Coming up with ways to make your brain sharp is a way to exercise your mental faculties in and of itself. But it’s not the only thing I do.
Here are 7 more ways I send my brain to the gym:
Read MoreCategory: Productivity
The 7 Uncommon Habits of Not-Yet Successful People
What you see up there is not a CGI rendering from a movie. It’s a real animal. An inhabitant of the Australian desert called the thorny dragon.
Let’s call him Trey. Trey does a few very uncommon things:
- He collects dew drops falling from plants on his back, where they remain on his spiny, rough skin.
- Trey then sends those dew drops to his mouth via his capillaries with one simple “chewing” motion.
- This means he can literally “suck up” water by just standing in it.
- He follows a simple, one-item diet: ants. Trey eats nothing but ants.
- Lastly, Trey has a second, fake head on top of his real one, which he can present to enemies by bowing down and hopefully get away without much damage.
Pretty cool, huh? So how come you’ve never heard of Trey? I mean, he’s not the national animal of any country, there are few clips of him on Youtube and he hasn’t been on the cover of Forbes.
However, Trey, much like his fellow thorny dragons, has a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, which is an eternity in animal land. A few more evolutionary cycles and they’ll close in on the masters of longevity: turtles.
When we look for success, we usually turn to the commonalities of those, who’ve made it to the top. But what if we’re wrong?
Maybe, the only commonality of making it to the top is to not share many commonalities with others.
Read MoreThe Most Important Person You Work For In Life Is You
On Monday, I picked up the official lecture notes for my “Fundamentals of German Law” class. It’s 180 pages long. The exam is in exactly four weeks, and I don’t know the first thing about law.
In a slight rush of feelings — mostly panic mixed with determination — I sat down and went through the first half the same day. Before this day is over, I’ll have done the rest. But not before writing this.
Read MoreWhat Should I Do If I Have Multiple Startup Ideas Worth Launching?
I think you’re confusing startup ideas with business ideas. There’s a huge difference between the two. Most people have lots of business ideas. Very few people have true startup ideas. Here’s how to deal with both.
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Comfortably Creative: How Folding Laundry Will Make You More Original
“Geez, these all look the same! How am I supposed to sort these?”
Every time I fold my laundry, I spend more time trying to tell apart my socks from one another than actually folding. They’re barely distinguishable.
Not too long ago, during a particularly tedious case of color-matching, a thought struck me:
“I wonder if my creative projects should be the same?”
Read MoreWhat Skill Should I Learn for 1-2 Hours a Day That Will Help Me Become Successful?
It’s obvious, isn’t it? Writing.
In 2 hours, you can easily write 1,000 words. In Word, about 300 words are a page. That’s 3 pages per day – 1,095 per year.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has 636 pages. You could write 1.5 novels of that length, just in your first year. The entire HP series is 3,407 pages. That’d take you three years.
Most ebooks on Amazon are a lot shorter. At 3 pages/day you could publish a 90 page ebook every month, or a 45 page ebook every two weeks.
You could also:
- Write 365 blog posts that rank on Google and attract 100,000 visitors to your website in a year (which I’ve done).
- Answer 5 questions on Quora every day.
- Publish 2–3 times a week on Medium.
- Ghostwrite articles, and later even books.
- Learn copywriting, which pays a ton of money, once you’re good.
- Start publishing your own magazine.
In addition, writing will automatically teach you a ton of other things, like:
- Communication
- Focus
- A great vocabulary
- Creativity
- Speaking
- Thinking
- Research
- Patience
I hope you’ll give it a try. We need more good writers.
…But You Didn’t: What Really Makes a Genius
“How very wet this water is.” — L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz
Do you ever go “Duuuuh, I could’ve thought of that!” after someone told you something?
Good ideas become obvious after the fact, but that’s the entire point.
After, not before.
Read More3 Things You Can Do Right Now To Increase Your Productivity
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” — Albus Dumbledore
1. Have a collection bucket.
In the Harry Potter series, Dumbledore has a “pensieve” in his office. He uses it to return to thoughts and memories, which he pulls out of his head using his wand to file them away for another day.
Distracting thoughts probably cost the world trillions of dollars in lost productivity each year. They’re in your head, but very real.
I find the best thing I can do is to pull them out and store them somewhere. David Allen calls this a “collection bucket” in GTD.
Just have a notebook or use the notes app on your phone, and whenever you think of something distracting you want to remember or get back to later, put it there. Review the bucket regularly. I try to empty mine every Friday.
For example, if you remember you have to buy milk in the middle of a task, put it there and the thought will stop nagging you instantly.
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Why You Don’t Have the Life You Want
Comfort.
In a world of Amazon, McDonalds, Netflix, Spotify, AirBnB, Uber and Tinder, nobody wants to do things the hard way.
Nobody’s willing to give up comfort now for greatness later. Everything in life has to be cheap, fast and easy.
Cheap, fast, easy.
Nothing worth having comes easy.
Nothing worth having comes fast.
Nothing worth having comes cheap.
Read MoreHow Do I Improve My Social Media Presence?
One word: CARE.
Social media is from people for people. At the end of every account you interact with is a person. And all social media accounts are run by, surprise again, people.
That said, here are 10 ways you can bring value to your community.
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