that leads us to rereading strategy is compelling and difficult to ignore for two reasons. First, as we keep repeating, we notice an increase in our performance. Second, we fail to notice that this improvement is coming from our short-term memory and will fade away quickly.

III. The 5 Learning Techniques for Super Learning

1. Retrieval practice

In essence, retrieval is trying to remember what you have already studied or learned.

This is one of the most effective techniques of learning that burns the material into your brain. This should be the core strategy of your learning.

How to use retrieval practice: When you study lecture notes or read a book, pause periodically and ask yourself:

What are the key ideas?
What terms or ideas are new to me?
How would I define them?
How do the ideas relate to what I already know?

The harder it is to recall a new learning from memory, the greater the benefits.

How it feels: Compared to rereading, retrieval and self-quizzing may feel uncomfortable and frustrating especially when the new learning is hard to recall. The irony is that this is exactly how you actually know that it’s working and you are in deep learning mode.

Spaced practice means leaving a considerable time between your practicing sessions.

How to use spaced Retrieval: Establish a schedule for self-quizzing sessions with some time to elapse between each session. How much time?

Depends on the material. If you’re trying to remember words, names, faces, etc., practice the retrieval within a few minutes after the first encounter.

New material from a text must be revisited within a day or so of your first encounter with it. After the second visit, you would need to let at least one week to pass before the next rehearsal.

What your intuition tells you to do: If you’re like me, your intuition might convince you to dedicate stretches of time to mass practice; that is, single-mindedly engaging with repetitive practice until you pass out.

2. Space out your repetition

Why spaced repetition is effective? When you leave some space between your retrieval practice or self-quizzing, some material is already forgotten.

At this stage, when trying to recall, you are reconstructing what you have already studied from your long-term memory. This effort engages more neuronal pathways and strengthens the memory traces.

3. Interleaving

I’ll explain this one with a favorite example of mine. This is from a real study.

A group of eight-year-olds practiced tossing beanbags into buckets in gym class. Half of the kids tossed into a bucket three feet away. The other half mixed it up by tossing into buckets two feet and four feet away. After twelve weeks of this they were all tested on tossing into a three-foot bucket.

Now here’s the question. Which group your intuition says that has been the winning one? Well …

The kids who did the best by far were those who’d practiced on two-and four-foot buckets but never on three-foot buckets. How much better? A significant 215 percent better.

How to use interleaving technique: Most textbooks bundle specific study subjects together. For instance 20 exercise on computing the volume of a spheroid. Followed by 25 exercise on computing the volume of a cone, etc.

You must break this kind of batch practicing. Solve a problem in one category then jump to another category.

How it feels? Blocked practice, mastering one type of problem before moving to the other types, feels (and looks) like you’re getting better mastery.

On the contrary, interrupting practice of one type to move to the other types feels disruptive, counterproductive and boring.

The irony is that even when learners are gaining mastery much faster from this interleaving technique, they still persist in feeling that blocked practice is more efficient.

4. Elaboration

Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material.

Personally, I find this technique remarkably effective. Using it, I can remember titles of all the chapters to the book I have read in addition to the key ideas for each chapter.

How to use Elaboration? A potent form of elaboration is to come up with an analogy, metaphor, or visual image for the new material.

For instance, if you’re trying to learn the principals of heat transfer, you may comprehend conduction better if you imagine warming your hands around a hot cup of coffee in a snowy winter.

Another amazing way of using elaboration is trying to explain it in simple terms. As Einstein put it:

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

This method is especially effective in that it debunks the illusion of learning. Next time you feel like you’ve mastered a subject, try to explain it ins and outs…

5. Generation

Generation technique has the effect of making the mind more receptive to the new material.

Generation is an endeavor to come up with a solution to a problem before referring to the answer. To use an analogy, generation is like plowing the soil which makes it fertile. (Noticed how I used elaboration technique?)

You can practice generation before a class by trying to come up with some key ideas you expect to find in the material. This initial effort makes you brain significantly more receptive to what’s coming.

Perhaps you noticed the recurring theme of each technique; they are uncomfortable. If you practice them, you will notice that a couple of hours using these techniques is also exhausting.

This is a good sign as I have elaborated this article about talent and how to cultivate it.

I would love to have your feedback on the article. Especially I am curious to know if you use your own secret technique for learning and practicing. Let’s share some thoughts.

Here’s how to swiftly make habits that stick

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 09:00:00 GMT

Habits are critical to a high-performance and fulfilling life. Just to summon a couple of quotes from the giants:

We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then, is nsot an act, but a habit. (Will Durant and not Aristotle )

And my favorite:

We first make our habits, and then our habits make us. (John Dryden)

Importance, and the vital role of habits, in fact, is evident to all of us like many other sound advice we hear all the time.

Yes, we know. That’s the problem. We know but we fail to act. Or if we act, soon we would relapse. The question is: How to create a good habit that sticks.

The habit loop and its three core elements.

Each habit is comprised of three core elements:

Trigger (or Cue)
Routine (or habit as we know it)
Reward

1. The Trigger (Cue): The first element of each habit is a trigger or cue. A trigger is essentially what prompts us or reminds us to take a specific action. For example, in the habit of smoking, a sensation of anxiety or the sight of a cigarette pack prompts us to indulge in the routine of smoking.

Triggers come in two major forms:

a. Objects: Visual objects or auditory sounds can serve as cues or triggers that spark the idea of action.

It has probably has happened to you as well: the sight of your book encouraging you to take and read it, or, the sound of a notification on your phone, drifting you away from the task at hand and drowning you in Facebook app.

b. Sensations: Feelings and sensations e.g. anger, anxiety, happiness, etc., also serve as strong triggers. A compelling trigger for alcoholics is often the sensation of anxiety. Or the sensation of a low mood might prompt us to grab the TV control and start watching …

So, triggers, are the first element of a habit loop, that drive us towards taking a specific action.

2. Routine (Habit): When the trigger nudges us, we engage in a specific routine. This is the habit itself. Anxiety kicks in (trigger), then smoking or drinking alcohol follows (routine or the habit).

3. Reward: When the routine is finished, we are often left with a reward. This reward is essentially what enforces the whole process to be imprinted in our brain and establishes the whole cycle of trigger > routine > reward AND REPEAT.

This reward can come in many forms: A feeling of relaxation, food, joy, etc.

What happens at this stage is crucial. Following the trigger, routine, reward, a loop starts forming in your brain.

With several iterations of this loop, you will reach a point where you will experience cravings.

When the habit has been repeated enough (it can range from a couple of weeks to over 200 times of repetition), with the very first hint of the trigger, you will feel butterflies in your belly which compels you forcefully to engage with the routine. Yes, as you may have noticed, this is very similar to what we call addiction.

There is a thrilling news here, though. Now that we know what elements are involved in a habit, we can deliberately design one which would end up serving us. Here’s what I’ve covered so far:

How to Build an Effective Habit

Remember that our goal is to build a habit with the level of automaticity. Put differently, we want to build a habit that does not rely on our willpower and that we want to make it as automatic as possible.

Otherwise, after several attempts, the whole process will end up in oblivion like many of our new year’s resolution.

1. Choose the habit: The first step is to choose what habit you want to form. Reading books? Meditation? Jogging? Up to you.

2. Establish a Trigger: Second step is to pick a trigger that reminds you of what you want to do. For example, if you want to adopt the habit of reading, you can choose to set the books you want besides your bed.

Or if you want to adopt the habit of jogging, as a trigger, you can put your workout gears somewhere that keeps catching your attention.

Here are characteristics of an effective trigger:

Pick a trigger that happens every day and is not subjected to circumstances.
Pick a trigger that you cannot avoid. For instance, you can choose to eat as a trigger for your reading habit. This way, each time want to eat, you are triggered to engage with your reading habit. Other ideas could include taking shower, brushing your teeth and many many others.
The trigger must enable you to follow through your habit immediately.This is crucial in that if there is too much time between the trigger and the action, your brain fails to associate these two events together, hence, you may be exposed to the trigger, but it really does not prompt you to action.
Make one and only one trigger for the habit you have in mind.

3. Design the routine: After the trigger, you have to design your desired routine or the habit. Why do I say design?

The reason is that there are many pitfalls that if you are not aware of them, you will not reach the level of automaticity. In other words, the whole process will vanish after several attempts.

Depending on the type of habit, you will definitely feel some level of resistance. You want to start reading or go jogging, and you have set up the trigger. But … you may not feel like it.

There are many reasons behind this resistance such as willpower, boredom, unpleasantness of the habit itself, etc. There are, however, strategies you can adopt, that can reduce the feeling of resistance. I call these tricks: catalyst.

The Habit Catalysts

The first catalyst is to shrink the habit in the beginning. If you want to establish the habit of reading, do not set your goal to read an hour a day. This might cause your brain to panic in which case your brain creates a strong feeling of resistance that prevents you from taking action.

The crucial thing here is just to keep the habit loop going. No matter how trivially you engage with your habit. Shrink the duration or intensity to make it far easier to your brain.

As you build momentum, you can increase the intensity of the habit.

The second catalyst is to use the mighty technique of Veto power. The idea here is that there is a small window during which you can act, otherwise, your mind will talk you out of it.

The third catalyst is a technique called the 20-seconds rule. This rule states that from the time that the trigger goes off, it should take less than 20 seconds till you engage with your habit. This rule keeps the resistance low.

In the case of a reading book, imagine each time the trigger goes off, you need to go to your room, fetch it from the top shelve … This in itself, creates an extra layer of resistance which we want to minimize.

The strongest catalyst perhaps is a specific mindset that I have used to successfully cultivate many of my habits. I stumbled on the neuroscience of habits in the book: “I am okay, you are okay”. The conclusion of the passage which wrapped up the explanation read like this:

If you do the habit now, next time it would be slightly easier.

Remembering this phrase works like magic. Knowing the fact that this constructive act of yours, will be easier the next time you want to do it, literally destroys the resistance.

4. Reward: Now it is time for the last element of habit loop, the reward. It is critically important that the reward comes immediately, or with very short delay, after the habit.

In the case of working out or jogging, if you say to yourself I will be more fit in three months, it would be too far away for your brain to realize it as a reward because your brain fails to associate that reward with the habit.

If you reward yourself quickly, however, with something like a meal you like, or enjoying a TV show you endear, your brain learns to associate the reward with the routine.

The amazing thing that happens after a couple of weeks, is that as soon as the trigger goes off, not only you do not feel resistance, on the contrary, you would feel cravings.

This is the power of a well crafted and well-executed habit loop. Craving to do the right beneficial action instead of feeling it as a burden.

Here are characteristics of a good reward:

It should come immediately after the routine.
It is vitally important for the reward to be pleasurable.
The best kinds of rewards are those that address our primal needs: Food, Sex, Socializing, Play, Relaxation, etc.

We are mere bundles up habits. The more sophisticated these habits of ours, the higher we can go on the ladder of life.

See you at the top.

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Sat, 01 Sep 2018 09:00:00 GMT

Mindset: The new psychology of success

Have you ever noticed those geeks, geniuses, and world-class achievers while thinking to yourself, gosh, if only I had such talents, or if only I had such high IQ? Disappointing, I know, I have been there.

Perhaps, such way of thinking and having such beliefs about IQ and talent is the biggest hurdle in the way of great success and achievement.

Thinking that we are born with a pre-determined IQ and talent, is called fixed-mindset according to Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University.

The bad news is that people with fixed-mindset live a mediocre life and barely achieve anything extraordinary. The good news, however, is that you can readily change your fixed-mindset and adopt a growth-mindset which is the default mode thinking of world-class achievers.

In this book review, I will provide a summary of the key points in the book “Mindset: The psychology of success”. In addition, I will provide you with practical insights on how you can apply the concepts in the book and alter this self-limiting belief.

The two mindsets and how they determine your future

Dweck, as a young researcher, has always been obsessed with understanding how people cope with failure. So, at schools, she brings children into a room and gives them a series of puzzles to solve.

Puzzles start from fairly easy and continue to get harder and harder. As the students grunt, perspire and toil, she watches their strategies.

This is where she gets shocked by the two starkly different approaches children adopted when facing difficult challenges:

Confronted with harder puzzles, one ten-year-old pulls up his chair, rubs his hands together, smacks his lips, and cries out, “I love a challenge!”. Another, seating away on the puzzles, looks up with a pleased expression and says with authority, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative!” As Dweck puts it:

What’s wrong with them? I wondered. I always thought you coped with failure or you didn’t cope with failure. I never thought anyone loved failure. Were these alien children or were they on to something?

These children turned out to be thinking with a growth-mindset. A person with a growth mindset believes that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, can be cultivated through effort.

Having this belief, not only they do not get discouraged by failure, they don’t even think they are failing. Rather, they think that they are learning, and consequently, they get smarter!

The superpower of people with growth-mindset is that they have the confidence and courage to start and accomplish anything; and they do accomplish because, in the face of many inevitable failures, they are not discouraged. They do not say to themselves I am a failure, rather, they say I failed. Hence, they persevere, and they will triumph at the task.

People with a fixed-mindset, on the other hand, think that human qualities are carved in stone. You are smart or you are not, and failure means you are not. The sad story for people with fixed-mindset is that the try to avoid failure at all costs, so they can stay (feel) smart. Struggles, mistakes, perseverance are just not part of their philosophy.

The curse of people with fixed-mindset is that in the face of the very first failure, they are scared, and say to themselves: I am not made for this task. They do not persevere, and they will not grow.

Why do people differ?

The question that arises here, is why some people are endowed with a growth-mindset, while the others are doomed with the fixed-mindset. The answer is in their childhood upbringing and it is really simple.

Imagine you are given a puzzle and you solve it. Now your parent sees your accomplishment. This is where the seeds to glory or mediocrity get implanted. If your parent praised you in the lines of:

Look, what a smart boy/girl …

You are so intelligent, excellent …

Sorry to tell, but you are doomed if you have heard similar praises during your childhood. Such complements may come from your parents, teachers, caretakers, the source doesn’t really matter.

But wait for a second, aren’t such praises suppose to uplift your spirit and raise your confidence? Well, let’s see what happens behind the curtain (in your subconscious mind) when you are complimented on a trait, over which you have not direct control (in this case, IQ and intelligence).

Imagine you have solved a puzzle and received a juicy complement hinting on you high IQ or intelligence. Now, you are given a harder puzzle, you strive to solve it, but, you notice it is taking much more time. This is where the self-limiting seeds start to grow. In your subconscious you will start a self-dialog along these lines:

hmm, wasn’t I a smart boy/girl, why am I not able to solve this puzzle then??? Hmm, maybe this is just how smart I am. My intelligence is limited to those tasks only …

From then on, you will be very conservative of the activities you will get yourself into for the sake of preserving your self-esteem. Too bad! Don’t freak out though if you are in this category, I will share with you how you can easily change this self-limiting mindset as we proceed.

Now, let’s see how children are endowed with the growth mindset.

Imagine, again, the very same scenario, you solve a problem and now it is time for some praises … Your parent, instructor, while marveling at your accomplishments, says:

Hmm, good job, this might have been an easy puzzle, let’s do something more challenging…

Hmm, good job, you seem to have worked so hard, let’s move on to a harder puzzle.

Take note that in the second scenario, there is no emphasis on an innate trait, rather, the praise is on something which is you have control over, that is, your efforts and how hard you work.

Now let’s examine your self-dialog as you face the new harder challenge. When you try to solve the puzzle and it takes time more than the usual, if you could play your subconscious mind’s voice a little louder, you would hear:

Hmm, I have not yet solved it, I have not tried enough, I must work harder on it, it is exciting.

You see the difference? An amazing example of growth-mindset is babies. Lucky to be immune to such destructive praises, babies, trying to walk, are not worried about making mistakes or humiliating themselves.

They walk, they fall, they get, fall again, they try, indefinitely until they get it right. This is the very essence of growth-mindset. Knowing that with practice, and perseverance, you will get better and better (with caution, read smarter …).

How do I know if I have fixed-mindset or growth-mindset

The cornerstone of change is to first acknowledge that a shortcoming exist. So, to uncover if you have the fixed or growth-mindset, read the sentences below:

Our intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.
You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.
No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.

If you agree more with the sentences 1, and 2, you are mostly behaving and operating with a fixed-mindset, and if you identify yourself with sentences 3, and 4, you operating with a growth-mindset.

When asked people, ranging from children to young adults: When Do You Feel Smart: When you are flawless or when you are learning? Here are how differently people with a fixed-mindset replied:

It’s when I don’t make any mistakes.

When I finish something fast and it’s perfect.

When Something is easy for me but other people can’t do it.

And this is how people with growth-mindset replied:

When it’s really hard, and I try really hard, and I can do something I couldn’t do before.

When I work on something for a long time and I start to figure it out.

See the difference? Which set of answers resonates most with you?

There was a saying in 1960 which read:

“Becoming is better than being”. The fixed-mindset robs people from the luxury of becoming. They have to already be.

How to easily put people into the growth-mindset

If you are a parent, teacher, coach, etc. both you and your subjects benefit enormously if everyone operates with a growth-mindset. Let me recount a real example from the book for you to see how you can make this happen.

Joseph Martocchio conducted a study of employees who were taking a short computer training course. Half of the employees were put in a fixed mindset. He told them it was all a matter of how much ability they possessed.

The other half was put in a growth mindset. He told them that computer skills could be developed through practice. Everyone, steeped in these mindsets, then proceeded with the course.

Although the two groups started off with exactly equal confidence in their computer skills, by the end of the course they looked quite different.

Those in the growth mindset gained considerable confidence in their computer skills as they learned, despite the many mistakes they inevitably made.

But, because of those mistakes, those with the fixed mindset actually lost confidence in their computer skills as they learned!

Meanwhile, you might ask, but, what about those IQ tests? Aren’t the students sorted into different levels based on their prior abilities and achievements? Well, you must remember that test scores and any measures of achievement tell you where a student is, and they don’t tell you where a student could end up.

Mindset in relationships

Mindsets manifest themselves in every domain, whether you are a leader, teacher, parent, or a husband/wife. I chose relationship since I guess there are lots of myths around this topic (we all once craved to find our one true soulmate I guess), and also you must beware that even people with growth-mindset, might approach a domain like relationships with fixed-mindset.

People with fixed-mindset think that if their relationship is the right one, and if they are compatible with one another, well, this means most things will fall into its place. In the face of problems, they tremble and threads of doubts and fears start to sneak in.

People with fixed-mindset say if this is the right relationship and if we are compatible, there must be no need for hustle and hard work to get it to work. Remember the delusions sparked by the fixed-mindset? “If you have the ability, then you shouldn’t work hard for it”.

Aaron Beck, noted marriage authority, says that one of the most destructive beliefs for a relationship is “If we need to work at it, there’s something seriously wrong with our relationship.” Says John Gottman, a foremost relationship researcher:

Every marriage demands an effort to keep it on the right track; there is a constant tension . . . between the forces that hold you together and those that can tear you apart.

As with personal achievement, this belief — that success should not need effort — robs people of the very thing they need to make their relationship thrive. It’s probably why so many relationships go stale — because people believe that being in love means never having to do anything taxing.

How do I go from fixed-mindset to growth-mindset

In this section, I share with you how you can adopt a growth mindset. Congrats, we have already taken the first step by shedding the light on these two modes of thinking.

Regardless of these further steps, the sheer awareness of these two mindsets takes you a long way, though, it may not be enough.

One way which is a profoundly effective way to instill the growth-mindset is studying the lives of great performers, and world-known figures like Michael Jordan, Mozart, Michelangelo, etc.

Why you might ask. The reason is that when you study the lives of such achievers, you will notice a common theme in their life story and that it, “hard work”, and not talent or IQ. While people marveled at the Pietà masterpiece, this is how the wizard, Michelangelo responded:

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.

Reading about these figures also debunks many self-limiting beliefs induced on us by movies such as Good Will Hunting in which a janitor (Matt Damon) solves a math open problem by glancing at it and just figuring out the solution.

You will realize that for someone like Einstein, it took 10 years of daily, deliberate, and intense effort to reach the theory of relativity.

Another way to cultivate growth-mindset is to be aware. In case of any failure or setbacks, do not see them as signs of stupidity or shortcomings of mental capacity, rather, choose to see them as a lack of experience and skill.

So, beware, when a self-limiting dialog initiates in your mind, stating that you are not made for this task, you are not good enough to do this, and remember that all you ever need is just a little push …

In the end, I would like you to share with me in the comments if you identify yourself as someone who used to have fixed-mindset?

What has helped you change your mindset in the past? Or if you think you always though and behaved with a growth-mindset, let me know what you think has contributed to the formation of this mindset in you (teachers, parents, any specific quotes you might remember).

Also, you will benefit a lot from the companion review to this book which is about talent, how it is formed and how you can speed up acquiring it.

Steve Jobs: Core lessons on leadership

Sat, 01 Sep 2018 09:00:00 GMT

The best thing about reading biographies and the very reason why I love biographies are the lessons you can learn from the bests. Having a business guru like jobs as a mentor is a blessing not everyone can have and fortunately enough, biographies make this dream come close to reality. So here are the best things I’ve learned about Jobs.

Jobs Core Personality Traits and Management Ethics

Jobs was an abandoned child, and when he asked his mom and dad if his real parents didn’t want him, they repeated slowly: “We specifically picked you out

“. So, abandoned, chosen, special, became part of what Jobs regarded himself of.

From early in childhood, his dad who was a skilled mechanic would take him to show him how repairing is done. He would point out to him the detailing of the designs, lines, vents etc. Jobs also watched his father a lot using his skills in negotiations when bargaining the parts he wanted to purchase. These experience with his father

instilled within him persuasion skills and attention to details that came in handy later in his career.

Another impacting force on Jobs views was his childhood search of neighborhood exposing him to simple, smart, cheap houses that were built by Joseph Eichler. From these exposures and later his Zen practices, he developed an orientation towards simplicity that influenced later all his ideas and designs.
A core personality trait of Jobs which had a significant impact on all his achievements was him being relentless on getting what he needed or what he deemed to be right:

That summer of 1972, after his graduation, he and Brennan moved to a cabin in the hills above Los Altos. “I’m going to go live in a cabin with Chrisann,” he announced to his parents one day. His father was furious. “No you’re not,” he said. “Over my dead body.” They had recently fought about marijuana, and once again the younger Jobs was willful. He just said good-bye and walked out.

One day Jobs walked into the lobby of the video game manufacturer Atari and wanted to be hired there, and told the personnel director, who was startled by his unkempt hair and attire, that he wouldn’t leave until they gave him a job.

Perhaps the boldest of Jobs traits was his Reality Distortion Field which made him believe what seemed utterly impossible to others and he would always persist that something odd could be done and interestingly enough, he would be often right.
He would refuse to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.
Jobs had come to believe that he could impart his feeling of confidence to others and thus push them to do things they hadn’t thought possible
A remarkable thing that helped Jobs what he eventually became was his engagement with many great people and mentors and getting into different businesses and careers. For instance:

The Atari experience helped shape Jobs’s approach to business and design. He appreciated the user friendliness of Atari’s insert-quarter-avoid-Klingons games. “That simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,” said Ron Wayne. Jobs also absorbed some of Bushnell’s take-non-prisoners attitude. “Nolan wouldn’t take no for an answer,” according to Alcorn, “and this was Steve’s first impression of how things got done.Nolan was never abusive, like Steve sometimes is. But he had the same driven attitude. It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done. In that way Nolan was a mentor for Jobs.”

Bushnell taught Jobs:

I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

Mark Markukula another mentor of Jobs taught him:

You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.

And that is precisely what Job did with Apple. He always thought product, not profit. Markulla instilled in Jobs the Apple philosophy which revolves around three core principles as follows:

Empathy: an intimate connection with the feelings of customers and understanding their needs.
Focus: To do what must be done, every other unimportant opportunity must be eliminated.
Impute: People from an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover.” If you present your great product in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod.

From Alan Kay, a Xerox mighty scientist Jobs embraced and applied two Maxims:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.

A great thing I’ve noticed is the root of many extraordinary feats has been this:

Because I didn’t know how it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.

Jobs has been an all-time perfectionist and always complaint that young generation has no such quality ingrained in them.
Jobs would never compromise quality and perfection in favor of lowering the costs, nor would he care about how much longer the project would be delayed to meet his expectations.
Jobs would always argue that “By expecting people to do great things, you can get them to do great things.” This actually has proven psychological roots.
From Bill Atkinson: “Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow the tastes.”
“No, because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them”, this is what Jobs kept replying whoever suggested doing some market research.
The journey is the reward. Jobs favorite maxim which too has proven neuropsychological roots. As soon as you reach your goal, the joy vanishes. (Look up dopamine working mechanism and its effects if interested).
Another Job’s favorite maxim was: “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.” He wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team to have them behave like swashbucklers who were proud of their work but willing to commandeer from others.
Sculley former Pepsi, the first Apple CEO had a weakness to manage a dysfunctional company was his desire to please other people, one of many traits that he did not share with Jobs:

We would go to the Mac building at eleven at night,” Sculley recalled, “and they would bring Jobs code to show. In some cases he wouldn’t even look at it. He would just take it and throw it back at them. I’d say, ‘How can you turn it down?’ And he would say, ‘I know they can do better.’”

Microsoft followed a different philosophy, their initial products were often clumsy, but they were extremely persistent, so they kept improving and improving their works.
Jobs had a profound emphasis on recruiting only and only A players:

Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”

As I traversed through the book, I noticed several things contributing to Jobs ability to come up with ideas:

He always has been on the edge of the technology and art, aware what’s the latest achievements of scientific and artistic communities.
He actively would canvass academics to inquire them on their needs and shortcoming to see if he could come up with a solution.
Part of his routines what holding occasional retreats with top 100 managers to a resort and keep brainstorming ideas and selecting top 3 out of n+1 proposed ones.

What prepared Jobs for great success was getting fired from Apple in act I, starting the “Next” venture and indulging and failing in any type of projects he desires. In short, his failures made him the “Steve” we know on act III (which is returning to apple).
This one is a bit dark: When he wanted to acquire something that others wouldn’t let go of (like his daughter Lisa from his ex-wife) he would spark off a destructive route of ignorance. In the case of his daughter, he undermined his ex’s effectiveness and her well being to get Lisa to move into his house.
A lesson Jobs learned from his Buddhist days was that material possessions often cluttered life than enriching it.
One thing the Jobs believed lead to the downfall of apple after he left the company with Sculley was that “Sculley destroyed apple by bringing in corrupt people and corrupt values,” “They cared about making money for themselves mainly, and also for Apple, rather than making great products.
If Jobs new for sure a course of action was right, he was unstoppable. But if he had doubts, he sometimes withdrew, preferring not to thinking about things that did not perfectly suit him.
Job’s ambition was to build a company that would endure, and he asked Markulla what the formula for that would be. Markulla replied that lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves.
A beautiful phrase I read was Job saying: We at Apple have forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
One of Jobs greatest strength was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not too is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted at one big product strategy session. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. “The room was in dumb silence,” Schiller recalled. There was also a stunned silence when Jobs presented the plan to the September meeting of the Apple board. “Gil had been urging us to approve more and more products every meeting,” Woolard recalled. “He kept saying we need more products. Steve came in and said we needed fewer. He drew a matrix with four quadrants and said that this was where we should focus.” At first the board pushed back. It was a risk, Jobs was told. “I can make it work,” he replied. The board never voted on the new strategy. Jobs was in charge, and he forged ahead.

Jobs used and benefited a lot from his tuition. In case of designs, he would point to models and sketches he liked and dump on the ones he didn’t.
Perhaps one of the greatest maxims Jobs wove into the fabric of Apple’s designs was Davincii’smantra: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”It takes a lot of hard work He said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.” As I’ve remarkably uttered:

Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.

To make Ive’s aesthetic desires and various design whims come into reality, Jobs had to fend off the objections of the manufacturing engineers.

When we took the designs to the engineers, Jobs said, they came up with thirty-eight reasons they couldn’t do it. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of grudgingly did it.

Jobs followed this strategy that made Apple successful the whole time: Make hit product and promote them with terrific marketing.
Steve firmly deemed motivation to be crucial:

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will, he said.
In designing products, Apple would come up several models, pick one, and keep refining them till it seemed perfect.
He believed (and recently have been advocated by many creativity gurus) that creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas. So Apple designed his building to promote random encounters with employees who would not be aware of each other otherwise.
What made iPhone successful was simplifying things that were complex to deal with in other phones.
Jobs had his theory on why great companies like IBM decline. “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. After all, as Dylan says: If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

What do you think was jobs best attributes? Share your thoughts in the comments.