Why We Screw Things up

You’re not gonna believe me, but the only reason we screw things up is because we want to. Even more, we screw things up because we’re deeply convinced this is what we have to do.

Breathe in, sit down and relax. You’re going to read something very difficult to accept.

The Early Conditioning

From the moment we’re arriving on this planet, we’re surrounded by restrictions. Some of them are dictated by fundamental rules, like “don’t put your hand in the fire, otherwise it will hurt”, or “don’t jump off that cliff, because you’re going to crash and die”. These are survival rules and by breaking them, our life will end abruptly. But other rules are created by outdated structures that are no longer fulfilling their role in our lives.

For instance, we are taught that we gotta “strive to go ahead” in our lives. That success comes after hard work. In some cases, that’s true. But in other situations, success may come through a so called “lucky shot” (I don’t believe in luck, nor in bad luck). Every once in a while, we just get everything we want. Just like that.

But here’s the funny part: every time we’re into that kind of situation, an inner conflict arises. We know that we have to “strive” to get what we want. Yet, what we want is already in our hands, easy as pie. What to do, what to do? Move on with what we got and forget about the rule? Or step back, look at what we got and decide “it’s not real because it didn’t come through hard work”?

Most of the time, alas, we’re choosing the second option. We’re so wired into our early conditioning patterns that we find it incredibly difficult to adapt to unexpected, pleasant situations. Even when everything is so obvious, when every piece of reality is telling us “just get me, I’m for real”, we’re still backing up, putting the veil of “unreal and treacherous” on it and start to… Exactly, start to strive!

Because that’s we’ve been taught to do in order to achieve success!

Early conditioning is screwing us up constantly. Unconsciously, we’re applying old patterns to current realities, and we filter our life through dirty lenses, ignoring that what was once true, today may be obsolete. And it’s not only about “working hard to be successful” approach, it just happens this is one of the most popular ones.

Here are a few other patterns that we’re still carrying on with us, burdening our decisions with unnecessary fog.

1 We have to do stuff in order to be loved

The premise: we cannot be loved just like that, we have to deserve it.
The result: Love is something that you fight for. It’s something that you conquer. Ultimately, love is something outside of you. You’re born without it and you have to do whatever it takes to get it. A bunch of bullshit, of course.

Somewhere in our early childhood, our parents (or anyone else around us, for what matters) may acted upon us in such a way that we got rewarded after we did something for them. And we learned that if we want to receive love, we have to do stuff. Voila: an early conditioning has been formed.

2 We just have to do our homework and everything will be fine

The premise: do your job and nothing bad will happen to you.
The result: we’re puzzled when we get fired, when we get dumped, when a brick falls off in our heads. Because you know what, these things happens. And they happen regardless of your homework. We’re not in control of the world. We can only control what we think about the world.

Somewhere at the beginning of our life, somebody taught us the protection pattern: if you do this, I will take care of you. It may have been worked for a few years, while we were kids, keeping us safe and cozy, but as grown ups we cannot expect to act like this. We cannot hope that just because we’re doing our job, everything will be fine.

What we really need to do is to keep doing our jobs simply because we like to do our job. And, if something bad happens, just cope with it and move on.

3 Don’t talk to strangers

The premise: everyone else apart me is an enemy, don’t engage in conversations with other people because they may hurt you.
The result: we find it incredibly difficult to relate on a personal level in our lives. We cannot share. We cannot trust. We cannot open our souls without the basic fear that the other one is the “enemy”.

Again, an overprotective approach which completely damaged our inter-relational system. It may have been worked in another context, when we lacked the necessary tools to discern if the other one really is the “enemy” but now, as grown ups, we don’t need this anymore. Yet, from the bottom of our unconscious minds we’re still using this approach almost every time we engage with someone new.

And I can go on like this forever. We all have in our internal system outdated rules that we still apply, by fear of doing an on the spot analysis. And, with that in mind, let’s continue to find out why are we still screwing up things. Even more, why do we find this not only acceptable, but even necessary.

Redemption And Sins – The Hidden Story Of Happiness And Screwing Up

Pretty much every religion on Earth taught us that our normal state is the state of the sinner. That we are here by mistake and we should constantly strive to “find redemption”. To return to some careless state of a sinless life.

But here’s the catch: we cannot exercise our “redemption” techniques, unless we’re sinners. So, every time we feel a little bit redeemed, instead of keeping that feeling for as long as we can, we rush back in the hole again. Because that’s where we belong, and that’s where we should live our lives. In sin and misery. How else could we exercise our redemption techniques, if not by keep being sinners?

That’s exactly why we screw things up too. Because we’re taught we’re unfit, not good enough, unable to cope with this world, weak, helpless and defeated. We’re taught that we need supervision, rules, more powerful people in charge over us. We’re taught that we don’t know what is good for us.

And that’s why we find screwing up not only acceptable, but necessary. By screwing up, we’re enforcing the very system that created us. We’re telling back: yes, I’m weak, helpless and unable to cope with this world. And I need somebody in charge over me.

But, ultimately, we screw things up because nobody taught us how to be happy. They all taught us how to survive. And, if you can read this, they did a wonderful job: you’re alive in this very moment. But that’s where their part is over. That’s where “they” (whoever “they” may be) have to be silenced.

Because your happiness is your part. Nobody can play it for you.

The 6 Stages Of A Failure

I am always amazed by how people react when I’m telling them what I do for a living: “I run a personal development blog”. Aside the usual eye rolling when it comes to put “blog” and “make a living” on the same level, they’re all having a sort of a chill. And a little step back. Like they want to have a better look at me.

From now on, they’re either totally ignoring me, putting a permanent “idiot” label on my forehead, either start to treat me like I’m Superman or something. The total opposite of failure, if you know what I mean. (I can’t tell you the exact proportion, though. I’d lean more towards the Superman thing, but the “idiot” team is also pretty strong). Anyway, fact is that once they learn I’m running a personal development blog, they somehow treat me as some sort of a guru.

Which I’m so totally not.

You’re Really Not Superman?

You may be disappointed, but I’ll say it again: no, I’m not Superman. Wrong blog, sorry. I don’t have a magic wand, hitting your heads gracefully and healing your life, your relationships or your finances. I’m not the ultimate carrier of the universal truth. I’m not the last beholder of the light of knowledge. Not even the best productivity guy around.

Then why the heck have I started a personal development blog?

Now take a deep breath and relax: the answer will puzzle you. Ready? Ok: I started a personal development blog because I know every imaginable thing about failure. I’ve been there so many times, I can’t even remember. I had failures in business, I had failures in personal and social relationships, in school, in my job (back when I had one) and, generally speaking, wherever you’ll find a consistent life niche, you can bet all your money that I had at least one major failure there. And you’ll win big time.

Yes, I had an online business for 10 years, but I’ve been on the verge of bankruptcy more than once. At some point, I had to sell my home (at that time a small studio I was living in) and move my entire company from the office I was renting to a small apartment, where I also had to sleep, just to pay my debt.

My first major personal relationship was also a complete fiasco. After my first child was born, I couldn’t manage to keep my relationship with his mother going on and had to split up. After that, I courageously entered a hasty marriage, only to end it up in a few years, with the same bitter taste in my mouth.

I can go on like this for hours. I mean, I really can.

But that’s not the point. The point is that all those failures, through a subtle but powerful process, made me stronger. And some of them made me even smarter, if you really wanna know.

The Anatomy Of A Failure

If you do something often enough, you’ll start to see some patterns. If you fail enough, you’ll start to discern the hidden structure of a failure. And this what I’m going to talk about for the rest of this post. In my experience, failure comes in 6 stages, each of equal importance.

1. The Experiment

That’s the first stage and also the most alive and most pleasant of all, so to speak. This is the part where you start something new, exciting, interesting. You take a risk. Start a business. Fall in love. Embark on an unexpected travel. This is the stage where you actually dive in without really knowing what’s going to happen. The experiment is the most intense part of a failure, because it releases our inner guardians. We act free of inhibitions, jumping around and being in the moment.

Unfortunately, this is also the stage we use to blame the most. We somehow associate the thrill, exhilaration and enthusiasm of this stage with the actual failure. Which is not entirely true.

For example, when you fall in love with the “wrong” person, this is the romantic phase. The phase in which you’re totally blind and helpless, enjoying every second with your new partner. You don’t really care if he or she is married, if he or she is an honest person. You just don’t want to know more, all you want is to feel more, to experiment more. I think we’ve all been there. And I think we’ll all be there too, at some point. But the fact that we felt good shouldn’t make us feel bad after we realize we did a mistake.

2. The Outcome

Something happens after this experiment: there is an outcome. Maybe your business idea wasn’t validated by reality (or, most likely, you did something wrong). Maybe your partner proved to be dishonest (or, most likely, you ignored some very obvious signs that he/she was actually flashing from the very beginning). Maybe the trip turned out to be a fiasco because the budget exploded and now you have to do the dishes in a restaurant to pay for your plane ticket home (or, most likely, you ignored some very common sense rule and it turned out that rule was for real).

The outcome is the part when we pay. When we realize we did something extremely wrong and we have to put up with the consequences. Sometimes we simply call this “the disaster”. If there’s something that could go wrong in the experiment, this is the stage when it actually explodes. Usually, in our faces.

Out of all 6 stages, this is the one we hate the most. This is the one which totally blows out the experiment, uncovering an ugly reality and making us feel miserable.

3. Denial

The first reaction is to deny the whole result. You avoid it altogether. Take refuge, step back, isolate, reject. The third stage is the stage of the blind man. You chose not to see the reality.

If the failure is about a business, you simply ignore the numbers. Act like you still have all the money you lost and their real absence is just a temporary glitch in the matrix. It will be fixed in a moment. Everything is ok. No worries.

Denial is more than often some kind of pain alleviation. The disaster was so big, that we simply couldn’t accept it. Our reality was so drastically challenged, that we can’t recognize it anymore, so we chose to run away and hide in a mental castle. Denial is also, more than often, the stage in which many of us are stuck for ever.

4. Excuses

Hopefully, at some point, you’ll get tired of living in denial. You’re going to realize you did a mistake. You’ll start to acknowledge the mess, but you won’t take responsibility. No, it wasn’t me: the market was tough. No, it wasn’t me: my partner lied. It’s the stage of excuses: somebody else did it.

As hard as it would be for you to accept this, I’m going to tell it anyway: this is the stage in which 90% of the people are stopping. They never get out of here. Accepting the mistake give them some sort of a relief, but they lack the power to take responsibility. Personal development is never possible if you blame others for your own failure. Never was and never will be.

What’s interesting at this stage is the enormous amount of creativity people are using in finding excuses. They’re ready to turn the world upside down and claim the rain is going from earth to the sky , just to avoid admitting that they turned on that stupid water hose.

5. Acceptance

Then, finally, you accept the outcome. Yes, you started that business, nobody forced you to. Yes, you entered that relationship, nobody forced you to. And it was a mistake. And you did it. And that caused a lot of a mess. And you still live in that mess, minute by minute.

That’s the most difficult stage of all. No wonder 90% of the people are stopping at the excuses layer. It’s so difficult to accept a failure. Because acceptance doesn’t only mean a verbal “yes”. It means a lot more. It means taking responsibility for what you’ve done. Accepting you did something that hurt somebody (most of the time, it’s you who is hurt, that’s true).

Acceptance makes things manageable again. When you were in denial, there wasn’t any handle to reality. Denial is a form of rejecting reality. And in the excuses layer, you were giving away your power to somebody else: you did it, not me, please solve it, so I can feel better. But now, if you made it to the acceptance stage, there’s hope.

6. Learning The Lesson

Which means taking some sort of real action. Acceptance in itself will only make you feel better on the inside, but will not change your external surroundings. If you did a major mistake and you accept it, that by itself won’t change the consequences of that mistake. You’re still on the same mess you created. Until you take action and get out.

And that’s the beauty of a lesson. You learn by doing. You see what you did wrong, when and how, and start to fix it. It’s like a DIY session, only it’s for the entire Universe. You broke something in your reality but now you know exactly how you did it. It’s like you have a map on how to re-assemble the pieces, so you pick your tools and start fixing that stuff.

The last stage is the stage in which you’re actually growing. It doesn’t really matter if you’re broke or alone, because now you’re doing stuff. You’re taking action. You’re exercising your powers again. The first and the last stage of a failure have something very subtle in common: enthusiasm. Only this time you’re not sleepwalking on the roof of your house, you’re fixing the roof  of your house.

Failure And Personal Development

Now, one may ask the following question (if nobody will do it, I’ll do it for you, I know you’re all thinking at it): if we know the anatomy of a failure so well, why aren’t we avoiding them altogether? Why do we keep making mistakes?

The short answer: because we can’t. The long answer: because this is how we learn. By experimenting, evaluating, accepting and taking action again. That’s the whole personal development process. As you can see, at the core of it it’s no secret of success, but rather the secret of failure. We grow up by identifying each stage of our failures and moving on.

One could argue that if we really know the anatomy of a failure, we could avoid it next time. Partially, this is true. But only partially. We may know a certain type of failure, but that wouldn’t prevent us from bumping into it again. On the contrary: have you noticed that we tend to make the same mistakes again and again?

Because it’s not about knowing the mistake and avoiding it. It’s about putting up with it. It’s about getting square. Learning the lesson. Once you learned the lesson, you won’t be attracted to that failure again. The glue to the failure is the fact that you didn’t consumed it entirely. There is still a very deep need for that specific lesson. You still need a cup of it to quench your thirst.

Once you’re not thirsty again, you’ll finally be free to try another lesson.

Don’t Hit It Big! Unless You’re Ready For It…

So, you want to hit it big with your blog? Go on, do it! Just don’t fantasize too much about how it’s going to be when you’ll do it. And you know why? Because it’s going to be completely different from what you think it would. Let me tell you a story about how success can become your worst nightmare.

The Story

Everything started a week ago. I published an article about how you can run the best version of yourself, based on a sketchy parallel between human beings and computers. The post was immediately featured on lifehacker.com, to my surprise (and delight, to be honest).

The reaction from the commenters was so nice, that I decided to go on and write a sequel. More precisely, I started to detail on some of the main points in the initial article. One of my commenters actually asked me to write a sequel and I’m always happy when I receive suggestions from my readers.

Here we are, with the second article from that series, now about How To Defrag Your Mind In 5 Easy Steps. To my surprise, the article got featured again on lifehackaer.com. Two articles in less than 10 days. Ouch!

Featured In LifeHacker

I assume that among my readers are people living outside the Solar system and I’ll just make a short description of what Lifehacker is, just for them (the rest of you already know everything about it, I’m sure). Lifehacker is one of the most visited places on the Internet today. According to quantcast, it glues together more than 250k unique visitors each day. If you get a link from a site like this, expect some serious traffic. And by serious, I mean very serious.

To make a long story short, after a few hours from the mention on lifehacker, my server was receiving a steady and healthy flow of 300 concurrent users. Or so I thought, it was healthy. It wasn’t, but at that time I had no idea. I host my blog on a dedicated server and I have total control over it (sometimes, this is bad and you’ll see why shortly).

The Glitch In The Matrix

While I was happily enjoying the traffic and watching for new comments, I briefly fired up Woopra to monitor things a little bit closer. In a few minutes I started to focus on other tasks. And after a while I saw the visitors number starting to decrease (by watching the badge on my Woopra icon on the dock).

Well, that’s it, I said to myself, what goes up must go down. It was a nice spike, now let’s get back to work. At its best, the spike was about 350 concurrent visitors. And rapidly going down. 200 in just 2 minutes. 100 in the next 2 minutes. Hmm, something looks fishy. It shouldn’t go down that fast.

I reloaded the most visited page on the blog and argghhhhh, the infamous message: “Errors establishing database connection” literally stabbed in my eyes. For a few seconds I didn’t know what to do. What database? Who? Where am I? Then I realized something is terribly wrong.

Fixing The Good Thing

I ssh-ed immediately and saw a horrendous 50% load on my server. 50%!!! I tried to do a restart to the database server, but it took like forever. Of course, my phone was closer than my good judgement so I immediately called my hosting company and asked for a reboot. “Can you please restart my server?”. “Ok, it’s your server, sir, button pushed”.

In minutes I was back again, with all the setup running smoothly. For like 15 minutes. Then again an increase in the processor load. Man, that was nasty. I googled immediately for a cache plugin, found wp-super-cache and installed it. Took me like 3 minutes.

I activated wp-super-cache only to remain completely baffled at its options page. Didn’t understand a thing. Never used it. Meanwhile, the traffic was steadily growing. After a few dozens of minutes which felt like days, I finally tweaked the plugin and my server, although puffing and steaming, was serving pages again.

I went to bed at around 1:30 and woke up normally at 6:00 AM. First thing: let’s check how’s the server doing. Apparently, the hardware part of the server was doing great, since the database mysql server was down again, so not too much stress on the CPU!!! In a few minutes I uninstalled the wp-super-cache plugin, restarted the server, replaced the configuration files for both mysql and http (simple fix to cope with bigger traffic that I should do in the first place) and the things finally came back to normal.

And by normal I mean around 60 concurrent visitors. Huh.

The Lessons

That was a big hit! Right? Being featured on Lifehacker, receiving as much as 2000 unique visitors per hour and all the hype on social media (I forgot to tell you that at some point I was also on the home page of delicious and receiving quite a lot of traffic from digg too). Yes, that was a big hit.

With the only simple mention that I almost completely screw it up!

And you know why? Because I wasn’t really prepared for that. I was dreaming about it but just assumed things will be fine, if not “the same”, when I’ll receive that huge exposure. Nope, it doesn’t work like this. Things weren’t even remotely the same as they were before. It was a completely different situation.

Every time we envision success we see it by our current lenses. We create it based on our current evolution level. Which is inherently wrong. The most intrinsic quality of success is “difference”. It’s something completely different from our normal state. We almost always forget that. I certainly did.

Here are the 3 lessons I learned by spending 10 hours tweaking a server instead of enjoying every second of my huge blog exposure:

1 Be Prepared

Totally. Always. Completely. Act like you are already there. If you’re expecting a traffic of 300 concurrent users, be sure you can cope with. If you’re expecting one million dollar in the bank, be sure you can cope with it. If you expect to have a family and a reliable partner, be sure you can cope with it.

Otherwise you will experience the most oxymoronic state of mind: being successful because you did it and miserable because you don’t have what it takes to enjoy it. It’s like eating ice-cream without knowing the difference between cold and hot.

If you work constantly, if you trust yourself and provide enough value, at some point you will hit big. The biggest lesson of this incident was that I shouldn’t focus on that part. That part is natural. Being successful if you do your job is the expected behavior of this huge application called The Universe.

You should focus instead of being prepared for what it’s going to hit you.

2 Don’t Fix It, It’s Working!

Don’t try to mess up your success. Don’t try to patch up yourself to cope with the new status or pretend everything is normal. Because it really isn’t. It’s something else, completely. It’s a new state of yourself and trying to remain the same will totally screw up things.

Trying to fix the server meltdown by installing a plugin I never heard of, not to mention never tested it, proved to do much more harm than good. Why fixing something that works? Ok, part of it was broken down, but all I needed was to put the system in its initial state.

If you’re “too” successful don’t try to impersonate somebody else. If you missed lesson number one, which is “I was not prepared for that”, just acknowledge and move on. You will only make things worse if you’re trying to fix things on the go.

3. You Asked For It

During the peak of that traffic flood, I surprised myself thinking something almost unthinkable. Unconsciously, I was hoping the traffic will scale down, at least for a while. Guys, can you give me a break just for 5 minutes, please, I want to make things work again.

Stupidest thing I could ever want. I spent months of work to reach this traffic and when it finally came, all I want is a break. Come on, I asked for it! How could I reverse it while it’s happening? What stupid mixed behavior is that?

If you’re in the whirl of your own success, always remember you asked for it. As difficult to endure as it seem, that huge success, that exposure, that wealth, happiness, or lifestyle, each of every one of those things are what you wanted in the first place.

You asked for it. For everything you receive in your life.

Self Sabotage

Have you ever felt that you’re doing something against yourself? That you could achieve so much more if you weren’t so lazy or so angry or so focused on unimportant things? Have you ever felt so powerless and stuck that you couldn’t even get out of the bed and have breakfast? Ever felt that whatever you do, you can’t get anywhere? Chances are, my friend, that you just assessed a self sabotage situation. In today’s post I’m going to talk about self sabotage, and describe my own experience with this type of attitude.

What Is Self Sabotage?

Self sabotage is a way to reject everything you created so far, choosing another path, one that could allegedly be easier or safer. You turn your back to everything you’ve done, deny it, and chose to do exactly the opposite. You take down all your hopes, dreams and goals and settle for whatever the environment is offering you at the moment. You surrender.

Most of the time, you do this unconsciously, and most of the time you don’t even realize that you’re sabotaging yourself. You just have a lot of excuses for not being who you want to be, feel a little numb and relaxed at the same time and your self-esteem is slowly going down. You go for comfort and security. You favor manipulation instead of direct action. You take the easier path. Of course, in the end, that easier path is far more difficult than the first one.

Self Sabotage Triggers

Self sabotage triggers are extremely divers. You may start to sabotage yourself because of a broken relationship. Or because you’re burned out by too much work. Or because you’re afraid of success. I think everybody has his own self-sabotage triggers and there aren’t two identical persons in the world. This is why writing a tutorial for avoiding self-sabotage would seem futile for me. What works for me couldn’t possibly work for you. The causes, reasons and triggers are different for each individual. All I can do is share my experience with self-sabotage, describe how I felt it and hope somebody else could find some inspiration in it.

I don’t think it can be prevented also. You can’t really prevent self-sabotage. I think it’s somehow part of the way we grow. It’s a necessary period in which we face our darkest sides, in which we favor destruction over creation, a period in which our higher self surrendered and let us drift in an unknown and uncontrollable ocean. Those periods are what I called “death” periods, chunks of time in which we don’t exert our full control and consciousness.

We’re dying and we’re born again each second, and most of the time we’re born in the same reality as we died in. Those death intervals are really short and the life intervals are lighter, bigger and stronger. There’s a balance, a prevalence of life. But sometimes, during your death intervals, when you’re not supervised by your higher self, you do something to change your environment, creating self-sabotage. You start to constantly alter what’s around you, in a desperate attempt to construct a somehow easier or comfortable reality. You change rules, let go of your goals, align with lower vibrations in order to avoid pain. You create a comfort zone. Only to realize, when you’re born again, that you are in fact breaking the other reality. (more…)

The Fake Saint

I talked the other day with an old friend. We talked on messenger because he didn’t find the time to see each other in the real world. His job assignments become too time consuming and his schedule quite hectic. I know how it is. Been there, done that, had to manage my own company for 10 years… But he wasn’t like this before. When I used to have too many tasks and a rather hectic schedule he enjoyed quite a bohemian period. Time took a turn and now the situation is somehow reversed. But I remember with a lot of deep joy those times, 4-5 years ago when we spent nights and weeks on a rather hippie timeline.

During that period he had a lot of talking. About our goal in this life, about astrology and about healthy food. I must admit that I owe him some of my current passions like astrology, or some of my health habits like raw food and the road I’m walking right now was first pointed during those times. But now things have changed for him and he started to feel a little embarrassed with what I write on this blog. To make a long story short, he thinks I’m cheating. In his own words: “I’m posing as a fake saint”.

I thought a lot in the last few days about that. I really did. Also, during the last few days I had some turmoil into my personal life. I won’t go into details but there is a wind of change in some other areas of my life. Something must be destroyed to let other stuff growing. Don’t know what exactly started to go down and when it will completely disappear, but I know for sure it’s happening right now. Things have come to a point when friends are asking me: why don’t you apply what you write on your blog in your life too? And I thought about that question also… (more…)