Jonas Sandström

“As long as you are going to be thinking anyway, think big.”
—DONALD TRUMP

And life will love you back.

A sure way to feel productive is to plan a lot of small tasks throughout the day. Running errands, picking up mail or “starting to look at [important work]” but finding yourself switching to facebook all the time. How often are you doing things that really matter? (Pro tip: Cleaning your room is not gonna get you far) How often do you feel productive even though you know deep inside you’ve done nothing of importance?

Selective ignorance is bliss.

Choose to do the few important things every day that really matters. You will definitely feel less productive the first few days because:

1) there’s only a few things being done unlike before, and

2) you’ll resist to do the work at first because it requires more attention than useless tasks, hence feeling less productive.

The end results, however, could be amazing.

Adventures will come, when you let them.

When dealing with productivity you usually set certain strict rules to fulfill certain goals. This is good, however, it will also backfire if you don’t account for one thing. It can create a feeling of failure if you don’t follow these rules 100%.

The failure in itself (not doing your bed for one day) isn’t the problem, the emotion is. The emotion of failing has the effect that you either 1) try even harder (and eventually succeed) or 2) you drop the task completely because you feel like you can’t keep up with the rules, and you might as well not do it all then. The latter is usually the one who takes the upper hand because you won’t have to fail again if you have no commitment to break. This, by the way, is probably one of the strongest reasons why extreme diets fail. Emotions are stronger than logic.

Don’t forget that something is better than nothing. Something can have profound effects on your life even if they’re not everything.

There are two lessons to be learnt here:

1. Self discipline is good but don’t let it stall you.

2. Past failure does not imply future failure.

Chances are you already know enough. (to take action)

Chances are your search for new information is useless. (unless you take action)

Chances are you’re neglecting the one thing you should be doing. (taking action)

Chances are you should be taking action instead of preparing for it.

Uncertainty leads to inactivity. Inactivity leads to uncertainty.

By being more active you’ll start to feel more certain. It doesn’t take much but it takes something.

Do something.

Why do we always underrate ourselves and the work we do?

For some people it’s because they have so high expectations of themselves that they never reach what they aim for. We underrate the work we do because otherwise we’re afraid of not living up to some mentally constructed standards, either ours or “everyone else’s”. So by underrating our work we don’t have to admit that we’ve failed to live up to the unreasonable high standards which really only exist in our mind. You create what you create, you do what you do. Accept it or change it. Never apologize for it.

Try this simple task:

First list 10 things you think others appreciate in you.

Next, list 10 things you think you could improve on.

I bet the last one will be too long to fit on the paper in your opinion. Why do you think that is?

Striving for better is good. The hard part is doing it while appreciating and understanding what you already have. Don’t let that get away.

Fear is subjective. It’s so subjective it’s not even funny. But still everyone, including me, sometimes walk through life in fear of what might happen in the future, fear of the unknown. Guess what, the future will always be unknown.

It’s all in your head

Fear is an old defense mechanism that the brain still has. Seth Godin calls it the lizard brain. Back in the old days when were were (supposedly) living in caves you might have called the mechanism common sense. Fear was an essential part of survival. Being scared of big dangerous animals was a good …

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One of the biggest hurdles when working towards a goal isn’t that you don’t push yourself hard enough. It’s the mere fact that your circumstances are such that you don’t have to push yourself.

A sure way of not getting things done is not having to do them.

Try putting yourself in situations where you have no option but to push through. Most people will probably say you’re insane but that’s okay, you’re not like most people.