Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead. We all have things that we want to achieve in our lives — getting into the better shape, building a successful business, raising a wonderful family, writing a best-selling book, winning a championship, and so on. And for most of us, the path to those things starts by setting a specific and actionable goal. At least, this is how I approached my life until recently. I would set goals for classes I took, for weights that I wanted to lift in the gym, and for clients I wanted in my business. What I'm starting to realize, however, is that when it comes to actually getting things done and making progress in the areas that are important to you, there is a much better way to do things. It all comes down to the difference between goals and systems. Let me explain. The Difference Between Goals and Systems What's the difference between goals and systems? If you're a coach, your goal is to win a championship. Now for the really interesting question: I think you would. 1. 2. 3. You can’t predict the future.
Removing Negativity From Your Life Json SurfrApp is the founder of IWearYourShirt.com. His new book, Creativity For Sale, is an in-depth look at how to turn passion into profit. Having more positivity in your life tends to lead to happiness, success and an overall feeling of calm. However, positivity can be an elusive animal to catch. The task of sorting through all that information to find positivity wouldn’t be very positive. I feel I’ve figured out a way to achieve positivity in my life and it has nothing to do actionably trying to be more positive. While I don’t think you can remove all negativity from your life, I’ve been very proactive in removing as much of it as I can. Clean up social networks A few months ago I spent a few hours completely reorganizing my Twitter following and it’s the best thing I’ve done for my use of Twitter since the day I joined. After creating multiple Twitter Lists of the different groups of people I followed, I found that one specific list of people ended up being super negative.
Why Do We Fail to Break Bad Habits? We all want to improve our health, our wellness and our happiness. But in order to achieve our goals, we need to break bad habits and form good ones that actually stick. Yet despite our good intensions, we often fail to act on them and even if we do, it’s ephemeral. There’s no doubt about it: change is hard. And no matter how hard we try to change, the comforts of eating sugary snacks, shopping and online surfing are difficult to resist. We try everything, but despite our unremitting effort to change, we return to our vices and with greater voracity. Why do we fail to break bad habits? To answer thais question, we need to look at our ability to judge our impulsive behaviours, or rather, our perceived ability. How The Illusion of Self-Control Promotes Bad Behaviour In 2003, researchers at Northwestern University asked a group of smokers to take a self-control test. [1] Unknown to the participants, it was simply a word association test. Here’s where it gets interesting. How to Break Bad Habits
Time Assets vs. Time Debts: A Different Way of Thinking About Productivity | James Clear Late in his career, Steve Jobs famously drove his car without a license plate. There were all sorts of theories about why Jobs decided to drive without tags. Some people said he didn’t want to be tracked. Others believed he was trying to make a game of avoiding parking tickets. Jon Callas, a former computer security expert who worked for Apple, revealed a different reason. According to Callas, Steve Jobs discovered a loophole in the California vehicle registration laws. Once he realized this, Jobs arranged a special leasing agreement with his Mercedes dealer so that every six months he would drop off his current car and receive a new Mercedes SL55 AMG to replace it. After hearing the story, many people responded by saying something like, “I guess that’s what you do when you have a lot of money.” Time Assets vs. We often fail to realize, however, that there are certain strategic choices that impact our time on a larger scale. Software is a classic example of a time asset. Assets Speaking.
Tech Entrepreneurs Should Remember Investors Don't Speak Their Language Young entrepreneurs often are so excited by new technology or their latest invention that they forget to translate it into a value proposition that their customers or potential investors can understand. They can become frustrated with investors, senior executives and even customers who don’t seem to “get it,” with the result that everyone loses. Senior business leaders, for example, are unlikely to relate when you pitch your latest web app that mashes up existing technology derived from early social-networking applications. Mashup probably reminds senior leaders of a train wreck, and social networking is still seen by many business executives as a frivolous waste of time. Related: 3 Ways Entrepreneurs Swing and Miss at a Funding Pitch It’s really your responsibility and to your advantage to translate your message into values and priorities that the intended receiver can readily relate to. 1. 2. 3. 4. Related: 3 Ways To Perfect Your Pitch 5. 6. Technology is the means, not the end.
The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on Things By the summer of 1830, Victor Hugo was facing an impossible deadline. Twelve months earlier, the famous French author had made an agreement with his publisher that he would write a new book titled, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Instead of writing the book, Hugo spent the next year pursuing other projects, entertaining guests, and delaying his work on the text. The strategy worked. The Ancient Problem of Akrasia Human beings have been procrastinating for centuries. Akrasia is the state of acting against your better judgment. Why would Victor Hugo commit to writing a book and then put it off for over a year? Why We Make Plans, But Don't Take Action One explanation for why akrasia rules our lives and procrastination pulls us in has to do with a behavioral economics term called “time inconsistency.” When you make plans for yourself — like setting a goal to lose weight or write a book or learn a language — you are actually making plans for your future self. So why do we still procrastinate?
How to do time blocking As we gear up to launch our Kickstarter for the Perfect Notebook, we have been talking a lot about productivity. The goal of our notebook is capture all your great ideas, and to make you more successful at the same time. We believe the cornerstone of success is doing work that matters, which can only be achieved with thoughtful planning. And that brings us to the topic of this blog post – time blocking. This is probably my favorite productivity hack, since it really helps you pack as much good stuff as you can into one day. I first read about time blocking on Cal Newport’s blog where he discussed the importance of doing deep work (If you aren’t familiar with deep work, it is the opposite of work like email and things that make you feel productive but don’t actually accomplish much. You spend so much time working. (If you want to learn more about our notebook – sign up below so you don’t miss out when it launches!) Time blocking is really just a method for planning your day. Step 1.
10 Steps to Ethical Content Curation To fill their pipelines with a steady stream of timely, relevant content that doesn't have to be created from scratch, a growing number of marketers are using content curation—the process of finding, organizing, annotating (contextualizing), and sharing digital content on a specific topic for a target market. Compared with the creation of original content, curation can be a faster and easier way to generate content. But bad curation can damage your brand's credibility and potentially lead to copyright and legal issues. Let's be clear: good curation is not piracy, and it's not unethical, because good content curation properly credits sources and adds something new to the conversation instead of ripping off other people's content. Below are 10 tips to from our latest e-book to help you curate ethically. 1. To prevent this curation pitfall, make sure you're reading both the A-listers in your niche and the newer (but credible) upstarts. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
The Scientific Argument for Mastering One Thing at a Time Many people, myself included, have multiple areas of life they would like to improve. For example, I would like to reach more people with my writing, to lift heavier weights at the gym, and to start practicing mindfulness more consistently. Those are just a few of the goals I find desirable and you probably have a long list yourself. The problem is, even if we are committed to working hard on our goals, our natural tendency is to revert back to our old habits at some point. Recently, I’ve come across a few research studies that (just maybe) will make these difficult lifestyle changes a little bit easier. Too Many Good Intentions If you want to master multiple habits and stick to them for good, then you need to figure out how to be consistent. Well, here is one of the most robust findings from psychology research on how to actually follow through on your goals: This finding is well proven and has been repeated in hundreds studies across a broad range of areas. Read Next
How to Overcome Obstacles Using Toyota’s Five Whys Technique — Better Humans When learning how to break bad habits and form good ones that stick, it’s not uncommon to experience a dip in your motivation and quit – and often right on the edge of a breakthrough. These losses can be chalked up as failures on our part and affect our self-esteem, or worse: discourage us from trying again in the future. The reality is, our problems are seldom behavioural, but situational. The obstacles in question may seem obvious – “I didn’t go to bed before midnight because I was watching a movie” – but there’s often an underlying root cause and classifying it is paramount to building the right solution. The Five Whys The Five Whys is a technique adapted from the Toyota Production System. The basis of Toyota’s scientific approach [and] by repeating ‘why?’ Often, at the root cause of all our obstacles are habits, that either aren’t working well or simply don’t exist. The Five Whys would look like this: The Problem: “I ate a pizza for dinner”. Why #1: Why did you eat a pizza for dinner? 1.
Tabla periódica de las emociones Os compartimos este fantastico material del portal Artevía. “Viviendo emociones” es una guía básica para desenvolverse en el apasionante mundo de las emociones. Parte de una premisa clara; las emociones son energía humana, por tanto, ni se crean ni se destruyen; solo se transforman. La guía se compone del “Manifiesto de las emociones”, un documento que proporciona unas pinceladas clave para usar la emoción de un modo efectivo en nuestro trabajo, e incluso en nuestra vida. Y de la “Tabla periódica de las emociones”, donde se presentan todas las emociones como elementos químicos. Os animamos a usar todas estas herramientas; a observar, a probar, a distinguir todas las emociones que se transforman delante de nuestros ojos, a buscar combinaciones sorprendentes para hacer de cada web, de cada vídeo, de cada tweet, de cada empresa, de cada producto… algo realmente único. Emociones_artevia Relacionado 21 Julio, 2015 29 Mayo, 2017
Intention, No Unrealistics Goals I came to meditation after years of trying to improve my life. I’d been stuck in depression for a long time, and meditation was the latest in a long line of wheezes meant to relieve the gloom. However, something curious happened when I followed the instructions given—I discovered it was impossible to meditate and struggle at the same time. Struggle still happened, for sure, but this was when I was “trying to meditate,” adding my own expectations or goals to the practice, or “not bothering to meditate,” just letting my habits of mind take over. When I actually meditated (staying present, opening to experience, coming back when the mind wandered), the sense of trying, hoping, wanting things to be different, or of giving in to despondency, hopelessness and fear—all this began to fall away. I often see the same thing now in beginning practitioners. Goals vs. I’ve found it helpful to distinguish here between intentions and goals. Making mindfulness an intention is different.