Why your 2 hour break is actually destroying you.
“You need to grind 80 hours a week on your business!” – Random guru
Almost no one is going to be able to take this advice. Gurus want to give impossible advice, so when nothing they say works, they can blame you for not following instructions.
Something as harmless as watching a movie might actually be having monumental effects in your life.
If you have infinite amounts of time, you can do just about anything. Become a virtuoso, bodybuilder, millionaire, etc. The question is never about how to do something, it’s actually about how to do something fast.
Imagine if building a business to launch initially takes 1000 hours total, and pretend you need to learn sales, marketing, web design, video marketing, etc and to get to the point that you’re making enough money to quit your job requires 1000 hours.
“Take a break! It’s just an hour or two, let’s go have some fun,” says the fun loving friend.
The way people look at it is to think there’s 168 hours in the week, if they spend 14 hours (only 8%!) of the total week on taking a break, it’s not that bad.
Spending only 8% of work week wasting time is devastating.
After you deal with your job and life maintenance, most people only have 0-2 hours of free time a day. If you take an hour and 45 minutes as a “much needed” break, you’re left with 15 minutes to devote to your business. Meaning it will take 4000 days to achieve anything meaningful in that business. However, if you spend those 2 hours on the business, you’re there in less than 2 years (500 days * 2 hours = 1000 hours) instead of over a decade.
While that break only was 8% of your week, we don’t have 24 hours in a day to do what we want, it’s more like 2. Therefore, 75% of your free time (90 minutes out of a total 2 hours of free time) is gone, not 8%.
What little “harmless” things are you doing that are actually having massive repercussions for your results?
Happiness it the delta between today and yesterday.
“Yesterday is behind you, just forget it and focus on the day!” – Random Guru.
Where you are in regards to your goals barely matters for your happiness.
And whether you want to forget yesterday, having an awful past that you’d like to forget about is the thing that’s going to get you to launch into a better place.
No matter where you are, you can be miserable no matter how many goals you’ve achieved. If someone has $10,000,000 in their bank this morning, they might be miserable as hell. Impossible? Consider if that person was worth $50,000,000 the day before.
The secret to knowing whether someone is happy or not is NOT seeing where they are today, but seeing where they were yesterday relative to today.
Yep – Truthcake just explained half the celebrity suicides in 1 sentence.
The trick is looking at where you were yesterday, and comparing it to today. Knowing what to compare to is the other trick. The unit of comparison may be simply more money, or perhaps the amount of people you’ve helped, a more satisfying work, or maybe the amount of hours it takes to achieve that money.
Growth comes in other forms besides your bank account.
If you’re not growing you’re dying. Stop trying to forget your past. It’s the only key to your present. And your present can be changed to control your future.
The truth about having a backup plan.
“There’s no reason to have a Plan B because it distracts from Plan A.” – Will Smith
Will Smith is successful, so we should listen to him, right? Not quite. What if someone had a dream that aliens told her to play the lotto. If she won the lotto, and began to claim that aliens were real, would you believe in aliens?
Point is, successful people have false positives, which is why it’s good to check fundamentally common aspects of all successful people (that strategy also doesn’t fully work on its own).
Here’s the reality –
Having a backup plan will hinder tremendous success but not having one will hinder mediocre success. – TruthCake
Restated, a backup plan will create a huge likelihood of mediocrity. No backup plan will create a huge likelihood of massive failure OR success.
Tony Robbins wants you to burn the bridges such that failure isn’t an option. This works out really well for him because it creates massive achievements, which he can use as testimonials.
However, the reality is that not having a backup plan will ruin you on a long enough time line.
If you’re looking to have a secure, safe, and moderately successful future, then you need to have a backup plan. You’ll never be amazing at anything, because as soon as things get hard (and they always do before you become amazing), you’ll bail and go to your backup plan. And you’ll probably be ok at doing that thing in your backup plan, until things get real hard, and you’ll bail again and again.
If you’re in the safety net, you’re not climbing (but you’re not dying either).
If you like playing it safe, enjoy stability in life, AND don’t care about greatness, then have a backup plan. You’ll be happier for it.
If you like greatness, can handle risk and turmoil, then backup plans will actually hurt you because you’ll never give something your full effort. And you’ll also be distracted from devoting time to that backup plan and that will make the main plan suffer.
You’ll never be the best rocket scientist if you spend 20% of your time learning how to code just in case your scientist job falls through. But you’re unlikely to stay unemployed for long.
You’ll never be the best husband if you spend 20% flirting with another girl at the office. But you’re unlikely to stay single for very long.
Backup plans serve a real and useful purpose for survival.
However…
The real question is, would it REALLY be that bad if you didn’t have a backup plan and failed at what you really wanted?
Using macro and micro goals to progress faster.
“Set and write down your your goals,” says the random guru with bad and incomplete advice.
Earlier I wrote about having internal and external goals. And it’s valuable to see what type of goal you’re trying to achieve. But what’s also important is having a goal with it’s micro and macro goals that go along with it.
All goals should be written down in their micro and macro form to make them effective.
Many people get hung up on the micro goal and it keeps them from easily progressing. For example, if a customer service rep is stuck trying to figure out why the system isn’t processing a coupon and trying to get things to work, they’re stuck in a micro goal. But perhaps the macro goal is to get the free 1 day pass into the gym. And it’s easier for the rep to just look the other direction while the person walks into the gym. The real problem, the macro goal, has been solved.
It’s like that “can’t see the forest for the trees” cliche, but actually helpful now.
You may need to get a cake for a party, so your goal is to find the best flour possible for the cake. You may struggle with that, but if the macro goal is really just to have a cake, instead of searching for the perfect flour, maybe you just need to go to the store and buy a cake.
It’s easy to become bogged down in the micro goals, but when you’re struggling, it may be worth examining the idea that you can just figure out a different way to get what you want.
The micro goals are the steps in the recipe. The macro goal is the cake.
Are the goals you’re striving for, and/or struggling with, part of the real ultimate outcome that you want, or simply a step in the process that can be side stepped by doing things a little differently?
Envy can be your best guide for goals.
“Don’t be envious.” – Random guru.
I say, get green with envy!
First, envy is just Admiration’s ugly sounding cousin, and we’re all fine with admiring someone. Regardless, think of whom you envy, what’s their life like? Who do they hang around? Who do you want to hang around?
When you get the answers to this, you start knowing a bit more on what you really want without the surface level resistance of saying that you don’t want anything at all, or that you want something (ie. money) you think would get you what you actually want (ie. respect).
Envy also helps you get away from unrealistic goals.
If you come up with a goal to make a billion dollars feeding the homeless, that goal might not be very realistic, considering there’s no billionaires that got rich feeding homeless people. You’re more likely to be like Mother Teresa feeding homeless people than becoming a billionaire.
Envy is your secret to a grounded reality in what your goals could be.
Also, when you do notice whom you envy, you can start to ask yourself why you envy them. For example, your “goal” could be to “make a million dollars.” But if the person you want to be the most is a movie star hanging around cool people, you may realize you don’t care about money as you do fame. And you may discover you don’t even really care about the fame, but the ability to hang around cool people that elite movie stars get to connect with.
Envy can obviously be bad for people that don’t use it correctly. However, Envy does 2 things wonderfully well:
1) Establish what you really want. As it’s easier to admit you like the idea of someone else’s life without your self-imposed restrictions / limitations.
2) That your goal is possible. Since someone else is already doing it, you know it can be done as opposed to some goal to make 1 billion dollars and party like a rock star, considering those 2 things don’t seem to go together in reality very much.
Why finding the foundations of success isn’t helpful.
“We interviewed 100 millionaires – here’s what they ALL had in common!” – Random guru.
This results to this make someone believe that if they found the magic common fundamentals, they could have the secrets and be able to excel.
There is no case of success where all they were in total was a conglomeration of commonalities.
The stuff that is uncommon is what creates the successful part of the equation.
If you want to build a house and all you ever build is a foundation, you’re not going to be very pleased when try to go to sleep on a concrete slab.
If success was building a house, you have 2 options to build your own house:
1) Look at 10,000 case studies of houses to see what they all have in common. On a scale like this, it may be a very limited amount of things like “nails.” Then what they’d do is tell you to read 100s of books on nails, learning everything about “the secret commonalities of all houses!” Now you’re a nail master…but unlikely to be building a house anytime soon.
or
2) Look at 1 house, and build it as closely as possible to what you see already done and how it was specifically, and uniquely, built.
You’d obviously pick the 2nd choice. But somehow in other endeavors, we’re looking for those commonalities – those “secrets!”
You need the commonalities, but you ALSO need the extra things that are all unique to each case.
What things in your life are you trying to make hard by telling yourself you need some sort of secret, when the best answer is right in front of you on what to do?
Yawning – An exercise in logic
Yawning is riddled with logical things around it, such as “it’s to help you get oxygen when your brain is sleepy,” or a “herd communication to relax,” and so on. That’s why it’s contagious. But how is it contagious? Some say it’s the sound of yawning that creates the trigger of contagiousness. Some say it’s visually seeing it.
But we often yawn when we don’t hear or see the other person prior to our yawn. Whoops…there go our current explanations!
There’s an easy solution to the question though –
Do deaf and/or blind people experience yawning contagiousness?
If yes, we’re missing something big in human biology. Maybe it’s ESP!?Probably not…
What other questions in life can you find the answer to by asking another question?
What is this site?
Self improvement for smart people.
I follow business leaders, gurus, and philosophers and note things others missed that I’ve found valuable.
This site is my precious treasure chest of ideas on business, philosophy and life. And hopefully during your pillaging here, you get your mind blown.
My life’s goals are to help summarize the human knowledge base, dispel self improvement myths, and achieve a resultant and unrelenting state of 24/7 euphoria. I’m kidding, but we’ll still try!
Follow along on my journey!
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