Inhale. Exhale

For the last 40 days my work routine was completely messed up. Some of you noticed it by the number of guest posts on the blog, which was really high lately (and for that I am thankful to all my dear friends and contributors here). Some of you noticed it by my (highly unusual) low presence on social media, on twitter and facebook. And some of you noticed it when I kindly asked you a small favor: helping me test one of the most interesting things I done lately: an iPhone app based on my Assess – Decide – Do life management framework.

Why iPhone Programming?

I can hear you, guys. Loud and clear: “what are you trying to prove with this iPhone stuff? I mean this is hundreds of miles away from being a blogger. I’m confused: what are you? What do you do?“ Well, I can understand your confusion. It may sound a little bit off the track, but it isn’t. This whole 40 days trial had very serious reasons. Here they are:

1. I Love To Make My Ideas Real

Number one reason is: making my ideas come true is one of my biggest sources of fulfillment. I live for this. I don’t have any other satisfaction bigger than that. I mean we all have brilliant ideas. I know some people who can have at least 6 brilliant ideas before breakfast (that would be a hook to a very interesting book, let me know in the comments if you guessed what’s the book I’m hinting at). But an idea is just an idea, an exercise of the brain. Putting all the pieces together, making it all work in the real life, just in front of your eyes, here’s from where the real satisfaction comes.

2. Self-Improvement Is Not About Writing A Self-Improvement Blog

Self-Improvement is about getting better and better at what you choose to do. Writing a blog about it can make a you a very respected blogger but it won’t automatically make you a better person. There are certain skills required to create and maintain a successful blog, I agree, but that has little to do with self-improvement. It’s just a blog. Self-improvement means challenging yourself into more and more difficult ventures, and overcome all the obstacles. This is where the real fun is.

3. I Truly Believe in My Life Management Framework

It’s been almost a year since the first draft of my ADD life management framework. A lot of stuff happened since them. I wrote 4 ebooks (all of them with printed versions published on Amazon too) and started 2 live workshops, one on online business and the other one in professional blogging. None of this could happen if I didn’t consciously apply all the rules in my life management framework. In other words: this just works. It made me far more productive than I was even when I had my online publishing company (and I was somehow forced to be productive). So, knowing that the system has been tested for almost a year on my self, I had no reason NOT to make it available to a wider audience.

The Whole Picture

But wait, there’s more. Yes, of course if is The iPhone app is just a part. The product I’ve been working on includes much more than that. I already have an ebook describing the ADD life management framework in a very advanced stage. I hope it will be ready by the end of this month. Think at the ebook as of a companion for the iPhone app (there will be a whole chapter dedicated to it anyway). And there will also be a series of podcasts on how to use this life management framework, along with the iPhone app (or even separately, if you want, ADD is a very flexible framework, it downs’t tie you down to a certain setup).

So, please keep in mind there will be some buzz again on this blog and make sure you subscribe, because in the next few weeks I’ll be writing far more than usual. Or at least in a different manner than you’re used to.

But until then, here are a few screenshots of the iPhone app. The interface may change a little bit in the near future, but basically this is how it looks:

The Growing Process

After 40 days of totally immersing in a completely new area, I feel incredibly fresh. Yes, there were a lot of roadblocks and frustrations along the way. At some points I felt lost. I also felt like I was going nowhere: what am I doing here in the middle of the night trying to understand a stupid thing like a UIPickerDateDelegate? Why am I doing this instead of sleeping or staying in the backyard listening to some music or just going out to some party?

Well, I did it because this is what I usually do: I try to get better at stuff. I try to overcome my own limitations. I try to discover new things. And I enjoy this far more than sitting outside in the backyard doing nothing or banging my head at some dull party. I love to be challenged. And learning Objective C from scratch in one month looked like one hell of a challenge.

Now, don’t get too excited. Learning Objective C in one month if you’ve never been exposed to programming might be almost impossible. I don’t claim I did this. I am a seasoned programmer (I think I wrote more than 100.000 lines of PHP code back while I had my online publishing company).

And I also did something to soften a potential crash: a dry run using a low effort project, just to get a glimpse of what should I expect. It was what I call “calibration”: do something small just to see exactly what steps do you have to take. So, three months ago I created a small game using a third party SDK, Corona, which allows you to build iPhone, iPad and Android apps. It didn’t took me more than a week. The game, called iFlipEm Lite, was written in lua, a very easy to learn programming language. iFlipEm Lite ( iTunes link) is in the AppStore for more than 2 months now and it had around 1000 downloads. Not to mention the Android version which had around 100 installations.

Once I understood the whole process of app submission and logistic requirements for deploying an iPhone app at a more professional level, I totally immersed into it. I started to daily log my progress (or, for what it matters, my frustrations) and I committed to it totally. I plan to write a very detailed post on how to tackle such a job so for those of you keen on technical details maybe there will be something more.

Now, this whole adventure backfired at me in a number of ways. First of all, the blog suffered a little bit. I didn’t wrote as much as I usually do and I didn’t promote it (or engage in cross-promotions) as often as I usually do. I ran much more guest posts than usual. The subscribers number remained basically the same but the in the blog business, if you don’t grow, you don’t exist. Just being there means nothing, you gotta move. So, my blog was stalled for a little while.

But while my blog was stalled, something else was growing: my personal experience in implementing an iPhone app, based on my own ideas. And even if this wasn’t very obvious (or at least very public) it counts. And it counts a lot. Maybe some of my readers got a little bit confused by the fact I didn’t wrote as often as I usually do. They shouldn’t. It’s normal. I’m not a writing machine, nor do I intend to become one. I’m enjoying the process as much (if not more) as I enjoy the destination. So every detour on my road is part of the journey. And I enjoy it a lot.

Now, since everybody knows now what I was doing lately, a short explanation of the title.

Inhale. Exhale

Every time we’re immersing in something new, we’re inhaling. We’re incorporating skills, information, knowledge, experience. We’re totally immersed in this process. And this is how it should be, anyway. And every time we’re sharing or applying what we learned, we’re exhaling. We’re pushing away our know-how, enriched with our personal experience.

Our entire life process is unfolding like this. There is this game of pushing back and forth that makes the journey worthwhile.

If we’re too much into inhaling (acquiring skills, knowledge or money) we’re going to implode, sooner or later. If we’re too much into exhaling (sharing skills or knowledge) we’re going to dry ourselves out: we’re going to run out of experiences to share.

So, the growth process is nothing more than this simple, fundamental process of respiration.

Inhale. Exhale.

How To Be Ridiculous

Have you ever feel ridiculous? Ever been laughed at? Don’t answer that, if it makes you feel uncomfortable. I know these types of answers can be considered sometimes “sensitive information”. You don’t really have to answer, if it makes you feel awkward. I can do it for you and I will: yes, I felt ridiculous a number of times. Yes, I’ve been laughed at, and not only once.

Ok, so what? I don’t have any visible scars from being ridiculous (and no invisible scars either). Then what is really the problem with being ridiculous? Why this fear of making a “faux pas”? Why this obsession of avoiding to be laughed at in public (and not only)?

Being Ridiculous

Have you ever saw an infant learning to walk? Noticed how he stumbles, fall, crawl and then get back on his feet again and start over? Everybody admires that. But what happens if you see a grown up doing the same thing? Suddenly, the stumbling, the falling and the crawling are ridiculous.

Being ridiculous means creating an unexpected and violent contrast between what you’re doing now and what you are generally expected to do. As a grown up you’re expected to walk steadily. Stumbling, falling and crawling will generate a huge contrast to this expectation. If you do that, you will be ridiculous. Similarly, an infant is expected to stumble and crawl, so he does not create any contrast at all between what he does now and what he’s expected to do. He’s just natural.

Every ridiculous situation is created from this contrast: you’re doing something surprisingly different from what you’re expected to.

Ridiculously Rejected

This contrast creates a certain response: people notice it and react to it. Most of the time, by rejecting you. And voila, the answer to our initial question: people fear being ridiculous because they fear rejection. Being ridiculous is a social illness and it manifests only in groups, by the way. You can’t really be ridiculous when you’re alone.

As strange as it may seem, this rejection is somehow natural. If you’re showing such a big contrast from what you’re usually doing and what you are doing just now, society tries to protect itself. You’re acting differently, or at least unpredictably. And for the sake of its own safety, society hates everything unpredictable.

You Can’t Do Without It

Now, we all do our best to have a consistent social behavior and avoid those awkward contrasts. Generally speaking, society likes this approach and rewards us by giving back validation. When we’re not ridiculous, we’re usually respected and accepted. But what happens when we have no other option than to create this contrast? Because, believe it or not, we do get forced to become ridiculous. Yes, we do. You don’t believe me? Follow on.

Have you ever thought what exactly happens when you learn something? Well, whenever you learn something new, when you’re trying to acquire a new skill or implement a new habit, you’re in fact bridging a huge gap between the actual you and the next you, the one who’ll have that habit, skill or ability. When you learn something new, you create an unexpected and sometimes violent contrast between the current you and the future you. Starting to get my point? Glad you do.

When we learn, when we grow, when we evolve, we are ridiculous. We are so different from the person we want to become, that we simply cannot avoid being ridiculous. Remember when you first started to learn a foreign language? Or cooking? Or some sport? Remember your hideous accent, your tasteless, ugly meals or your clumsy, mechanical moves? Well, my friend, you were ridiculous. Really ridiculous.

Truth is, we all are. We’re all becoming better, we’re all evolving and each time we’re aiming at something much better than we are now, being ridiculous is absolutely mandatory. It means we’re getting there. We’re creating the contrast. We’re leaving behind something familiar and we’re stumbling upon a new territory. The biggest the gap we want to bridge, the highest our ridiculous meter.

When To Worry

As a rule of thumb, when you got used to being ridiculous, without really evolving into something new, you should take a step back. It means you’re no longer advancing. You’re on the same level, although there’s been a while since you started to do that specific thing. To continue our comparison, if you still stumble and crawl when you’re in high school, well, unless you have a serious physical condition, that should be a problem. You should really have learn how to walk by the time you’re eighteen.

Whenever you’re ridiculous not because of the contrast between your older, dustier version of you and the shinier, new version of you, well, you’re in trouble.

It means you’re not growing, you’re just funny, in a sad way.

How To Be Ridiculous

When I started to blog constantly in English, more than a year ago, I “enjoyed” a lot of ridiculousness. The main reason: my English skills. Which were poor, to say the least. Truth is I never had an English lesson in my entire life. Not a single one. All that I’ve learned was by watching movies, reading programming documentation and other blogs. I learned by absorption. And when you learn like this, you should expect some serious flaws.

Every now and then some of my readers are kind enough to give me some grammar or vocabulary advice. They expect me to be proficient in English and every small mistake is immediately spotted. Of course, in the process, they make fun of me. Lately, since this blog really picked it up and became popular, I have some “spelling nazis” hunting for my English blunders and vocally announcing them on Twitter or in their blogs.

My reaction: I’m happy about it. It means this blog created such high expectations that every small mistake is by contrast unacceptable. I’m really, really happy about that. Oh, in the process, I’m also aware of the fact that I’m being ridiculous. Which means I’m getting there.

I think by now you realized that every time you will want to grow, you will face this danger of becoming ridiculous. Well, live with it, it’s part of the deal. And yes, you will face rejection, that’s also part of the deal. What we call society, this group in which you are living, keeps a certain memory about you and when you grow you will violently change it. You will become different (hopefully, better).

To this new image of you, society reacts by questioning your status quo: “hey, you’re not the guy I know, but you’re not his newer version either. Who are you, funny guy?”. Just keep doing what you’re started and do whatever you can to become your better version, until you force society to acknowledge it. At some point, after you get better and better at what you’re doing, it will have no other option than to accept and validate your new you.

Being appropriately ridiculous is an art. The art of accepting your own mistakes. The art of keep growing until you’re not making them anymore. The art of daring to become so differently from your older version that sometimes you won’t be recognized anymore.

The art of creating an incredibly better you.

Goals and Mechanical Rabbits

When I turned 39, a few days ago, I wrote a list about 39 things I learned through experience. A few of them got picked up by my readers and broadcasted on Twitter. Being bitesized really helped this process, I don’t think any of those items were bigger than 140 characters. One of the most retweeted was number 8:

“Goals are good, but no better than the mechanical rabbit at a dog race. At the end of the race, they’re useless.”

Since that seemed to touch a lot of people, I thought it would be a good idea to write a full post about it. Which I am doing as right now.

The Promise of Goals

Everybody knows the power of goals. They light the path, throw away the fog and make your efforts worthwhile. Some of the most popular goals are:

• get out of debt
• get a compatible partner
• be your own boss
• get a promotion

Of course, there are other smaller goals like owning a specific house or car. Or even buying a specific computer. I want to have a Mac by Christmas. That’s a goal.

Usually, goals are good. But, once you reached your goal, what happens? Where is the drive to run? Where is the motivation? Gone, of course. You reached your goal. The race is over.

The only thing that would make you run again is another race. Another goal. Another mechanical rabbit running in front of you, close enough so you can tell it’s worthwhile, but far enough to be out of reach. In order to catch the rabbit, you have to stretch. To go over your limits. Usually, you do that.

But after the race you bump into that frustration again. What the hell is wrong with that rabbit? Where does it hides? Every time I think I caught it, it disappear. Damn you, rabbit!

Running in the Right Context

The problem is not the rabbit. The problem is the context. A dog race is a limited context. It’s a stupid competition, trying to establish a winner among a pack of dogs. A dog race stretches the animals until one has the power to reach out and become what we call “the winner”.

This is pretty much what happens in the real world of jobs and careers. This time the  mechanical rabbit is a certain lifestyle, a certain amount of money in the bank, a specific power position. A lot of dogs are running after that rabbit. One of them, after years of struggling and sacrifices, go in front of the others. The result: the dog who catch the rabbit is a winner. The rest are losers. They have to start the race again. And again. And again.

I think you can see now how a limited context can totally change the game. Imagine a dog in the wild. And wild here is not defined as a context with no rules, but with less limitations than a stupid dog race. Imagine a dog at wild, chasing real rabbits. Is there winner there? Barely. The natural context is so large that the chances that 2 dogs are chasing the same rabbit are pretty low. And when it happens, they usually share, somehow.

A dog chasing real rabbits will do it for the thrills and for survival. If it doesn’t catch the rabbit, his meal will be gone. There is no competition here other than continuing to live. The victory here will be life in itself, not the first place and a medal.

Choosing Your Race

Fact is goals are highly dependent on the context. If you chose to live your life in a limited context, chasing goals will feel as frustrating as running at a dog race. You won’t be living a real life. You would actually live a dog’s life, being enslaved for the benefit of others. Don’t blame the mechanical rabbit for that, as it does the best it can. It runs. That’s what a goal does, it runs before you until you reach it.

But was it worth the effort? The whole race was something that fulfilled you? Being “number one” is making you really happy? Most of the time, the answer to these questions is “No”. Running over and over trying to defeat other people with the stupid hope that being ahead of them in a limited context will make you happy, that, instead of being your source of happiness, as you expect, it will eat you up inside. The context in which you are running is limited. So are the goals.

But, what happens if you would chose a larger context? Avoid the dog race altogether, step out of it. Get rid of notions like “winner” or “loser”. Think in terms of living, not racing. Just being joyful for the run. And then chose a goal on which your entire life will depend. What if, instead of chasing a career or a political position, you would chase a life. A different life. Living in a certain way. Earning enough to travel the world, for instance, but not entering any Fortune 500 list. The difference is that once you reach this new goal, in this new context, you will feel alive and thrilling. Reaching that goal in this new context will make your life go on, instead of just preparing you for another race. It will leave you free and full of energy, not empty and frustrated. That goal will be the real rabbit. Instead of being just a mechanical impostor, it will actually give you the energy to go on. And continue to live as you chose.

I used to chase mechanical rabbits all the time. Being the first in my niche, with my business. Been there, done that, felt like crap. Maybe it was a necessary milestone for my personal evolution, but truth is I never truly enjoyed this type of competition. Once I stepped out of the context, everything changed. Once I left the dog race yard, with all those mechanical rabbits ready to run in front of me, something changed. The whole game, changed, in fact.

There is no victory and no first place when you chose to live your life. There is only life. Sometimes you catch the rabbit, sometimes not. But running after a real rabbit, after something on which your entire life depends, that is so amazingly different.

What type of rabbits are you chasing now? Are you in a dog race, following a stupid social device which will leave you empty inside once you complete the race? Or are you chasing out in the wild, with no limitations in a game with no victory or defeat?

It’s just a question of choice.

Balls Of Fire

What happens when you’re in a hatred environment? What happens when you’re threatened? How’s your reality changed by this? What is your first reaction in case of aggression?

The standard answer when you’re threatened is to respond in kind. To fight back. To protect yourself. Responding to hate by hate, to threat by threat, that’s what we’ve been taught to do for centuries. It’s like you’re receiving a hot ball and in order to avoid getting hurt, you’re passing back the ball, possibly with even more heat on it. That’s the standard answer.

The “smarter” answer (as opposed to standard) is to observe the ball thrown at you and do nothing. Yes, you will get burned if you touch it, that’s right. So, why touching it in the first place? Why letting it reach you? Instead of accepting it, switch your focus from the reaction state, to the witnessing state: just observe it, see where it goes, don’t interact. You’ll have the breakthrough of your life.

Because the ball doesn’t really get to you, if you don’t allow it. That’s amazing! I know it sounds pretty strange and voo-doo-ish, but it really works like this. Once you start to just observe the things, to witness with detachment, you will see them in a very different way. Even more, by observing things instead of accepting them into your reality, you reach some kind of power over them. You will be able to allow or disallow them to reach you.

This is something really difficult to perceive and even more difficult to accept. I confess it took me a lot to even understand that. Reading about this really helps, that’s true, and I read a lot about how witnessing, observing your reality, without interaction, can actually change it. But you have to do it, not to read about it, in the first place. And it’s the direct experience of this attitude which reveals this incredible mechanics. (By all means, do not consider I’m a master on this technique, I just know enough to write a blog post about it. All I know is it works.)

Observing versus Giving Attention

There’s a huge difference between observing something and giving attention to something. Since we’re going to use those terms a lot in this post, let’s make a quick round up.

Observing means witnessing something, without any involvement. Giving attention to something means acting on that thing somehow: reacting emotionally to it, rationalizing it, comparing it with past experiences, doing something about it, anything.

Observation is stillness. Attention is focused movement.

Observing is non-action, attention is always seconded by action.

Gravity and Reality

Now let’s get back to our balls of fire.

You can’t receive something you don’t want. Every time you’re receiving something is because you accepted it. Being it a present, a relationship, your job, money, health… Or anger, illness, scarcity… You let it into your life. If you step back and look at the world from an observer place you’ll have this image very close to the planets and satellites: all the stuff that surrounds you is kept together by your own personal gravity. And the gravity which keeps your world together is your attention. The stuff around you, what you call your reality is orbiting around only because you accepted it and focused on it. You make your world living by giving it your attention.

Now if you’re not giving any attention whatsoever to some stuff, you’ll actually observe it floating away. There’s no more gravity to keep it close to you. Just think at something you didn’t think for a long time and you’ll have this feeling of distance. That thing seems so far away. Yes, that thing really is far away, because you didn’t offer it your undivided attention. The moment your focus shifted towards it, the thing started to get close to you.

Without your attention, things are just floating around. You create your environment by attracting stuff into your life the same way planets are keeping things on their surface with gravity.

So, now you realize that the ball of fire doesn’t have any direction of all. It is just a meteorite wandering through space.The author of a threat doesn’t direct the ball at you. Yes, he may use your name, he may use his mental projection of what he thinks is you, but it cannot make the ball land on your planet. Unless you give him permission to do this. The ball doesn’t really have any direction, it floats around, like any other thing which doesn’t receive your attention. It’s you who’re giving it mass and shape, by shifting your focus towards it.

What Goes Up Must Go Down

Now, what really happens when you’re not accepting hate at all? When you’re just observing the balls of fire and not allowing them into your reality? They drop. Most of the time. Most of the hate you receive or you get exposed to is circumstantial. It’s a result of chaotic situations, confusions or misunderstandings. This type of hate will just drop off. It’s like interplanetary meteorites lost in space. Consequences of small accidents, debris of violent but short and blind interactions.

But when the hate or threat is calibrated, ignoring it creates a surprising consequence: the ball goes back to the sender. When a ball of fire is calibrated it gets an extra weight. It’s not incidental anymore. It’s like a volcano erupting from a planet with so much power, that the ball of fire actually lifts off from the atmosphere and is thrown away in space. It’s something way bigger than a meteorite. It’s not floating around like a light, circumstantial ball. And it’s exactly this weight which makes the ball finding its way back to the sender. The ball is attracted by gravity. If it doesn’t find a suitable place to land (meaning: you’re not giving it the benefit of having a physical mass by your attention, you’re just witnessing it) the ball will look for the closest planet. And of course, that’s the sender.

In real life, this is a somehow hidden process. Not always the threat one sends come back to him in its exact form. Most of the time, the hater goes through a painful process without any visible connection to his initial threat. It may be an accident, an illness, some bad incident or any other kind of difficulties. The sender doesn’t really knows what hit him. In his reality system, he got rid of the ball, or so he thinks. He eliminated something from his system, and the only form he’s expecting that thing came back to him is your version of a ball of fire. If you don’t throw nothing back, he’ll assume his threat finished its cycle. Only it didn’t.

I saw this process from both ends. I was both the hater and the hated. And it worked on both situations. While I was hating somebody, and that person either ignored me, either didn’t really pay any attention to me, I found myself in violent circumstances. Accidents, violent incidents that I didn’t deserve to be part of. Or so I thought.

And when I was hated and let the hate pass me by, the perpetrator faced the same situations: accidents, illness or pressuring surroundings. At the first sight there wasn’t any logical, rational connection between the ball of fire and the violent incident. Only at the first sight.

Love and Hate

An ignored ball of fire will always land of the sender. It may be in a different form, the energy of that meteorite has been somehow modified by circumstances, but it will always come back to the sender. If no one wants it, it will come to the source.

But if you really want something, if you put all your attention and love in that specific thing, it will finally be attracted. Your attention made that thing slowly come to you. Love is acting in the same way.

In fact, love and hate are the same force, only with different polarity.

Hate is what loves sees in a twisted mirror. Hate has the same power and it will change your life at the same level love will. Except hate is destructive and love is fulfilling. They both use the same energy. One is building, the other one destroys. They are both powerful gravitational fields around you. And they attract their kind.

Why Is This So Difficult?

If things are really as simple as described, then why is it so difficult to manage a violent situation? Why hate is still there? Why people are getting hurt every day?

Because pain is real. Being hurt is real. You can’t always avoid a ball of fire thrown at you. Hitting one every once in a while is part of the game. Accept it or not, believe it or not, you do have parts in yourself which are attracting balls of fire. Most of them are placed under the surface, in what we call “the unconscious mind”. This is why you’re not always aware of the cause. But just because you’re not aware at the moment, that doesn’t mean you didn’t attracted it.

This is why is important to observe yourself instead of act upon those balls of fire. In time, you’ll start to see some patterns. You’ll start to identify similar situations. You start to find continents on your planet which are attracting balls of fire. And the only way to avoid other balls of fire is to start working on those continents. Because this is all you have.

Your reality is the only thing you have control on. You can’t control other people’s realities. All you can do is to work your attraction fields. Understand why are you attracting those balls of fire and how you can manage them. You have total control of your planet. You are the one who built that ecosystem, and you can still modify it whenever you want.

Maybe you won’t be able to solve it instantly. It may take years. But if you accept that you do attract some balls of fire into your life, you’ll be at least aware of that. You’ll understand that pain may be unavoidable, but suffering is optional.

At some point, those balls of fire you used to receive day and night, burning your forests and drying your oceans will stop landing on your planet.

All you’ll see will be some trails on the sky. Maybe somebody just thrown a huge ball of fire at you. But since your focus is somewhere else, all you’ll see will be a trail on the sky.

Finding Your Personal Mission

A personal mission sounds pretty serious, doesn’t it? Living your life by a personal mission must be something really hard and difficult. It means waking up every day and creating your flow of actions according to that personal mission statement, right? That means your freedom is gone. Being spontaneous is doomed and your life enjoyment dead and buried.

The vast majority of people are thinking like this. To be honest, I used to think the same, for a very long part of my life. Having a personal mission always sounded extremely limiting to me. I love to be free, I love to change my mind whenever I feel like, I love to be flexible about stuff and a personal mission sounded like the most effective way to kill all of this. I always rejected the idea of having a personal mission. Life is something you discover every second, right? So why putting labels on it and build limiting fences?

It took me a lot of hard work and a lot of unhappy experiences to understand the benefits of having a personal mission. It took years of delusion and lying to myself, hundreds of artificial values to invest in and tons of social conditioning to bear. It took almost a lifetime.

Why Having A Personal Mission?

First of all, let’s be clear on one thing: right now I live with a personal mission, but I used to live very comfortable for years without one. It’s not mandatory. It’s just far more better for me. This is not, by any means, an evangelist post which aims to make you create your personal mission just because it worked for me. It might not work for you. In fact, it might not work for a lot of people. But it worked for me.

So, why having a personal mission?

• Because it subtly gives a new substance to my everyday activities.
• Because it brings a lot of coherence and meaning to my everyday activities.
• Because it puts me in perspective: how I’m doing today versus how I’ll be doing 5 years from now.
• Because it makes me do the things I do best and avoid the things I’m not good at.
• Because it creates a personal path that I will follow with joy.
• Because it makes me happy about things I can do and prevent me from being unhappy by doing things I don’t want to do.
• Because it’s keeping my energies focused.
• Because it helps me understand why I’m here and how I can live better.

How To Choose Your Personal Mission?

Well, I don’t know how to choose your personal mission, because that’s your job. I do know how I chose my personal mission. (more…)