What’s Your Surface Test?

Lately, Victor, my 13 year old son, had some trouble in school with maths. When he asked for some support from my part, I jumped right in. We don’t live together, so we met in various places around the city, trying to accommodate each other schedule. By the way, that’s another advantage of being a digital nomad: having flexible hours and places to work on.

So, we started our common journey towards some of the wildest and challenging destinations I had lately. Namely, the 7th grade algebra and geometry. First of all, let me tell you that what they teach to those kids nowadays in school is serious stuff. Heavy. A little too heavy. Or, to be more clear: too disconnected from what I know to be real life. But more on that later.

Preparing For The Test

Things were great in the beginning, but, as we advanced, we started to experience some hiccups. One morning, we went to a McDonalds and started to work. It was a very nasty weather, blizzard and freezing cold. We had to walk in that weather for around 400 meters. Inside it was warm and cozy and I could tell it was too early for him. He was barely hiding his yawning. The lesson was quite difficult and we were starting to lose track and focus. A few times I asked him if he wanted to quit. To my (quite pleasant) surprise, he answered “No” each time. So we continued to push, and, even if that session lasted 45 minutes more (and I had to postpone a business meeting because of that), we made it. Or, to be more precise, Victor made it.

To make a long story short, in the last week we sat together and took everything from the start. Read the theory, did the assignments, the whole routine. Victor picked up really fast. We never spent more than 1 and a half hour on each session, because we didn’t have to (except, maybe, for that morning). We finished all the stuff faster than we thought. The only thing that he really needs to do now is to practice more by himself.

So I decided it’s time to let him know that, if he does really well on his 7th December test, we’ll go to the Steve Vai concert on 8th. Yeah, he’s into rock music. He already saw Ozzie Osbourne live, if you wonder. Now, this announcement really motivated him. He struggled to get a chance to respond in class and get a better grade even before the test on the 7th. With not much success, unfortunately. We’re still waiting for the final test to build a better grade.

So, the pressure builded really strong on this 7th thing. He really wants to go to the concert so he pushes a lot. From what I saw, he is prepared. And confident. And really willing to succeed. He’ll do fine.

The Potential Test Result

But, and here’s where this blog post really starts, he may as well fail. Yeap, this is a possibility. Even if he’s confident. Event if he really wants to succeed. Although he did it in a very powerful way, he inserted himself into this maths thing a little too late. The concepts aren’t very clear yet for him. We didn’t have enough time to do this. And some of the concepts are really strange. Much too disconnected from what we face in our daily life. And the manuals are crap. (Believe me, by that I just made them way better than they really are).

For instance, at some point we struggled to understand how to extract the square root of a number, following their indications. Forgive my nerve, but after half an hour of following some stupid indications, without understanding squat, I ended up googling it, and found a working and understandable algorithm in 5 minutes.

So, Victor may flunk maths this year. So be it.

I’m still committed to go to that concert together. Because maths is not the real lesson here. The real lesson is wanting to do things better. To overcome some stupid status quo. To create some disruption in some parts of his life, disruption which will ultimately lead to something better in all the other parts of his life. 

Because during our sessions, what I wanted to train, wasn’t algebra. I don’t know algebra. Never really used it. 

The Real Test

But I used self-discipline. I learned how not to quit. I learned how to focus. And this what I want to teach to my son. And this is what he proved me that he learned. The maths grade is secondary in this process. It’s not completely meaningless, I still want him to get a good grade, but it’s not as important as the real life lesson.

Victor may not remember how to extract the square root of a number in 20 years from now. I didn’t and had to google it. But he’ll remember for sure our common determination to stay there and do the assignment. Our sessions of “we can do this”. That freezing morning when he really pushed it and remained on track.

The Real Lesson

Too often we get caught in some temporary challenges forgetting the real test. We are pushing it to get more money, more social status or more power. And when we fail to acquire this we’re unhappy. We failed the test.

Well, we may flunk the money test. We may flunk the social status test. We may flunk marriage (I did this a few times, by the way. Brilliantly).

But as long as we can keep on trying, we’re going to be fine. Behind all these “tests” something more powerful is building. 

It’s our capacity to face challenges. Our constant insertion into the life thing, just as Victor decided it’s time to reinsert himself into the maths thing, just to make something better out of it.

And even if we fail the “surface” test, a reward will always be there for us. I know that for sure. We’re far too limited to understand all the subtle life processes which are surrounding us. That’s why we invented sayings like: “when God closes a door, it opens a window.” Because in the hidden fabric of the events, there’s always a reward for everything we do right on the “deep” layer, even if we fail on the surface test.

I don’t know how Victor will do on his surface test, this time. I do hope he’ll get a good grade on the 7th. But I am still going to that concert, no matter the outcome. 

And I will enjoy the hell out of it.

The First Year Of Blogging – Personal Benefits

Welcome to th final article from the series about my first year of blogging as a business. In this article I will outline the personal benefits of having a personal development blog as a main business. If you came here directly, you may want to have a look at the other articles:

The First Year Of Blogging – Writing
The First Year Of Blogging – Promotion
The First Year Of Blogging – Money

Self Discipline

By far the most important and visible benefit of having a blog as a business was self discipline. I actually had to write content, to promote the blog and to make sure I find ways to make money out of it. And I had to do this persistently for more than one year. I didn’t have anyone to call in if I was sick, I couldn’t postpone posting an article because I was bored or depressed, I had no one to promote the blog for me. No employees to blame if something went wrong, no excuses.

This is a tremendous self-discipline booster. I’ve always been a self-discipline freak and, as you may guess, running a business for more than 10 years requires a lot of commitment and dedication. But this was different. When I had the business I was competing most of the time with my competition. As a blogger I was competing with myself. I had to find ways to keep myself motivated and to constantly improve the blog. Of course, the main benefit of having a personal development blog is that you can transform virtually every experience into a blog post. As long as you learn something from it, of course.

Blogging Skills

The second benefit is related to my blogging skills. If I read some of the articles I wrote one year ago I can hardly believe I was the one who wrote them. And yet, I was the one who wrote them. Keeping a blog consistently from more than one year proved to be a fantastic tool for sharpening my skills. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty far from what I want to be, but I am far more than I used to be.

And so, it wasn’t any surprise at all when I started to receive, in the last few weeks, a lot of requests for writing for other blogs. For some of them I did guest posts, but others are asking me to write as a paid blogger. I couldn’t even imagine one year ago that I would be in such a position. And yet, I am in such a position now. There is no other way to become better at something than doing it unceasingly.

Social Skills

During the last year I interacted with more people than in my last 3 years as a business owner. Yes, that’s true. I think I interacted on a constant basis with more than 100 people. And that would be only the close circle. Beyond that circle there are at least 1000 people which whom I interact every now and then. Of course, those interactions are taking place in the social media or directly on my blog. As a comparison, when I had the business I didn’t interact with more than 30 people on a daily basis, and that was when I had pretty hectic and busy days.

Now that’s a fantastic social skills booster. Even if the interaction is not taking place in the real world, it still challenges your core social expertise and resources. Even if you time box your social interactions, grouping them together in chunks like Twitter or Facebook, you still have to get through those interactions. Not to mention the fact that some of them are leading to real life interaction, like the first Steve Pavlina workshop I am attending in Vegas these days.

Goal Setting

One of the things that got strengthened this year was my capacity to set up goals. Again, I didn’t have any serious issues with that, but not having serious issues with something doesn’t mean it cannot be improved. This is exactly what happened with my goal setting capacity. Blogging has the advantage to give you a very fast feed-back. If you do something bad, you’ll know it very fast and you will be able to take measures.

In time, this back and forth game of setting goals and adjusting them to reality somehow crossed the blogging territory limits into other areas of my life. I can be better now at setting up goals in other areas, like fitness or eating or traveling. There is this subtle learning that occurs when you’re applying self-discipline to a specific area of your life for more than one year. This knowledge and intuition took me from writing only 15 posts per month up to creating huge lists posts (both in terms of length and popularity) like 100 Ways To Live A Better Life.

Goal Achievement

Well, that’s one of the things I should celebrate. Goal achievement, although highly praised in any personal development course, is heavily underrated in real life situations. Everybody teaches you how to achieve your goals, but no one tells you what happens after that. It’s a celebration, people, that’s what happens after you achieve your goals. I had one successful year of blogging as a business and I’m really proud of it.

Goal achievement could be a really dry and boring process if you don’t put a little bit of joy in it. If you don’t take the time to be happy about what you’ve done you could as well be a robot. Precise, exact but soulless. After one year of blogging, a year filled with a lot of challenges, difficulties and successes, all I can say is I’m really happy about that. It went really well and although during this series – and most of the time during the last year – I’ve blogged about my experiences, the real reason behind creating a successful personal development blog is not me.

It’s you. Thank you.

Building Self Discipline

If you have really high goals, chance are that you had to improve your self discipline at some point. You had to streamline your daily routine, to improve your skills, to become more effective, to achieve more in less time or with less energy. Although one of the most expensive tools in your personal development tool box, self discipline is by far the most useful. In today’s post I’ll talk about my experience with self discipline.

What Is Self Discipline?

In short, self discipline is the ability to follow a specific goal regardless of current environment. If you would live in a perfect world, everything you want would be achieved instantly and effortlessly. But if you’re reading this post you don’t live in a perfect world. You live in the same world I live, a world in which things are falling short sometimes, in which priorities overlap, in which your energy seems always to be under the required level. Like it or not, this is the world we live in. This is our environment. And self-discipline is the ability to overcome any setbacks your environment can place between you and your goals.

Building Self Discipline

Creating self discipline is a tedious task. Because self discipline is more than a habit, it’s an intrinsic quality of your being. You can’t “learn self discipline” in one area of your life and then apply it exactly in other areas. And still expect it to work.  It simply doesn’t work that way. You’re creating a habit, at best, not self discipline. For instance, if you’re a blogger, you can’t create self discipline in your writing, and apply the same pattern to your physical activities. It’s much more than that.

What you can do, is to develop a certain approach which gives you the ability to tackle any task in any given context. Self discipline is more of a lifestyle than an atomic activity. Is more like a personal attitude towards life than just a technique you can put on autopilot and then just watch the results.

During the years, I had my share of struggle with self discipline. I wasn’t a very disciplined guy, mostly because I always had this thing with authority. I mean challenging authority figures. Among other stuff, this was one of the reasons I ended up being my own boss. But besides that, I always had this challenging attitude towards what I felt like imposed tasks. And that certainly didn’t make things easier for me when I had to follow long term goals.

But at some point I succeeded. I had a business for 10 years and believe me, you do need a hell of a lot of discipline to keep an online business working for 10 years. If you’re reading this blog you may know that I’ve been on a raw food diet for more than 9 months. I also imposed to myself and successfully implemented a posting speed on this blog, which is live for more than 9 months. And as I write this, I am on a 30 days exercising challenge. These are pretty distinct goals: business, health, writing and fitness. But I made them happen.

Creating self discipline, in my experience, requires only 5 things: clear goals, incentives, assessment, interference management and opportunism. Let’s take those things one at a time.

Clear Goals

If you don’t know where you’re heading, you can’t go faster. That’s a fact. Keeping clear goals is fundamental for building self discipline. Make those goals crystal sharp and then stick with them. One of the most common pitfalls in maintaining a self-discipline is losing sight of what you’re doing. It happens more often than you think. At some point you become so involved in reaching that goal that you can’t seem to remember which goal was in the first place.

There is also another very important reason for having clear defined goals: each goal needs specific actions. You would act in a certain way if you’re trying to improve your health (by embracing a raw food diet, for instance) and completely different if you’re going to improve your writing. You will implement different strategies for different objectives. Self discipline will help you strengthen your overall strategy, but if you’re choosing the wrong one, you won’t get results. And if you don’t get results, you’re going to quit.

Incentives

Creating self discipline requires rewards. Little payments down the road, in order to keep you motivated. I do think rewards are necessary during the process, although they are not the main objective. The main goal is to create a swiss army knife tool that you can apply constantly in every area of your life, regardless of the specific actions needed or of the specific context. And if some rewards will speed up the process, why not? It surely works for me.

Most of the time, those rewards will come in the simple form of progress assessment (more on assessment in a moment) like looking at what you’ve done so far and feeling good about it. When I started the raw food diet I monitored my weight. In two months I lost about 7 kilos. Well, I allowed myself to be happy about that. It was like Dumbo’s magic feather: kept me flying. Of course, the main goal wasn’t weight loss, it just made me go further.

Progress Assessment

Self discipline needs adjustment. You can’t expect anything to go perfect from the first time. So, in order to see if things are going in the right direction, you need to assess your progress. Constant feedback is another fundamental ingredient for building self-discipline. You may find yourself too active on a very easy situation, or under acting on a very difficult one. For each of these situations you will need some form of adjustment. And those adjustments will create little by little that attitude you call self discipline.

Also, regardless of the specific goal you’re trying to reach, when you’re starting to develop self discipline, don’t expect to have result fast, just watch the progress. Keep a journal, write things on your room walls, put iPhone reminders, send yourself emails, whatever works for you. For instance, when I decided to implement a posting speed on my blog I also created a blog audit wordpress plugin which helped me track the progress.

Ignoring Interferences

If you’re heading for the right goal, with the proper incentives and you’re making good progress, chances are that you’re going to be distracted soon. I think it’s just human nature: every time we seem to reach a certain momentum we tend to lose it the very next second. I call those situations interferences. Every time you are attracted by something else than your main goal, you’re allowing some interference to play with your energy field.

Those interferences are not necessarily pleasant. You can also get unpleasant interferences if you’re on a fluctuating context. For instance, some old, unfinished tasks will strongly require your attention, or some job superior will try to impose a disruptive attitude on you. Those interferences will break your flow and put some more distance between your and your goals. Pleasant or not, you got to learn how to ignore those interferences for good. Set course for your goal and stay there.

Opportunism

Have you ever been struck with luck? When trying to reach a specific goal, I mean? Some unexpected help coming from an unexpected person? Some situation change which created an advantage for you? Well, that sort of things just happens. I won’t go into details about how you attracted those things, but I’ll tell you that I am very fond of these situations. I mean, every time I feel these “hidden” help hands, I reach out.

Implementing self discipline means taking advantage of everything useful around you. If there’s some luck around, go for it, it will make things better. If there’s some help coming from somebody, receive it, don’t reject it just because “I have to do it, by myself”. Sometimes the Universe is just lending us a helping hand. Even – or even more – when we’re trying to implement something as difficult as self discipline.

***

In the end, the real reward is not achieving your goal. But stretching your limits. Further and further. It’s not about having or getting more (like more money, more stuff, etc) but about the experience of different things. It’s all about enjoying more dimensions of yourself and of the world.

The First 6 Months Of Blogging – Writing

During my first 6 months of “serious” blogging I discovered a lot of things about blogging and about myself. In the first post of this series I’ll share what I learned about the blog writing process. This is a rather long post, more than 2500 words, so I suggest you set aside some time to read it comfortably. Keep in mind that this series is targeted towards people who embraced blogging more like a profession or a revenue oriented activity rather than people who blog for relaxation or fun. There’s quite a difference between journaling and blogging.

Posting Speed

During the first 6 months I wrote 106 articles on my blog. For the sake of statistics that accounts to 0,58 posts per day. Here’s the monthly breakdown:

October 2008 – 17 posts
November 2008 – 20 posts
December 2008 – 20 posts
January 2009 – 17 posts
February 2009 – 15 posts
March 2009 – 17 posts

The lowest month was February and the most productive months were November and December. During the first 3 months the enthusiasm level was pretty high and I found it easier to work. But after the first 100 days I had to rely more on self-discipline than on enthusiasm. The motivation was there all the time, but the drive to work is made of more than just enthusiasm. I had to really stick with it. I had to keep a constant flow of work, and here’s why.

Posting speed is one of the key metrics of blogging. Here are some of my thoughts about blog metrics, among other things, if you want to know more about this topic. Based on the posting speed you can actually predict some of your other blog metrics, like traffic and comments and pingbacks. In fact, posting speed was the main metric I wanted to control during the first 6 months.

When I decided to go full time blogging, this was my first and most important commitment: to write at least 15 posts per month, one post every other day, at least 1200 words for every post. That was my number one goal.

And I did this for a number of reasons: (more…)