Business icons, superstar professional athletes, billionaires — it doesn’t matter how rich or how accomplished — I’ve had them all tell me the same thing…
There are moments when you feel the world is too much. Days and even weeks when you want to (or perhaps do) pull up the covers and half-sleep in bed until nightfall, avoiding a feeling of hopelessness that seems insurmountable. Long-awaited deals fall through without warning, haters attack you without reason or fact, circumstances turn good decisions into awful realities — sometimes it just feels like the deck is stacked against you and there is nothing you can do about it.
I’ve felt the same on more than a few occasions, and more are coming.
Entrepreneurs in particular seem prone to feeling on top of the world one minute, only to feel crushed by it the next.
To this breed, I assure you all: in our species, it’s normal.
It’s an integral part of building anything remarkable, whether a business, a relationship, or a life. Expanding your sphere of comfort and abilities comes with a cost: repeated self-doubt.
I thank my mother for forwarding me the above video to put things in perspective. In your moments of self-doubt, I encourage you to watch it and meditate on all of the things you’ve done that you once considering impossible. The odds you’ve overcome, the critics you’ve proven wrong, and the small defeats that — through making you stronger and smarter — made huge victories possible later.
Get back up. Bigger and better things are waiting for you.
Leo Babauta has been a incredible model for me in the world of blogging.
His blog, Zen Habits, went from 1 reader — his wife — to being one of the Technorati top-100 blogs in the world in less than 12 months. Leo, who lives in Guam (how cool is that?), has built his audience by deconstructing his offline behavior as much as his online behavior…
In the last two years, he has:
- Quit smoking (on Nov. 18, 2005).
- Lost 40 pounds.
- Gone from a non-runner to completing several marathons and triathlons.
- Become a vegetarian.
- Tripled his income.
- Written a novel and a non-fiction book.
- Eliminated his debt.
Oh, and those children people like to use as justifications for inaction? No more excuses. Leo has six kids.
To illustrate a few of Leo’s principles for changing behavior, I am pleased to offer several exclusive excerpts from Leo’s new book, The Power of Less.
It is a fast read and a good reminder that — in a world where people tend to focus on the latest Firefox extensions and gizmos — simple basic habits are the force multiplier, not new applications. I added bolding to some parts I think are particularly important, as well as bracketed text [ ] for my comments.
The Power of Less
From Chapter 5: Create New Habits and The Power of Less Challenge
The only way you’ll form long-lasting habits is by applying the Power of Less: focus on one habit at a time, one month at a time, so that you’ll be able to focus all your energy on creating that one habit.
The tool that you’ll use to form each habit is an extremely powerful one: the Power of Less Challenge, a 30-day challenge that has proven very effective in forming habits for thousands of readers of my Zen Habits blog.
Here’s how it works:
1. Select one habit for the Challenge. Only one habit per month. You can choose any habit — whatever you think will have the biggest impact on your life.
[Tim: This is also supported by research done by BJ Fogg of Stanford University. Want to teach 60-year olds to use an SMS program to help them quit smoking? It won't work. Those are two new behaviors. Choose one behavioral modification at a time.]
2. Write down your plan. You will need to specifically state what your goal will be each day, when you’ll do it, what your “trigger” will be (the event that will immediately precede the habit that’s already a part of your routine — such as exercising right after you brush your teeth), who you will report to (see below).
3. Post your goal publicly. Tell as many people as possible that you are trying to form your new habit. I suggest an online forum, but you could email it to coworkers and family and friends or otherwise get the word out to a large group.
4. Report on your progress daily. Each day, tell the same group of people whether or not you succeeded at your goal.
The Rules
There are only a few rules you need to follow to make this Challenge a success. If you follow these rules, it would be hard for you not to form a new habit by the end of the 30 days.
* Do only one habit at a time. Do not break this rule, because I assure you that if you do multiple habits at once, you will be much less likely to succeed. Trust me — I’ve tried both ways many times, and in my experience there is 100% failure for forming multiple habits at once, and a 50-80% success if you do just one habit at a time — depending on whether you follow the rest of these rules.
* Choose an easy goal. Don’t decide to do something really hard, at least for now. Later, when you’re good at habit changes, you can choose something harder. But for now, do something you know you can do every day. In fact, choose something easier than you think you can do every day. If you think you can exercise for 30 minutes a day, choose 10 minutes — making it super easy is one of the surest ways to ensure you’ll succeed.
* Choose something measurable. You should be able to say, definitively, whether you were successful or not today. If you choose exercise, set a number of minutes or something similar (20 minutes of exercise daily, for example). Whatever your goal, have a measurement.
* Be consistent. You want to do your habit change at the same time every day, if possible. If you’re going to exercise, do it at 7 a.m. (or 6 p.m.) every day, for example. This makes it more likely to become a habit.
* Report daily. You could check in every 2 or 3 days, but you’ll be more likely to succeed if you report daily. This has been proven over and over again in the Challenges.
* Keep a positive attitude! Expect setbacks now and then, but just note them and move on. No embarrassment in this challenge.
12 Key Habits to Start With
You can choose any habits in this book that you think will help you most, at work and in the rest of your life. But if I had to recommend 12 habits to start with (one each month for a year), these are the 12 I think could make the most difference in the lives of the average person (more on each habit in later chapters):
1. Set your 3 MITs (Most Important Tasks) each morning.
2. Single-task. When you work on a task, don’t switch to other tasks.
3. Process your inbox to empty.
4. Check email just twice a day. 5. Exercise 5-10 minutes a day.
6. Work while disconnected, with no distractions.
7. Follow a morning routine.
8. Eat more fruits and veggies every day. [Tim: Here is the "slow-carb" breakfast I use to start my morning routine]
9. Keep your desk decluttered.
10. Say no to commitments and requests that aren’t on your Short List (See Chapter 16, on the Simple Life).
11. Declutter your house for 15 minutes a day. 12. Stick to a 5-sentence limit for emails.
On Starting Small
Tim: Leo advocates, as I do, that you use smaller behavioral changes as a lever for major behavioral changes. In other words, start smart to seed the right habit before you aim to maximize output. In the beginning the habit is more important than the result.
Here are four good examples of “downsizing” behavioral changes, taken from pg. 42 of The Power of Less:
* Exercise: Start with 5-10 minutes a day, instead of 30.
* Waking early: Start by waking 15 minutes earlier, instead of an hour or two.
* Productivity: Start by trying to focus on the task at hand for 5-10 minutes at a time.
* Decluttering: Start with just one drawer, instead of trying to declutter your entire office or home.
Here are a few other segments I highlighted in my own notes for The Power of Less:
p. 51 Focusing on completion vs. organizing and filing p. 62 Don’t schedule appointments (Tim: much like Arnold Schwarzenegger) p. 80 “What’s the worst that will happen if I delete this?” p. 99 Reducing commitments p. 119 Decluttering the desk p. 128 Designate a home for everything:
Designate a home for everything, and be fanatic. When you find stuff on flat surfaces, or draping over a chair, it might be because you don’t have a designated spot for that kind of thing. If you don’t, designate a spot for it immediately. If stuff doesn’t have a home in your home, you need to get rid of it, or it will forever wander around the house.
Remember: productivity shouldn’t be complicated.
Putting a good tool on top of a bad habit (process) just multiplies garbage outputs. Forget the latest and greatest technologies and go back to basics. Routines and rules, not gizmos and tools.
Training in horseback archery in Nikko, Japan. (Photo: David West)
2008 has been one of the most exciting years of my life. I did more dealmaking and met more people than in the last 5 years combined. This produced many surprise insights about business and human nature, especially as I uncovered tons of my own false assumptions.
Here are some of the things I learned and loved in 2008. I’ve linked to posts that I wrote when exploring some of the concepts in more detail…
Favorite reads of 2008: Zorba the Greek and Seneca: Letters from a Stoic. These are two of the most readable books of practical philosophies I’ve ever had the fortune to encounter. If you have to choose one, get Zorba, but Lucius Seneca will take you further. Both are fast reads of 2-3 evenings.
Don’t accept large or costly favors from strangers. This karmic debt will come back to haunt you. If you can’t pass it up, immediately return to karmic neutrality with a gift of your choosing. Repay it before they set the terms for you. Exceptions: ubersuccessful mentors who are making introductions and not laboring on your behalf.
You don’t have to recoup losses the same way you lose them. I own a home in San Jose but moved almost 12 months ago. It’s been empty since, and I’m paying a large mortgage each month. The best part? I don’t care. But this wasn’t always the case. For many months, I felt demoralized as others pressured me to rent it, emphasizing how I was just flushing money away otherwise. Then I realized: you don’t have to make $ back the same way you lose it. If you lose ,000 at the blackjack table, should you try and recoup it there? Of course not. I don’t want to deal with renters, even with a property management company. The solution: leave the house alone, use it on occasion, and just create incoming revenue elsewhere that would cover the cost of the mortgage through consulting, publishing, etc.
One of the most universal causes of self-doubt and depression: trying to impress people you don’t like. Stressing to impress is fine, but do it for the right people — those whom you want to emulate.
Slow meals = life. From Daniel Gilbert of Harvard to Martin Seligman of Princeton, the “happiness” (self-reported well-being) researchers seem to agree on one thing: meal time with friends and loved ones is a direct predictor of happiness. Have at least one 2-3-hour dinner and/or drinks per week — yes, 2-3 hours — with those who make you smile and feel good. I find the afterglow effect to be greatest and longest with groups of 5 or more. Two times that are conducive to this: Thursday dinners or after-dinner drinks and Sunday brunches.
It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do. If you have a strong informed opinion, don’t keep it to yourself. Try and help people and make the world a better place. If you strive to do anything remotely interesting, just expect a small percentage of the population to always find a way to take it personally. F*ck ‘em. There are no statues erected to critics.
Related: You’re never as bad as they say you are. My agent used to send me every blog or media hit for The 4-Hour Workweek. Eight weeks after publication, I asked him to only forward me positive mentions in major media or factual inaccuracies I needed to respond to. An important correlate: you’re never as good as they say you are, either.
It’s not helpful get a big head or get depressed. The former makes you careless and the latter makes you lethargic. I wanted to have untainted optimism but remain hungry. Speaking of hungry…
Eat a high-protein breakfast within 30 minutes of waking and go for a 10-20-minute walk outside afterward, ideally bouncing a handball or tennis ball. This one habit is better than a handful of Prozac in the morning.
(Suggested reading:The 3-Minute Slow-Carb Breakfast, How to “Peel” Hardboiled Eggs without Peeling)
I dislike losing money about 50x more than I like making it. Why 50x? Logging time as an experiment, I concluded that I often spend at least 50x more time to prevent a hypothetical unit of 0 from being lost vs. earned. The hysterical part is that, even after becoming aware of this bias, it’s hard to prevent the latter response. Therefore, I manipulate the environmental causes of poor responses instead of depending on error-prone self-discipline:
A good question to revisit whenever overwhelmed: Are you having a break-down or a breakthrough?
Rehearse poverty regularly — restrict even moderate expenses for 1-2 weeks and give away 20%+ of minimally-used clothing — so you can think big and take “risks” without fear. (Seneca)
A mindset of scarcity (which breeds jealousy and unethical behavior) is due to a disdain for those things easily obtained. (Seneca)
A small cup of black Kenyan AA coffee with cinnamon on top, no milk or sweeteners.
It’s usually better to keep old resolutions than to make new ones.
To bring in a wonderful 2009, I’d like to quote from an email I received today from a mentor of more than a decade:
While many are wringing their hands, I recall the 1970s when we were suffering from an oil shock causing long lines at gas stations, rationing, and 55 MPH speed limits on Federal highways, a recession, very little venture capital ( million per year into VC firms), and, what President Jimmy Carter (wearing a sweater while addressing the Nation on TV because he had turned down the heat in the White House) called a “malaise”. It was during those times that two kids without any real college education, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, started companies that did pretty well. Opportunities abound in bad times as well as good times. In fact, the opportunities are often greater when the conventional wisdom is that everything is going into the toilet.
Well…we’re nearing the end of another great year, and, despite what we read about the outlook for 2009, we can look forward to a New Year filled with opportunities as well as stimulating challenges.
Happy New Year everyone!
Goofing around at a maid cafe in Akihabara, Tokyo. (Photo: David West)
The above video is of my presentation at the Entertainment Gathering, titled “How to Feel Like the Incredible Hulk.” In a short 17 minutes, I explain exactly how I conquered fears of swimming, language learning, and ballroom dancing by questioning “obvious” guidelines and dogmatic teaching.
I explain three approaches (first principles/assumptions, material over method, and implicit vs. explicit) you can immediately apply to your own lifelong goals, or lifelong fears, to become the new-and-improved you in record time in 2009.
This is one of my favorite presentations I’ve ever done. Perhaps because it was so short! Special thanks to Terry Laughlin of Total Immersion for the photographs of swimming biomechanics.
For students of Japanese, the closest equivalent to the featured kanji poster that I could find online is here.
I hope you enjoy the talk as much as I enjoyed giving it!
Other Presentations from the EG
Dozens of presentations were mind-blowing but few are online at this point. Here are two I found hysterical (makes my OCD look normal) and brilliant (makes me look like a knuckle dragger), from Adam Savage of Mythbusters and the superhuman intellect Amory Lovins, respectively:
Before you watch Amory’s video, read this abbreviated bio - I suspect he is also Batman:
Cofounder and CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, Amory B. Lovins is a consultant experimental physicist educated at Harvard and Oxford. He has received an Oxford MA (by virtue of being a don), nine honorary doctorates, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood (”Alternative Nobel”), World Technology, and TIME Hero for the Planet awards, the Happold Medal, and the Nissan, Shingo, Mitchell, and Onassis Prizes. His work focuses on transforming the hydrocarbon, automobile, real estate, electricity, water, semiconductor, and several other sectors toward advanced resource productivity. He has briefed eighteen heads of state, held several visiting academic chairs, authored or co-authored twenty-nine books and hundreds of papers, and consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. Newsweek has praised him as “one of the Western world’s most influential energy thinkers”; and Car magazine ranked him the twenty-second most powerful person in the global automotive industry.
In October, I was contacted by a film team from USC about doing a Cisco-sponsored profile of my home for a series titled “Digital Cribs.” See all of the homes filmed here on the right-hand side — some are incredible.
It contains some fantastic visual effects and showcases my aversion for wires. Note: the book fondling was requested by the team, so apologies for the Groundhog DayWhat About Bob?-type moment.
Most of the gadgets we filmed were edited out or just a blur in a camera pan, so here are a few of the goodies that I showed at home:
These students really busted their asses to get the video done, and it’s a view count and ratings competition, so if you like it, please click here and rate it well! This team flew to SF, shared rooms, pulled all-nighters, and — in my opinion — deserves it. It could be their big break.
What new digital tools or toys can’t you live without at home? Do you have anything that sets you apart, or that provokes “oooh”s and “aaaah”s from friends?
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Follow Tim’s misadventures and experiments in real-time on Twitter.
Odds and Ends: Victorinox Winner
Thank you all for your patience — and awesome promotion — with the Victorinox Trial by Fire competition! I was totally overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and innovative approaches. I’m humbled and honored to have you as readers. Kick-ass! No word back yet from History Channel on the show, but you’ll be the first to know.
Without further ado: the winner is Mr. Raley, who got the show (and The 4-Hour Workweek) mentioned on the Dennis Miller live radio show with 1.5+ million listeners. The runner-up is Lee Burrell, and an honorable mention goes to Markus for his Facebook campaign. Markus, the .jpg link in the comments wasn’t working!
Many thanks to Charlie Hoehn for helping with selection. Mr. Raley and Lee, please look for an e-mail in your inbox in the next 48 hours.
Thanks again to all, and Happy Holidays to you and yours!
