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 But other rules are created by outdated structures that are no longer fulfilling their role in our lives.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.

Brilliantly Better – The Ebook

Last Friday I launched – in soft mode – my latest ebook, Brilliantly Better. During the last 48 hours anyone interested in getting it had the chance to buy it at a discounted price, 9.99 USD. As of now, the price of the ebook is at the normal level, meaning 16.99 USD.

Also, a few other things have been completed, adding the final touches to the launch. First, I finished a promo movie. I’m really proud about how it came out, more about that in the next paragraphs. Second, a brand new website has been put in place, and that would be, obviously, Brilliantly Better.

The Brilliantly Better Movie

This is my first attempt ever at making a movie. I don’t know anything abut this so I asked a very good friend to help me out. He’s one of the best guys I know at this thing, with thousands of hours of work on the field, and dozens of commercials already aired. His name is Sega and you can find more about what he does by clicking on that link.

We spent the last Saturday shooting in my living room, experimenting with various lenses and gear and settings and props. I never thought that getting a few minutes of valuable filmed material can be that hard. But it was also incredibly fun. We both enjoyed our time and we did that not because we had to, but because we liked it. Huge difference. Meaning we had a blast

I should also mention that the music and the sound on the movie were also supervised by Sega (I’m the one talking, though, obviously). I should also note that we shoot it with my Canon 450D, with two types of lenses, and the music was made on my iPad, using Garage Band. The editing was completed on Sega’s laptop, on Adobe Premiere. The total number of hours spent on this was around 20.

One of the things that really helped us out was the fact that we have a lot of common beliefs. During the last 3 years Sega has been on his own quest too, traveling through India and Asia. Also, he started to write a novel about his spiritual adventures, the book (in Romanian) should be published soon. Also, we’re both fussy and expensive. But, as you can see, we deliver.

As for the movie, you can see it at the end of this post. If you like it, share it. Also, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

What Should You Expect From The Ebook

I’m sure you already clicked on the first link and you read everything on the Brilliantly Better website. I’m writing this for the 1.34% of you who didn’t.

You will get more 70 articles, 500 pages, each and every one of them carefully selected out of more than 700.000 words I’ve written on my blog since I started it, 3 years ago. It’s just the best of what I wrote so far.

And I won’t say a word more than that, because you should really be at the ebook site now. And because I deeply hate those ridiculously long and shallow sales pages, that way of promoting stuff I did just doesn’t click with me.

Enjoy Brilliantly Better – The Ebook!

From Competition To Connection

I used to think that my company, Mirabilis Media, (the one I created when I was 30 year old and sold it 10 years after, for quite some money), was one of my biggest achievements. Honestly, I don’t think that way anymore. It was an achievement, but I start to doubt that it was my biggest one.

By any mainstream standards, being successful with your own company is a great achievement. Many people are working their butts day in and day out to make it happen.

And once you’re getting a little bit of grip, once your products are becoming adherent to the market and your name starts to be recognized, well, something interesting kicks in and kinda ruins the whole thing. It’s called competition.

Am I the first one in the market? Am I the second? Everybody and their mother knows that only the first 3 players are counting in any field. And only number one and number two can get a major investment. If you have 25% of the market you can do that and if you have 45% you can do the other thing. If you are the third in a market with two big and powerful leaders you can play your cards in a certain way. Everything is about coming up first.

Competition is deeply wired in our structures. Especially males are subject to its influence. Roll back to the time when we’re hanging around in small groups, hunting on the fields of Africa and you’ll start to understand why. The alpha male used to have all the privileges. If you were number one, you got the most fertile ladies, the best food and shelter and pretty much the entire respect of the group. Until somebody else challenged you, that is.

I guess that spreading away your genes as far away as you could, imposing your own DNA over your peers and just surviving in a very difficult environment was the biggest achievement you could have during those times. I’m inclined to agree with that.

But times have changed. Surviving, as important as it is still is, is not the biggest issue anymore. Our social structures, our environment, our capacity of creating life supporting materials have evolved. It’s way easier to survive and to spread your genes today, than it was 50.000 years ago. If that’s all that you want, I mean. As a matter of fact, I think that spreading your genes became the easiest thing we can do nowadays.

Then why we’re still so pushed by these ancient instincts? Why we’re striving so much to pick up on some numbers and always try to come up in the first place? Why we still have this pathological fascination with numbers and fight?

I admit I haven’t find an answer to that question yet. I tried, believe me, for years, but I couldn’t find it. And when I was just about to give up, a few years ago, something happened. Basically, I found a new question. And that new question is: What would happen if we could replace “competition” with “connection”?

And the answer to that questions was: “Wow!”.

Competition versus Connection

If you’re in a competition state, everybody is your enemy. If you’re in a connection state, everybody is your partner.

If you’re competing, you’re spending resources, like in losing them. If you’re in connection, you’re sharing resources, like in growing them.

If you’re competing, there is only number one that makes you happy, like a pyramid that can only be traversed from the top to the bottom. If you’re connecting, you’re happy everywhere, you’re in a graph, a web that can be traversed any way you like.

If you’re competing, your body is in a fight or flight situation, you can either win or lose. If you’re connecting, you don’t have anything to lose or to win, there is only healthy expectation.

If you compete, your self-esteem becomes a result of the competition: if you win, self-esteem goes up, if you lose, self-esteem goes down. If you connect, your self-esteem is driving the connection process: the more you have, the more people you attract into your connection area.

If you compete, you win a prize. And, in order to win another prize, you have to compete again. And again, and again. If you connect, there’s no prize to be won: your created value is spread constantly in the graph and returned to you constantly from the same graph.

As I started to draw all these simple comparisons, I realized that I kinda shifted to connection right after I sold my company. A few of my formers competitors in the market were puzzled by the fact that I didn’t invest more, that I didn’t create even a bigger empire than the one I sold. Some of them still are puzzled and maybe think that I have something under the table, ready to explode when the time will come. Well, I don’t. Because I don’t compete anymore. I connect.

So, to make a long story short, I still don’t know what pushes us to competition. And I may never find out what it is. But I do know something better than that.

And that’s the value of a true connection.

Can You Solve The Puzzle Of Your Life?

As Bianca, my 4 year old daughter, started to better understand images and shapes, as she started to talk more and to understand more, we slowly started to play more complicated games. Lately, she seems to develop a rather strong appeal for puzzle games. We solve at least one puzzle almost every day. We started with very simple games, with bigger parts, but soon she got bored. We had to find bigger puzzle games, with smaller (and more) pieces.

The other day, after we finished one of those games, just before she had to go to sleep, I had a short… let’s call it moment. A moment of clarity. I saw a few similarities between the puzzle games we played and some more “serious” situations like goal achievement, personal development or difficult life situations. Somehow, the games we played activated a switch. A very interesting one. After she went to sleep, I decided to write about this. By the way, it’s not the first time when Bianca is shedding some light on my path. Less than a month ago she let me see through her book of life, for instance (don’t be shy, take a look too).

Now, lets’ talk about how solving puzzles can help with your goal achievement strategies.

You Got All You Need

Every goal, every endeavor, every important achievement is made out of hundreds of little separate pieces. Goal achievement is just a matter of putting those pieces together. You take each and every bit, look at it, try to find its place in the bigger picture and then do your best to fit it in. That’s all there is to it, nothing more. Just a puzzle game.

And yet, we seem to struggle with our goals more than we should, or more than we expect in the beginning. And the most common roadblock of all is the feeling of “lacking”. I lack resources to make my life better. I lack the good looks I need to attract a better partner. I lack money. I lack a positive attitude. I lack luck.

Fact is we have it all. We just don’t see it. We have all the parts just in front of us, but we’re so early in the game that we just can’t understand them. We do have the resources, the looks and all the luck we need, but we don’t see them in the big picture. I realize this every time I shuffle the pieces for a new puzzle. When I look at them, they all seem so unrelated and distant. Not part of the same game. Totally different.

But as the game progresses, each and every piece find its place. All I need is just a single matching point, and from that matching point everything starts to link it up until the final image is complete.

But You Have To Stick To A Plan

And that calls for the second thing about puzzle and goal achievement: a plan. If you really want to solve the riddle you need a strategy. A roadmap. Some structured approach to reduce confusion up to the point the world becomes manageable again. It doesn’t have to be downright solvable, just manageable. As a matter of fact, if a puzzle is so easy that I can see through it from the beginning, I don’t feel any drive to even try it out.

But if the puzzle is so huge, so difficult and so complicated that I can barely think it’s doable, I need a strategy. Something that will give me hope to walk through it. Something that will make me understand the big picture. We all have our own specific strategy. For instance, my puzzle strategy is to find the corners and the edges. If I have a physically delimited portion of the image, I can easily find my way from there. I build from the edges to the core of the puzzle, ring by ring.

Bianca’s strategy is different: she looks for the first match she can find, regardless of the type of the piece (corner or edge). Once she found a match, she looks for the next one, and so on. All she needs is a starting point. She builds from there, in whatever direction she can find. That’s all we need to get the thing moving on. Until then, the puzzle game is nothing but a mess. Without a strategy, things looks like they’re impossible. But once you decide to bring the smallest amount of order into the chaos, you’re in fact creating a small crack, letting the light shine through.

Your puzzle solving strategy may be different. But as long as you have one, your puzzle will be finished. Just stick to it. All the unrelated parts will eventually fall into pieces.

Yes, It’s Confusing

Sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes you spend days or months or years thinking how to get over your current situation. In other words, your puzzle game is frozen. You can’t advance anymore. There are no matching pieces that you can find. And still, you have to go through it. If you stop, you will never solve it.

We have moments when we seem to have no way to advance, me and Bianca, when we play our puzzles. Although we have all the pieces in front of us, something prevents us from seeing their role. We have no vision. No clarity. Bianca, as a kid, gets bored much more easily than I do. So I have to perform some special tricks in order to keep her focused.

And those are the moments when I realize I have to do the same tricks (or even come up with some better ones) if I want to solve the puzzles I choose. I need to find ways to remain in my life game even if it seems hopeless. I need some ways to overcome those situations in which I think there’s nothing more I can do. Because I can. All the pieces are there, I just can’t see them yet. But it’s my abandon which will actually make it meaningless. If I leave, the game will never be finished.

The game of life is confusing at times. And I think it’s confusing for a very good reason: to test your ability to stay on the path. Every puzzle is solvable, even if it seems it isn’t. Every life situation is solvable. As long as you don’t leave the game.

Putting Your Own Pieces Together

One of the nicest feelings you can have is to see a puzzle solved. And I’m not talking about the games I play with Bianca, (although creating a nice scene from Kung Fu Panda, for instance, can be funny at times). I’m talking about your life situation. I’m talking about your goals. Your dreams.

Maybe you had a dream of becoming somebody. An actor, a writer, or just a happy husband. Maybe you wanted to change the world. Or just to travel around it, while witnessing its beauty. This is your puzzle. This is the riddle you have to solve.

Even if it seems like you don’t have the resources, all the pieces of the puzzle are there. You just don’t see the big picture yet.

All you need is to set up a little plan and bring some light in. Most of the times, this little plan means just going along with the flow. Follow your intuition. Trust your heart. Remember, it’s just a puzzle. You picked it up and you do have all the necessary pieces to complete it.

Just stick with it.

And let me know when you finish, I’ll come over with Bianca to enjoy it together.

A Guide To Pursue Your Passion With Success: 14 Essential Steps

What follows is a guest post by my friend Celestine Chua, @celestinechua.

This is a great opportunity to be writing a guest post at DragosRoua.com. I’ve known Dragos for over a year now, back when we first started actively growing our blogs. It’s amazing to see how everything has evolved since then. In just a year, DragosRoua.com has grown from a less than 1,000 subscriber blog to a 4,000+ strong subscriber base. It has also evolved from a blog into a proper business, with multiple products (books, audio) and services (workshops).

For me, my blog, The Personal Excellence Blog, has grown from 0 to over 2,500 subscribers today. It now has over 150 free personal excellence articles and free ebooks, chocked full of content and value. I started my personal development school late last year, giving workshops and 1-1 coaching. My blog has also been featured on CNN.com and other prominent local media outlets.

All these didn’t happen by chance though. They came as a result of conscious strategies and actions. Before I pursued my passion to help people grow 1.5 years ago, I was working in a regular, corporate job. I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I ditched my full-time career to pursue my passion. It has certain been a journey of trial and error, and it continues to be today. Along the way, I tried many different strategies, learning from others and trying different things on my own. There were things which helped me, and then there were things which didn’t.

Looking back, there were 14 essential steps which have been critical in my path. If you are planning to pursue your passion, they are definite essential steps in your journey. If you are already pursuing your passion, these strategies will certainly give you a big boost. I know following these 14 strategies in the upcoming years will continue to help my passion and business grow.

Throughout the article, I’ll be using mainly blogging as an example to bring out the points since my blog is closely tied to my passion, but bear in mind these strategies are applicable no matter what you do. Many of these strategies may be intuitive, but they work and they are precisely what have helped me in my path. Here they are :

1. Know what you want to do

So you know you have a passion in something. How do you want to pursue this passion? What are the key channels you want to use to express your message? Choose the channels you are most passionate and build your business around them. These will become the foundations of your business. You don’t need to be limited with just 1 medium.

For example, my passion is in personal development. I love helping others achieve their personal best in life. There are many ways I can do this, such as via being a counselor, a teacher, a coach, a trainer, and so on. I decided to start off with The Personal Excellence Blog, as the internet as a medium has the low barriers to entry and allows me to instantly reach out to large audiences. From there, I write articles and share my best learnings and advice. It has since become the key channel where people know about what I do.

After 4 months of blogging, I started to give 1-1 coaching for readers who want personalized attention on their goals. I also began to branch out to speaking and training via workshops. Most recently, I started writing a book to reach out to more people. All these channels help me express the same message to help others.

There is no limit to the number of channels you can use to express your passion. The most important thing is you need to know what exactly you want to do first and how you want to do it. The clarity will give you focus in your path.

2. Identify your target audience

Every venture has an audience it is reaching out to, and the same goes for yours. Who do you want to reach out to? How old are they? What are they doing in life? How can you help them?

Knowing your target audience is important because they will become central to your plans. For example, what product you want to sell (step #3), how you are going to reach them (step #4) and the pricing you are going to adopt (step #9). You can only answer these questions if you know who exactly you are reaching out to. There is no one size fits all solution. The more you know who your audience is, the better you can cater to them.

Don’t just think you know your audience too – really get down to understand them. Research if you need to. Do a survey. Talk to them. Get up close and personal. The degree you understand your audience determines how well you can meet their needs.

For example, I’m currently writing a book on Passion & Money (how to pursue your passion and earn money doing it). To ensure I’m writing in line with my readers’ needs, I wrote a blog post to ask my readers to share with me the questions they want to have on the topic. Some were questions I anticipated and quite a few were new angles I did not consider before! It was a pleasant surprise and I’m really glad I had sought for their opinions. If I hadn’t asked, I would be writing a book which I thought will be valuable for them, but wouldn’t be. I would have wasted all that time writing the book! Their replies helped me to write a book that will be valuable to those who want to pursue their passion successfully.

Further reading:

• How To Define Your Target Market (Success Designs)
• How To Define Your Target Market (Entrepreneur.com)
• Determining the Target Audience of Your Small Business

3. Create your products/services

I’ve been to many blogs where the bloggers yearn to make a living out of their blogs, but I’m not entirely sure what they are selling. There are 1-2 ad channels here and there, a free ebook gets readers to sign up for their feed, 2-3 affiliate products and a bunch of amazon links. It seems more like a random “try any method that earns me money” rather than a clear product/service selling strategy. Unfortunately, as random as this is, the earnings you get will be random too.

Get clear on what you are selling. What are your key revenue streams for your business? Is it through products? Through services? What products? What services? With the 80/20 rule, typically we can expect 20% of the items we are selling to generate about 80% of our revenue. Get clear on those 2-3 key items that will help you generate the bulk of your revenue. Then, ensure you create these items with the highest value possible (step #12).

4. Have a marketing plan

No one is going to know about your business if you don’t market it out. You have to create a marketing plan to get people to know about you. There are different ways to do this. One way is to study how other businesses in your niche get the word out. Another way is to imagine yourself as the target audience and think about how you will seek out information on the topic. Then, tap into those channels as your marketing plan.

When I first started The Personal Excellence Blog, I did a sizable amount of research on how to market and promote my site. I found out there were many different methods like as (1) social media like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter (2) posting comments on other blogs/forums (3) posting articles on popular article directories like Ezine and Hubpages. A lot of time was spent in the first few year on getting the word out. Some worked very well (such as hitting the front page of Digg, Delicious and SU), while others were not so effective. The key is to experiment and choose what works best for you. Even today, a key part of my blog development plans includes marketing, primarily through guest posting. If you want to grow your business to a larger scale, you need to have a plan to market it out.

Further reading:

• 10 Small Business Marketing Strategies That Work
• 4 Free Ways To Market Your Business

5. Have clear goals and stick to them

When working in an employee in a company, there are structures in place and clear list of responsibilities for your role. There are expectations from top management and targets to fulfill for your appraisals. However, when you are working for yourself, you are the person who calls the shots. When you don’t have to account to someone else, it can be easy to slip and stagnate. Form clear goals and hold yourself accountable to them.

Further reading:

• The Art Of Setting Great Expectations
• Success Goal Achievement Step 1: Establish Your Goal
• Locke’s Goal Setting Theory on SMART goals (MindTools)

6. Create your business guidebook

For every project I do, I have a guidebook where I write my goals, strategies, plans and learnings.It’s like a success roadmap. I use excel workbook because it’s so easy to organize information. Similarly, for my personal development business, I have a guidebook which guides me through the running of my personal development business. In it, there’s my business purpose, values, strategies, plans, long-term and short-term goals, administrative information, etc. I started this book since the early days I started my business, and it’s been with me ever since. Over time, I built on it to include more information, such as my learnings from rolling out my plans and what to do differently. The objective is to have a guidebook that contains the essential information to bring your business to success. This is a document you will refer to every step of the way. It is meant to be work-in-progress, meaning to be updated every step of the way as you acquire new learnings.

Further reading:

• Create a Business Plan by Answering 4 Simple Questions (Wisebread)
• How To Write A Business Plan (Entrepreneur.com)

7. Do things for free at first

As part of your marketing drive (#4), you might want to consider giving value away for free to drive quick awareness. This is a strategy I’ve used and it has worked really great for me.

For example, I give away many of my best advice and learnings for free at my blog, through my articles. Not only that, I also invest many hours writing these articles. Every article takes me about at least 5-6 hours to craft, write and revise. I’ve written many series that took days and a lot of hard work to write, such as how to discover your purpose, how to overcome procrastination and how to move on from relationships. Giving so much value away for free has undoubtedly help to drive quick awareness of my work. Many readers have since passed my site on to their friends, family, and through Facebook/Twitter. If I had made my blog a subscription only channel, it would not have the awareness it has today. Even for my coaching and workshops, I initially offered them for free to get the word out, though I never got to do that for long as the demand quickly soared.

8. Have monetization plans in place

Your business may have high awareness among your audience, but if you don’t have monetization plans in place, you aren’t going to earn money. Your traffic isn’t going to automatically convert into money by itself. Get clear on how you are going to earn money. Are you going to monetize through products, services, or both? What is your anchor product/service going to be? What are the ancillary products/services?

One of the reasons that makes DragosRoua.com a business, and not just a blog, is that Dragos has a clear portfolio of products and services he’s selling. He sells ebooks/books, audio podcasts and he runs workshops, and there are probably more to come in the future.

Further reading:

• The First Year Of Blogging ñ Money
• 101 Ways to Monetize Your Blog Without Irritating Your Readers
• How To Make Money Online (John Chow’s Blog)
• Shoemoney – Skills to Pay the Bills (Jeremy Schoemaker’s Blog)

9. Know your pricing strategies

If you are not careful, it’s possible you can price yourself out of the market. In one of the workshops I just did last month, I had priced myself significantly out of the market range. I had set the full-day workshop for 15 people to be $180 USD. I came up with the pricing as it was an affordable pricing for corporate training. The value that was packed in the workshop was also definitely worth more than that. However, as the workshop was direct to the public and not corporates, pricing was an immediate barrier. As I observed the competitor strategies, I realized a better method would be lower pricing ($30 USD) but to a large audience of about 100pax. Overall revenue is consistent due to the higher volume of people.

Do your research first before you design your pricing strategy. Understand how the other companies in your niche are pricing their products/services. Compare your product offering with theirs, then decide the pricing strategy that you are most comfortable with.

10. Get your accounting straight

Keep clear accounting of how much you are earning and spending. In business terms, earnings are referred to as revenue, or top-line. Some people only look at their top-line and neglect to keep tabs on their expenditures, which results in high revenue earned but little to no profits. Some others are so obsessed about reducing costs that they just hold back on spending until they earn money.

The important principle is not to spend excessively, while at the same time not scrimping on necessary costs. The question I usually ask myself is this – Does this affect the value I can deliver to my audience? If it gives a significant positive effect, I’ll spend it. If it doesn’t affect that much and cashflow is tight, I wouldn’t go ahead with the spending.

11. Learn from your competitors (allies)

I always see my competitors as allies because they want to achieve same objective as I do, but I’ll just use competitors to make it simple. Your competitors have been in the industry and have acquired their own experience. Hence, chances are there is a good reason behind the strategies they are using now. Identify your biggest competitors, look at what they are doing, and learn from them. In establishing my blog, I’ve picked up different tips from bloggers such as Darren Rowse, Steve Pavlina, Leo Babauta, Glen Allsopp, Dragos, and an array of many other blogs. I analyze what are the things they did that moved them to success, and then I adapt those steps to fit me. It has worked great so far and I intend to continue doing so.

12. Focus on value creation

Ultimately people pay for your products or services because they see value in them. So the most important thing is to focus on value creation – creating the most value to your audience. How can you make sure what you are doing provides the highest possible value for your audience?

For my articles, coaching and workshops, I spend a lot of time on them to ensure the audience gets the most value possible. I’ve spent countless late nights working because I wanted my audience to get more value for the experience. On my blog, I’ve trashed a number of articles because I didn’t think they were of good value to readers. Because of that, my audience knows the quality standard with what I produce and they keep coming back for more.

When your audience knows they can expect the best from you, they will regard you as a credible opinion leader, or authority in the field. They will trust your recommendations and your perspectives. This trust is only built through spending a lot of hard work and time to generate genuine value. There is no quick short cut to it.

Further reading:

• Creating Value
• Making Money With A Purpose

13. Have regular reviews

Review is essential to know how you are doing. In the first 6 months of starting out, it’s especially important to review, especially since you are just starting out and there are many things subjected to change.

I have a weekly review with myself every Saturday morning, where I review my progress in my goals the week before. This helps me know if I’m on track in meeting my targets or off track. If I meet my targets, it’s a sign that I’m doing the right things . If I don’t meet my targets, I’ll understand what went wrong and what I could do better next time. Then from there, I plan out my action plan for the next week to achieve next week’s goals. These weekly goals ladder up to the monthly goals at the end of the month, where I do a monthly review.

Further reading:

• Building the Weekly Review Habit
• Review Your Goals Weekly
• 12 Ways to Upgrade Your Weekly Review
• The 6 Stages Of A Failure
• 27 Ways You Can Develop Bounce Back Muscles In Difficult Times

14. Believe In Yourself

Last but not least, believe in yourself. Believe in your dreams, your passion, your goals, your abilities. Believe that if anyone is able to bring these to life, it’s you and no one else. If you don’t have the power to bring them to life, you wouldn’t be able to given the ability to conceive them in your mind. As Napoleon Hill puts it: ìWhat the mind can conceive, it can achieveî. In my journey, I have never once doubted that my dreams would come true. I knew that as long as I put in all my heart and soul into it, it’s a matter of time before things come to fruition.

So move forward with great vigor and belief. As long as you keep at it, you will bring your dreams to life.

Further reading:

• How To Be The Most Confident Person In The World

Celes writes Personal Excellence Blog, where she gives her best advice on achieving personal excellence. If you like this article, you might enjoy her reader favorites like 101 Things To Do Before You Die and Are You Sleepwalking Your Life Away?. Get her RSS feed directly here and add her on Twitter @celestinechua.

How to Deal With Rejection: 5 Fresh Ways to Look at Getting Rejected

This is a guest post from my friend Henri Junttila, @henrijunttila.

Learning how to deal with rejection is tough. Depending on how you get rejected and what for, it may hurt a lot or it may hurt a little. I’m a big believer in the fact that we create our own reality. Why do you react to some things, while I do not? It’s because of our personal experiences and our beliefs. Most of these beliefs can be changed if we want to, so you can remove the fear you have for getting rejected. You can increase your courage and you can remove the label of “not being good enough”, just to name a few examples.

Here are 5 fresh tips on how to deal with rejection:

1. Release Perfectionism

Why are we afraid of getting rejected? Is it because we have to seem like we’re perfect? Have we been taught to keep up a charade and not others see our weaknesses? For a long time, I battled with perfectionism and it led me to reject rejection. I was in my own imaginary world and refused to face reality. It wasn’t until I started letting go of being perfect that I started making fast progress. It’s okay to show people that you aren’t Zeus the Greek God. We all have vulnerabilities and we all make mistakes. If you show some of them to your audience or the people you hang out with, they will just be able to relate to you more.

2. It’s a Learning Opportunity

Getting rejected is one of the best learning opportunities, that is, if you pay attention and learn from the experience. If you get rejected and blame someone else, you’re probably not going to get much out of the interaction. If, however, you start thinking about what you could’ve done better, you’re on to something. If you can’t figure it out, ask the person or company that rejected you. If you sent in a guest post to a blogger, ask why it got rejected. Sometimes it’s just your writing that doesn’t fit, but sometimes it’s because your writing has flaws in it. Figuring out these flaws will only make you better. If the response is that your grammar sucks, at least you’ll know what to work on.

3. Be Aware of Your Programming

We’ve all been rejected when we grew up, so we’ve learned to think of rejection as something bad. If we walk up to a pretty girl (or man, if you’re a girl), we get scared because we might get rejected. But what if that girl wasn’t a good fit for you in the first place? What if she hadn’t rejected you and you would’ve gotten married, and lived a horrible life with lots of fighting. Look at the rejection as a blessing in disguise. Now you can go forth and find a girl that actually is a good fit for you. The point I am trying to make is this: you cannot know what the rejection means. In the short-term it might feel bad, but you have no idea what it teaches you or what it might lead to. You cannot judge the rejection as something good or bad in most cases. Constantly looking at the negative, even when it isn’t necessary, isn’t productive. Believe me, I’ve been there and done that.

4. No Rejection, No Growth

What would happen if you were never rejected? Would you grow as a human being? Would you need to grow? If everyone says yes to you, you wouldn’t need to change anything and you wouldn’t need to learn anything. That would be a pretty boring life, wouldn’t it? I personally have come to enjoy getting rejected (in most cases) and getting criticized, because I know it’s an opportunity for me to grow. I’ve learned that resisting or hiding from rejection is useless. My ultimate goal is to grow, evolve and become brilliantly better. If I am avoiding rejection then I am in conflict with my goal. It helps to step back and ask yourself what your goal is and if you’re moving away from it with the actions you take every day.

5. Rejection is Essential to Success

If rejection is necessary for growth then we can probably assume that rejection is essential to success. There are many different ways you can look at this. If you run a small company, lose a contract and go bankrupt, is that success? Again, you cannot really know what this will lead to. In that instance, it wasn’t success if you look at it from the viewpoint of making money, but I’m sure you can learn something from the experience of going bankrupt that you can apply to your next endeavor. It all comes back to your own perception of reality. You can use an effective map or a broken map. It is completely up to you. But I’ve found that the more I align myself with reality, the faster I am able to make progress and grow, in both business and life. Sometimes things hurt, but that’s just how life is. It isn’t all a walk in the park, although it surely can be. By becoming aware of your own programming, you can start to remove the bad and replace it with the good.

Author Bio: Henri Junttila is a lifestyle superhero, who writes about self-improvement for conscious people at his blog, the Wake Up Cloud. Make sure you check out his free Discover Your Passion in 5 Days e-course if you’re serious about living a passionate life.

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.

The 7 Traits Of Highly Successful Bloggers

What makes a blogger successful? What are the common traits of highly effective bloggers? If you’ve even remotely tried to launch your own blog, that question surely popped into your head at some point. And I bet it was rather sooner than later.

I have more than a year of blogging as a pro. And before starting to blog for a living I was an avid consumer of other blogs. I think I have in my RSS reader feeds I read for more than 5 years now. Gradually, I developed my own set of blog appreciation rules. And of course, if you’ve carefully read the title of this post, those rules are no more than 7. In today’s article I’ll write about what I think is the recipe for being a successful blogger.

1. Authority

This is what makes a blogger believable.

Authority creates trust. And trust makes you spend your precious time on that specific blog instead of doing something else. Because you know it’s worth doing it. You know you’re in for something. You’ve been there before and you weren’t disappointed. Your expectations were met again and again.

Have you ever wondered what makes you click the links of a popular blog? What makes you follow that advice or buy that product? What makes a blogger believable?  It’s not his identity, nor his persistence, although both are part of the success mix, but his authority. You believe a blogger because you trust him.

Without authority a blog will be floating. It may jump every now and then if it touches some hot topics but if it doesn’t build a significant level of authority, it will drift away, at the mercy of fashion.

I think one of the most respected blogs in the marketing niche, for instance, is Seth Godin’s blog. Seth’s authority was previously built by his books but it somehow spread over his blog. The person vouches for the blog in this case.

2. Authenticity

This is what makes a blogger accepted.

Being honest. Being human. Being able to make mistakes and accept them publicly. Blogging is such a fantastic media revolution not because it created a super hero, like cinema, but because it made the normal, average, human guy able to openly express his intentions, dreams, challenges. And made those opinions instantly available.

Authority without authenticity won’t build a successful blog. It may create a solid corporation, but not a sustainable blog. With any interaction, people are unconsciously trying to find themselves in the other guy. It’s a human need, called validation, we all need that. If, as a blogger, you don’t reach out openly, without being afraid, you’re in the wrong business.

One of the most famous examples of  authenticity is, at least for me, Steve Pavlina’s blog. If you read it just for a few minutes you couldn’t but notice that vibe of authenticity which makes Steve so popular even when he’s allegedly “deluding” in some of the not-so-mainstream explorations like polyamory or, recently, BDSM or alike.

3. Accessibility

This is what makes a blogger palatable.

Accessibility makes a blog available, ready to be consumed. It’s the way you write, the way you wrap up your message, the package by which you deliver your goods. If you want to be popular as a blogger, keep in mind that your audience is extremely diverse. It takes much more work than you think to write in an accessible way.

This quality is often overlooked in almost all bloggers rankings I saw. Usually, authority and authenticity are the main criteria, but there’s no point in being an authority if you can’t deliver a readable, straightforward message to your readers. Regardless of your expertise, a clear, accessible blog will always increase your chances to a broader audience.

The most brilliant example of an accessible blog is Brian Clark’s Copyblogger.com. It amazes me how Brian writes in such an easy to understand way about really complicated topics, like the art of persuasion. Copyblogger.com is popular because it provides easy to understand access to incredibly complicated issues, not the other way around.

4. Persistence

This is what makes a blogger wanted.

Persistence creates demand. Showing up constantly and doing what you have to do will build a sense of expectation among your readers. They will know you’re there for them. They will wait for you, call for you or ask things from you. Constantly broadcasting your message will create a certain frequency in your readers minds. They will just tune in.

Now, try to imagine a blog with only one article per month. How would this feel to you? Like a joke, I know. Or imagine a series of 5-6 fantastic articles in a week and then several months of silence. No way. Being there is fundamental, can’t be avoided or faked. They say showing up is 80% of success. I doubt it will be exactly 80% but it’s without a doubt compulsory to show up persistently in order to build a successful blog.

Few people know that several years ago, when he started Problogger.net, one of the most visited blogs on the planet, Darren Rowse only wanted an increase of 10% in traffic from month to month. That tells a lot about how far he was ready to go with it. Problogger.net may not be the most spectacular blog on this planet, but it surely is one of the most constant, reliable and respected. And the persistence of the author plays a big role in that.

5. Connectivity

This is what makes a blogger available.

Connectivity creates links. All kind of links, from plain HTML, PR-juice enabled links, up to human contacts. One of the fundamental characteristics of a successful blogger is his ability to be broadcast as far as possible. And here’s where connectivity plays a fundamental part. All A-listers are virals, without exception.

Have you ever wondered how many interactions a successful bloggers has in a normal day? My wild guess is that this number is at least 10 times higher than the average. Just imagine reading dozens of comments (and perhaps responding each of them), interacting on Twitter, or Facebook or Digg. You can’t really do that if you’re socially impaired.

One of the bloggers who could always be studied in schools for that is, in my opinion, Chris Brogan. I’ve been following closely his work in the last few years and his growth was literally explosive. I think he directly interacts with more than 500 persons each day. Guess what? Those persons are also the broadcasters for his message. How many persons are broadcasters for your message?

6. Creativity

This is what makes a blogger valuable.

Creativity triggers admiration. We admire a blogger not because of his authority or authenticity, but because of what he brings new and beautiful in this world. For his capacity to innovate, to re-create his environment, to embellish and refine. Many successful bloggers actually created their niche from the scratch, they built something out of nothing.

This ability to re-organize the Universe in a new form, to create value and to touch others is by far my favorite trait from all 7. Without this ability a blogger would offer no more than a Wikipedia entry, valuable advice but flat, with no human touch, no improvement, no spark.

My favorite creative blogger right now is Gary Vaynerchuk. For a guy who makes a living by drinking wine (joking, of course) he’s unbelievably creative: he re-invented  video blogging and he wrote a book not about Chardonnay, but about how to follow your passion! That’s creativity, that’s building something where there was nothing before.

7. Identity

This is what makes a blogger recognizable.

I chose the word identity because “personal branding” would have been a little bit too precious. But personal branding is what I meant by it. Identity is what makes you unique. It’s that centimeter you own in your readers’ cortex, the same way you could own some real estate. It’s the exact connection they make between a certain niche and your name as a blogger.

Did you observed how many times we actually use the name of a successful blogger to identify a niche? In blogging, the capacity to build a unique, easily recognizable identity (or brand, for what matters) is the difference between two identical copies of a newspaper. You may talk about the same things, have the same level of authority and the same creativity as other bloggers, but what makes you different is your brand. Your personal brand.

For instance, Leo Babauta identity would be tied up in my brain with the following concept: “minimalist productivity”. Whenever this concept pops out in a conversation, the first person I think about is Leo Babauta, creator of ZenHabits.net. That’s his identity. His brand. I’m sure there are a lot of other bloggers writing about minimalism, but their identity may not be as strongest as his.

***

Of course, all the aforementioned bloggers are sharing all the 7 traits, I just had to chose which one was the most representative for each.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any examples of successful bloggers where you can identify one, two or all of these traits? Do you, as a blogger, have all of them? Would love to hear your comments.

Solving The Wrong Problem

One of my oldest memories as a child is cleaning the house. I remember clearly how I started to use a broom – which seemed like a giant toy – and how I slowly gathered together piles of dust from all areas of our small apartment. It was something new and exciting. Although I was a kid (not older than 3, I guess), I know I wasn’t playing, because I had the task to take out all the dirt from the floor. I used the broom as a tool to get out all the dirt and did it consciously. At some moment, all the piles I gathered with my broom were loaded into a trash bin. I clearly remember how good I felt after the whole action. I eliminated the dirt. Did something by myself.

Fast forward 35 years: I’m writing a blog entry about one of the most subtle, yet incredibly important setbacks in our lives: inverse evaluation. The name sounds strange, but behind this name lies one of the most popular approaches in our world. It can be found at any age, in any culture, at any education level. It makes more bad than smoking and it’s more popular than drinking. Many people still consider it like something normal, although is one of the worst thing you can do to yourself. It’s the evaluation of things by the opposite of what you want to happen. Or, to be shorter: inverse evaluation.

It’s The Other Way Around

The best way to explain it is to analyze my first memory described above. As a kid, I felt this huge satisfaction when I took out the dirt from the floor. I finished a task and the result was great. I felt so good, that I was eager to repeat it instantly. Only there wasn’t anymore dirt in the house. I had to wait for a while until I was able to do the trick again. But when I did it, I had the same satisfaction. To be honest, the satisfaction was even bigger.

Now, suppose you’re trying to lose weight. You have something like 10 kilos over your normal weight. You start to exercise, control your eating habits, get slow on your sugar, and so on. In 3 months, you’re out of 10 kilos. Wow! What an accomplishment! You lost 10 kilos!

You run your own business. At some point, you want to cut some costs in order to streamline a little your cashflow. With a little bit of attention, you’re able to cut 5000$ from your expenses. Wow! Can you imagine that? I just cut 5000$ in expenses from my own business! Am I good or what?

Started to understand where I’m heading? Not yet? Then read on.

You don’t want a bigger pile of dirt, you just want your house to be clean.
You don’t want to lose 15 kilos next time, you just want to keep your weight at a normal level.
You don’t want to cut 7000$ nest time from your business expenses, you just want to naturally grow and maintain your business.

That’s inverse evaluation. You measure things by their opposite.

The real goal is to have a clean house, not to produce (and happily eliminate) more and more dirt. The real goal is to be healthy all the time, not to lose more kilos every few months (after you worked hard to put them on you, of course). The real goal is to provide value through your business, not to measure your success by your economies.

It’s the other way around. And still, we don’t get it.

Shift Your Course

Measuring things by their opposite is very dangerous. It’s tricky because is closer to us than the real stuff. This inverse evaluation is easier to understand because it’s measurable. It’s easy to understand that single atomic action of getting out the dirt from your house every two weeks. It’s so convenient. Every two weeks you get your dose of self-respect and satisfaction. Clean your life. Lost extra weight. You see?

Seeing things as they are is difficult because you’re inclined to get satisfaction from atomic actions. You trained yourself to react to small doses of actions instead of being part of a continuous flow. Keeping a clean house – as opposed to get the dirt out every two weeks – means making small adjustments all the time. You’re doing a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow. You don’t let the dirt to accumulate. In fact, you lose completely the notion of dirt, and you’re only working with the notion of clean. You don’t do single atomic actions. You’re in a continuum of cleanliness.

It’s the same in all other areas: be healthy (instead of focusing on weight), be successful (instead of focusing on money). And it can go all the way up, to the top of your life.

Let’s start another example here: suppose you have a lot of enemies and you decide it’s time to convert them to friends. In abstracto, this is a very healthy choice. It will be really good for your soul and it will win some karma points on the side. So, you start to practice compassion, you start to learn how to apologize and in a very short time you convert several enemies into friends. It feels so good, that you want to do it again. But, surprise: you’re out of enemies! You converted them all! Now what? You start making some new enemies, of course.

The real stuff means not having enemies at all, eliminating the very concept of enemy. Being friendly is the thing, not converting enemies to friends.

Indulging versus Being

Some of you may think already at concepts like polarization or attachment, in its buddhist acceptance. If you do that, good, it means you know where I’m heading. But knowing the concepts is a thing, applying them is another one. For me, one of the easiest way to alleviate my inverse evaluation episodes is to assess if I’m indulging or being.

Ok, let me explain. Indulging means you’re doing something to balance a situation: you come from work, you’re tired, you need some relaxation. Forget about the outside world, have a drink, a chat with your spouse, maybe some sex. Or a dinner out. Or a quick gym session for some endorphins. In a few hours your energies are back to normal. That’s indulging.

Being is different. You’re ok as you are. If you’re tired, that’s ok, you don’t need any reward, nor a miracle medicine for that. Just let the body recover in its own terms. If you’re stressed, let the stress dissolve by itself, don’t apply an antidote. If you’re happy, don’t think at something sad, to “balance” it. Just be happy. Don’t try to balance your current situation for the sake of equilibrium. There is no such thing as equilibrium, you’re moving all the time. If you really want to go to the gym, just go to the gym and feel good about it.

Don’t go because of something, go for something.

Indulging will always call for more and more imbalance in your life. Just being will take your life as it is.

Indulging will always create inverse evaluation: you’ll need more dirt to make your house even cleaner, more fat just to feel better about losing it, more enemies just to have more and more epiphanies of converting them into friends.

Where are you right now? Are you indulging yourself? Or are you just being, with all the good and bad of your life?

“I Can” versus “I Do”

“I can” is empowering, while “I do” is life changing. There is a subtle yet powerful difference between those verbs.

“I can” will change your internal reality, will make you believe you are truly able to do it. But it won’t do it for you. It will always remain at the internal level, it won’t reach out.

On the other side, “I do” will modify your surroundings and make things happening. “I do” is the reality itself, not just an internal representation of it.

This is one of the most important, yet widely ignored confusions in the personal development field.

“I Can” traps

I can lose weight.
I can be a millionaire.
I can have a fulfilling relationship.
I can create a fantastic career.
I can change the world.

All those sentences are empowering, but they are not modifying anything. They are just a potential. In fact, they are even less than a potential, they are a trap. The trap of “it’s ok just to say it”. The trap of “ok, I said it, now can somebody please stand up and do it?”. The trap of “I had a revelation and that’s enough”.

Having powerful thoughts and using powerful verbs – and “I do” is a powerful verb – is certainly important, but it’s not enough. It can give you a kickstart, it can motivate you, but it won’t do it. It won’t make it happen, unless you switch to the “I do” level.

“I Do” thrills

I am losing weight.
I’m becoming a millionaire.
I’m creating a fulfilling relationship.
I’m building a fantastic career.
I am changing the world, starting with myself.

Notice the difference? It’s not about the fact that you can do all those things, but about actually doing them. Notice the change in your emotions while reading this? The “I can” sentences are giving you self-confidence, clarity and perhaps some motivation boost. But the “I do” sentences are giving you the thrills.

And this is where all the fun is, at the thrill level. All the connection and joy of life is taking place at the “I do” level. All the rest – including the “I can” preparation – is just a scaffold to reach this thrill level. Once you got there, is not important anymore.

From “I Can” to “I Do”

How many times you’ve been stuck at the “I can” level? How many times you wrote powerful and motivating sentences but never actually did something? How many times you visualized your goals, set up milestones, allocated resources only to see the dust covering everything because you didn’t do anything to move things forward?

Switching from “I can” to “I do” is difficult. Here’s why:

“I Can” is comfortable, “I Do” is riskier

I can keeps you in the comfort zone, it won’t move you in any direction. I can in itself, without a follow up in the real world, will bury you.

I do gets you out of the comfort zone. It pushes you to break the limits and actually do. There is always a risk of failing if you do something. But if you don’t, you won’t change anything either.

“I Can” is nice, “I Do” is grumpy

At the “I can” level things are pinky and perfect. You see your goals, you imagine a self without extra fat, a perfect career, a nurturing relationship. Everything is nice.

At the “I do” level things are sometimes ugly. You have to fight, to resist, to pull, to strive. Getting there means almost every time beating some obstacles. Which is not always nice.

“I Can” makes no promises, “I Do” respects all the promises

At the “I can” level you don’t make promises, you’re just telling “ok, I’m able to do it”. You won’t commit to anything. You’re just acknowledging some facts.

At the “I do” level you have to respect your commitments. Doing things means keeping your promises. Make things happening. Stand up for your words.

“I Can” is easy, “I Do” is hard

Because you make no real commitments, “I can” gives you room to dream big. I can be whatever I want. It’s spectacular and easy. You’re just saying it.

Once you start keeping your promises, the big dreams must become reality. And that’s hard. It’s not always spectacular and it requires constant, difficult work.

“I Can” is a thought, “I Do” is an action

Think for a moment at this situation: you met the love of your life, you fell in love and now you want to move forward. “I Can” marry you is a thought, while “I Do” marry you is an action. You can replace your example with whatever situations you feel attracted to: “I can” have money versus “I do” have money, “I can” be happy versus “I am” happy.

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Now, how can you really move from “I can” to “I do”? If you read the differences above carefully, I think you already know. And, surprisingly enough, it’s not complicated. You knew it all the time.

If you really, really want to switch from “I can” to “I do” you have to get out of the comfort zone. You have to be prepared to fail. You have to make and keep promises. You have to work it out. Thinking that you can do stuff is important, but making it happen is a completely different process. And in my opinion, this is where all the fun is, at making things happening. Thinking big is good, doing big is even better.

And, yes, the most important step to actually do something is to move away from the computer right now and start making things happen. Reading blogs, including this one, won’t help for long. It might help in the beginning, it will give you some directions, but it won’t make things happening in your place. The real master of your life is you, not a blog.

Step out, take risks and do something with your life.

Of course you can. Now do it!

ADD stages – Do

ADD comes from “Assess, Decide, Do” and it’s a life management framework, initially described in this introductory post. As opposed to the regular productivity approaches, a life management framework focuses on a higher level integration and rejects the task checking approach as the only metric for measuring productivity performance.

In ADD, each individual can have only 3 main stages or can act in 3 main realms: the Assess realm, the Decide realm and the Do realm. Those stages are cumulative, in the sense that an imbalance in an early stage, like the Assess stage, can create negative consequences in the following stages. A balanced, constant flow between those 3 stages is the main metric of a fulfilling life management.

If you came here directly you may want to check out first the Assess realm and Decide realm posts.

Today will talk about the Do realm.

Closing The Circle

The Do realm is where you are closing the circle you started to draw by assessing and then deciding something. It’s the final stage and the most physical one. Usually, what you’re doing is something touchable, real, as opposed to the Assess or Decide stages, which are mainly mental activities. The Do realm is like the visible part of an iceberg. You know an iceberg can show only a small part on the surface, and this is the Do realm, but the core of it is under the water, in the initial Assess and Decide stages.

The Do realm is also one of the most refined and talked about by productivity experts. Much of the writing and methodologies created in the productivity area is focusing only on the Do realm, including GTD. Productivity and effectiveness are mistakenly defined as a consequence of the Do realm, when in fact they are a consequence of an entire Assess – Decide – Do cycle.

If you did your job in the Assess and Decide stages, you’re not actually doing much in the Do realm. The only three activities are scheduling, prioritizing and finishing.

Scheduling

You have to create an understandable and manageable time frame for your activities and this is done by scheduling. You’re allocating energy and space. You’re putting some order around you. We all live in time and making the most of our time is one of the best thing we can do.

Scheduling means in fact to acknowledge that you will be available for that specific task at a specific time. If you’re not scheduling your activities, you’ll actually reject them from your timeline. You’ll send a message of non-availability. But if you’re scheduling, you’re sending to yourself a message of availability.

As any other activity, scheduling can be improved, refined and automated. There are tons of books on how to use your time, and the intent of this post is not to offer a scheduling tutorial. All I want to stress is that one fundamental activity in the Do realm is scheduling, or sending messages of availability.

Prioritizing

Reality is changing. Your universe is changing. What was important yesterday may not be so important today, or tomorrow. Prioritizing your doing means give room to what’s important now as opposed to what you thought it was important yesterday. Prioritizing comes after scheduling and it’s an important, often ignored part of the productivity process.

Prioritizing will conflict with scheduling and that’s something normal. Prioritizing means giving space and energy to what’s important now and reschedule what was left out. Many people get confused when they have to make changes based on the priority of the tasks but that’s an important part of the Do realm.

How do you know what’s important and what’s not? Well, that is something you will have to micro Assess-Decide-Do every time. As I already mentioned, ADD is an abstract framework and supports any implementation you want. For instance, there will be a different prioritizing strategy in an ADD implementation for programming, than to an ADD implementations for relationships.

Finishing

If you start doing something, finish it. Or cut it out, if you can’t do it anymore. As simple and dumb as it sounds, finishing is a very important part of the doing process. So important, that I felt the need to make it a separate process.

One of the most subtle yet powerful ways to procrastinate (like really procrastinate, loosing your time) is to remain stuck in a project or task for ever. There is this pressure not to finish the task, because… well, because you’ll have to do something else. And you don’t want. Or you are scared. Or bored. Or whatever.

I’ve been there so many times that I had to come up with a finishing strategy. I’ve been caught in so many situations where finishing seemed strange or inconvenient or not appropriate that I really had to reconsider all my attitude towards finishing. I’m sure you’ve been there: caught in a sticky relationship, in a never-ending project, in a just-above-the-fold job, and so on.

Finishing is the most important part of doing something. It frees your resources, it makes room for something new and it feeds the next Assess session. If you’re not finishing what you’re doing, you’ll never be able to assess what you’ve done so far. Your ADD cycle will be stuck.

Creating Miracles

Doing is where the miracle takes place. By doing what you assessed and decided, you’re changing your reality the way you want. Assessing is just a perspective and the decision is just an intention. If those are not backed up with constant activity and with real life actions, your Assess-Decide-Do cycle will be broken.

But if you’re staying enough time in this cycle, if you succeed in Assessing, Deciding and Doing on a regular basis, if you engage totally in each part and let yourself flow freely through those stages, if you really become aware of the whole process, as simple and yet as powerful as it is, you’re going to create miracles.

Starting with yourself.