If you hate studying, if you feel like you can’t concentrate, if you’re tired of being average, I’d like to tell you one thing:
It’s okay. I used to be like you. You can change.
The one thing I now know that’s brought me from where you were to where I am now is why I study. And it’s made all the difference.
Here’s a timeline of my college history to illustrate.
Read MoreHere’s how most people approach networking:
“Uh-oh, our Kickstarter is about to launch and we have zero people on our email list. Let me go to some networking events, hopefully find 2–3 influencers I can do something for, and then they’ll share.”
These people do find influencers. The problem is they see right through this sham. And then these people lose.
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The human mind mostly wants to continue whatever path it’s on. Once you’re in flow, your brain wants to focus, continue to zone in on the task at hand and really exercise those Jedi powers.
As soon as you make the decision to do something, it’s all downhill from there. Here’s how David Rock, author of Your Brain At Work, describes it in Psychology Today:
Once you take an action, an energetic loop commences that makes it harder to stop that action.
[…]
Most motor or mental acts also generate their own momentum. Decide to get out of your chair and the relevant brain regions, as well as dozens of muscles, are all activated. Blood starts pumping and energy moves around. To stop getting out of your chair once you start will take more focus and effort than to decide not to get up when you first have the urge.
The problem is that the same method of gaining momentum also applies when we move away from a task, towards a distraction. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not so much unnatural to focus, as it is natural to break that focus whenever something potentially dangerous or rewarding pops up.
Read MoreKeep your phone out of sight. I’ll say that again, very slowly, because it might not make sense at first.
Keep. Your phone. Out. Of. Sight.
The difference between this…
…and this…
A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that “the typical office worker is interrupted or switches tasks, on average, every three minutes and five seconds.”
3 minutes and 5 seconds. That’s 185 seconds in total between one interruption and the next.
What’s more, “it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.”
23 minutes! That’s over 7 times as long as it takes for you to be interrupted again.
What does that tell us? The average worker never even gets close to the zone of deep work, where complex tasks are accomplished with good results.
As if that wasn’t enough — your phone is only one of many sources of distractions, after all — we keep our biggest nemesis right in front of us.
Not only will we look at it every time it vibrates or makes a noise, when our phone is within arm’s reach, we’ll naturally pick it up every couple minutes, just because we can.
You know “just in case.” Don’t give me that look. I know you do it too. We’re all weak.
Well, Justin, you can stay in your case from now on (pun alert), because we won’t be playing your game any more.
Put your phone…
…or keep it in another room altogether.
The level of peace, relaxation and productivity you’ll face will be unprecedented.
Stop being “the typical office worker.” Start being an awesome office worker.
Sometimes, all it takes is something as small as moving your phone a few centimeters. That’s the life hack I’d like everyone to know.
This Wednesday, I realized all my current blog post ideas would take more than a day to complete. Between The 4 Minute Folio launch, AniQuote suddenly materializing from the massive mist of ideas in my head and a new side gig I’ve taken up two weeks ago, it’s a week as busy as ever.
Hence, I decided to give myself the following constraints for this post:
Artificially limiting yourself is liberating. Busy weeks come with a lot of learnings, so these rules forced me to go narrow and think really hard:
What’s the biggest lesson from the past 7 days?
Read MoreWhen you were 1 year old, you thought trying to touch everything you could get your tiny hands on was a good idea. Whatever would happen next, it sure would be amazing.
When you were 2 years old, you first learned to speak. You used that ability to be brutally honest. When you wanted mom, you said “Maaa!” and when you wanted dad you said “Dada!”
When you were 3 years old, you yelled in the grocery store that you wanted the cereal in the red box. And you didn’t give a damn what anyone walking by thought about it.
When you were 4 years old, you built the best Lego or Barbie house in the world. You were your own biggest fan, and you meant it.
Read MoreOn the 14th of May, 2012, one of my best friends, Paul, sent me an article by James Altucher.
In it, he described his daily practice of improving a little bit, every single day, in four areas:
I thought: Let me try that. So I started tracking it on this free website James had made: The Daily Practice.
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Meet Charles Proteus Steinmetz.
Charles was a German-born, American mathematician, electrical engineer, who spent most of his life in Schenectady, New York, as a professor at Union College.
You can thank him for the thing we all most depend on in life: Electricity.
Charles helped shape the development of alternating current (AC), and is the reason you can plug your toaster, blender, TV or lamps into the sockets on your wall.
As soon as General Electric got word of this little (he was indeed just 4 feet tall) genius’s work in New York, they bought out the company he worked for in 1892, and with it, the man’s expertise.
In 1965, a Life magazine reader, Jack B. Scott, wrote in to tell the story of an encounter his father had made with the so-called “Wizard of Schenectady” at Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan.
Ford’s engineers had a problem they couldn’t fix, and so Steinmetz went down there on behalf of GE. Here’s the excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine:
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If we get on the treadmill together, there are two options: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die.
— Will Smith
But who are you running against? For most of your life, the person on the other treadmill is yourself.
Right now, the field might be crowded. Many people are ahead of you, and you can’t see who leads the pack. But once you start running faster than everyone else, you’ll soon be the only one left in the race.
Very few people have an outstanding work ethic. That’s what makes them outstanding. But it also means it’ll get lonely.
You don’t want what your friends want. You want what you want. So you shouldn’t care about winning against them.
Your true competitor is also your greatest fan.
Look at Will Smith again. He could’ve long stopped running. There’s no one for him to beat any more. As of 2016, his movies have grossed $7.5 billion at the global box office.
Why does a guy like that turn around and go straight to making more films?
When people like Will Smith glance at the other treadmill, they see a different version of themselves. One that’s not as good, as generous, as humble, as disciplined, as honest or as dedicated as they are.
That’s who they’re running against. Running from. Before long, you’ll be running against yourself too. You’ll have to, in order to keep going.
When you get there, I hope you’ll do what Will Smith does: keep running anyway.
In 2010, I wrote down a set of “first principles” for my life. I asked myself:
“Which rules, if I lived by them for the rest of my life, would make me as happy as I can be?”
7 years later, it’s time to reflect and see which ones stood the test of time.
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