Category: Psychology

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How To Reach Your Goals With 27 Self Awareness Activities

Nik

I’m doing it again. I can feel it. Like a toothpick, my thumbnail rests in the gap between two teeth. It’s the position it takes right before I bite it. When I catch myself, like right now, I can prevent it. But it’s always a battle.

Often, I’m okay with losing it, as long as it means I’m winning the war with the article I’m writing. After all, what ends up on your screen isn’t a picture of my fingernails, but a (hopefully) helpful blog post.

It wasn’t always a conscious decision though. For over ten years, I bit my fingernails, unaware of the habit. When I started learning about self-improvement in 2012, it was the first habit I made a conscious effort to break. This both required and helped me with one of the most important human capacities: self-awareness.

Today, I’d like to help you cultivate yours, with 27 self-awareness activities, which you can practice on three distinct levels to improve your thinking, mental health and decisions – and thus, your results in the game of life.

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The One Life Hack I Think Everyone Should Know

Nik

Keep 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…

…is an increase in your productivity with a magnitude of at least 5x-10x.

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.

Hm. How does that work? Oh, right, it doesn’t.

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.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Put your phone…

  • into your desk drawer,
  • behind your laptop,
  • slip it under a couch cushion,
  • leave it in your bag,
  • store it in your locker

…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.

Counterintuitive Confirmation: How To Eliminate Your Doubts

Nik

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:

  • Less than 1,000 words.
  • No more than 4 Pomodoros total.

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?

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How To Compete With People Who Are Better Than You

Nik

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.

  • You’ll be the only one left in the study room at school at 7 AM.
  • You’ll be the only one left who sends emails at 10 PM.
  • You’ll be the only one left working, while your friends are out partying.

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.

(Barack Obama on 20th of January, 2009, about to take the oath of office)

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.

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How To Start A Passion Project One Day At A Time

Nik

When people sign up for my newsletter, they instantly receive an automated email that asks them: “What’s one thing you struggle with?” Some consider this a marketing trick, but for me, it’s a once in a lifetime chance to talk to readers, say hi and try to help them however I can.

Nevertheless, it does have a research benefit to it: I see which problems keep coming up and what bothers my audience the most. I’ve written so much by now, that most of the time, I can recommend a particular resource for any given issue.

No time to read? Take my free course. Issues with productivity? Gotcha. Can’t google stuff? Wrote a book for you.

Recently, one question kept coming up, which I found myself unable to send people a resource for. It’s a question about projects. A question about starting. Here are three reader responses, all from this week, aimed at it:

“I want to start a business, but hardly have the money or the idea for it!” –Vishal

“I started learning magic tricks long ago, but I never take the time to share my tricks online. There are a few on youtube and I really wanted to share more.” –Flavien

“Being disorganized and lacking focus. I’m a certified NLP trainer and looking to start my own business as a Learning Coach for children. Yet I spend my days on chores, cooking and computer based admin stuff.” –Megan

Can you spot the question? Here’s the one I see: “How do I start a passion project?“

Today, I’ll do my best to answer it. But first…why is it that question?

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One Thing You Can Learn in 2 Minutes That Will Be Useful for the Rest of Your Life

Nik

In 430 BC, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Greek general Pericles led a fleet of over 100 ships towards the enemy island.

Charge!

As they were charging ahead at full speed, suddenly, a solar eclipse cast the entire fleet into darkness.

They weren’t as well-explained back then, you know?

Unaware of the scientific nature of this unexpected and shocking event, panic befell the soldiers and sailors. But not Pericles.

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Dear Millennials — A Letter To The Lost Generation

Nik

“You are all a ‘génération perdue!’,” the garage owner shouted at the young mechanic, who couldn’t fix Gertrude Stein’s car fast enough.

Dear Millennials Car

“That is what you are. That’s what you all are … all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”

Stein later told the story to her dear friend, Ernest Hemingway, who’s largely responsible when historians today refer to those born between 1883 an 1900 by said name.

What Hemingway alluded to in The Sun Also Rises isn’t lost in the sense of gone, missing or forsaken, but “disoriented, wandering, directionless — a recognition that there was great confusion and aimlessness among the war’s survivors in the early post-war years,” as Samuel Hynes points out in A War Imagined.

When I look at my generation of fellow millennials, I can’t help but feel as if history is about to repeat itself.

Hence, this open letter.

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Liquid Sleep: How To Get More Out Of Life By Staying Up Longer

Nik

Last June I bought a Garmin Vivosmart HR activity tracker, primarily for two reasons:

  1. My daily step count is visually present to me at all times, which makes me more likely to get those 10,000 steps.
  2. If I sit for longer than an hour, it vibrates and nags me to get up and move. Since sitting is the new smoking, I think moving regularly might be more important than moving a lot.

While I happily would’ve shelled out 125 € for just those two features alone, there are a few other perks to wearing one of these around the clock. One of them is sleep tracking.

What I’m about to say as a result of it is not going to be popular and it’s definitely not politically correct. At the very least though, it’s food for thought.

For the past five months, I’ve been sleeping less and I think it’s the right choice. Let’s put that into context.

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