What do you give?

When viewing the world from a perspective of curiosity everything seems new and interesting. Every day, every encounter, every night out and every moment is exciting. There are, however, bigger changes which makes dents in your life. A new chapter opening up a whole world of possibilities and experiences that has before been out of reach. Tomorrow is a new chapter for me.

Tomorrow I’ll be introduced to the field of Business intelligence. I will be starting to work full time in a field I have yet to conquer. This new journey from beginner to top of mind, a linchpin if you may, will require effort and hard work. That’s what I like about not being the best; it forces you to work harder so that you can, eventually, be the best. Success in this case is highly subjective and not even relevant. The process teaches you so much more.

Try to spot the every day adventures, because there are far more of them than you think. Bigger adventures will follow.

The first moment of resistance when performing a task worth doing is critical.

You wake up in the morning and you say to yourself “I’ll just lay here for 5 more minutes, then I won’t be as tired”. Not only is this a lie but what happens next morning? Will you get up in time or stay in bed an extra 10 minutes?

Resistance feeds resistance.

Acknowledge resistance the first time and quickly discard it. That way you might not have to deal with the cascade of resistance that usually comes after the initial one.

For developing new skills, this is probably one of the most important questions you could ask yourself (on a daily basis). Read it again.

“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.