Archives February 2021

So you watched grey’s anatomy. And maybe how I met your mother. Let’s not even talk about game of thrones.

If you are the average person, you’ve spent between 5 to 6 hours a day watching video content, mostly series and other kinds of entertainment.

And you complain about lack of opportunities. I mean, come on.

How about you skip the next season of your top 3 shows and start building a new skill? Sounds too much? Too hard?

You don’t need those 10,000 hours they talk about. You only need to stop wasting time.

Talking about all those hours binge watching shows, here’s a spoiler: sooner or later you’ll regret all those wasted hours-turned-into-years.

It is 1:37 a.m. That awful insomnia has hit again and you are part sleep and part awake.

You’ve been browsing your Instagram for a couple of hours, clicked in a promoted post, landed in Amazon and got caught there.

It’s been more than half an hour now that you’ve spent just browsing through hundreds of garments of the fall collection.

You are tired and angry. You need that shot of dopamine that comes with the purchase, and you know it.

You have been struggling with yourself enough, the last thing you need is to turn on the lights, wake up your spouse, have an argument on what are you doing, get your credit card, fill the information, confirm…

Then you find “One click shopping”. You smile, click on the goddamn button, and finally you can go to sleep. You have been programmed to expect friction less customer experiences.

It is a simple concept. It seems so obvious and it is so easy to overlook.

For silicon valley fellas, it is now ingrained in their DNA: remove friction as much as possible. But for the rest of us mortals, oftentimes it is hard to focus our businesses with that goal in mind. And our businesses suffer.

Every client is expecting you to make things easy for them. It is not a wish to have now. It is a must have feature.

Measure your levels of tiredness and excitement.

You ought to feel both tired and excited.

If you are not tired, it means you could have given more.

If you are not excited, it means you are not aiming high enough or that your work is meaningless.

And if your both not tired and not excited, well, changes must be done. Stop wasting your life.

It is so much harder to risk anything and everything when you must succeed in your effort.

Whether may be your boss, your family or yourself, of you can’t fail then you will never be able to make quantum leaps in performance.

First you must get rid of those shackles.

Once you see failure as an option, then you can aim for moonshots.

How effective could that be? First, let’s understand what are emotions and how they emerge?

They are are biological states associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure.

And they exist and emerge, originally, to motivate adaptive behaviors that in the past would have contributed to the passing on of genes through survival, reproduction, and kin selection.

That is, they are responses to external and internal events.

That all sounds perfect, since they constitute a feedback system that help us navigate our daily lives in order to fulfill those 3 objectives life and nature try to achieve.

The problem arises when we start thinking on how different es our life now than it was a few thousand years ago: survival is not dependent on avoiding predators anymore and reproduction is not based on physical traits.

They are magnifiers of the negative. In the past, being over reactive of negative input was rewarded with survival.

They are oftentimes wrong, since a huge percentage of people don’t understand deeply what kind of feeling they are feeling. It is very rare to see in a pure form, they come in a combination of several basic emotions.

Sometimes they will keep hidden. We may culture certain emotions without us even being aware of them. We may be angry to our boss for years, hiding our true feelings, deluding ourselves into saying everything is fine.

So it takes a second order effort to turn emotions into usable information.

One have to be aware of the arising emotions, so a mindfulness practice is required.

Then, we must restrain ourselves of reacting, so self discipline and control must be developed.

After, we must analyze them objectively, without judgment, and then we may decide if they are useful or not.

It takes a lot of effort to integrate this practices into our everyday life, but the alternative, being driven by emotions, is ineffective, high in cost for trying to mend mistakes, and usually will deviate us from our goals.

A startup with funding is a rocket. 3 out 10 will survive and even then, It could blow up.

On the other hand, if you get your own customer base, at your own pace, you might be riding a bike.

And it can go fast yeah, but never go out of orbit fast. The advantage here is that you won’t blow up.

So what vehicle are you building?

More important: are you fit to drive a rocket? Or a bike?

What a time to be alive!

A few years ago, you could only dream to spend time with that inspiring person. The person that you wanted to learn everything from.

Now you can take a deep peak into any of your hero’s minds and hearts.

For me, it’s to hear a conversation between Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jaime Wheal. Not an interview, but a conversation. As if you were in a casual gathering in their home.

And in that conversation they can delve deep into what they think, want and love. You can see their way of de-structuring a problem and how they would and will solve it.

Podcasts, clubhouse, channels. They all give deep teachings and you can actually get to know intimately some people that otherwise would be completely out of your reach.

Choose your mentor. Learn from them. Grow to their level and then thank them in person.

Can be yourself.

Taken from a clubhouse featuring Naval Ravikant. Paraphrasing, this is his exercise:

Imagine yourself from 5 years ago.

Go into detail on how you, felt, what you did, who you were with, your emotional state, your goals, your dreams, your friendships, your partner, etc…

Then try to give (in writing), the best advise to that past self.

Repeat the exercise to the 10 years ago yourself, and then 15 and 20. Go as far back as it makes sense to you.

Analyze the different sets of advise and find patterns, differences and similarities.

Try to apply that set of advise to yourself, today.

Execute.

It is boring.

And for your own personal reality it is useless.

Someone has decoded human life and decanted it in 7 steps, or 10 rules and then tell you to follow them. I mean, come on, it is naive.

We all have to take the long road: learn the dynamics of the problem and the system framing it, and then study your particular case in order to identify how the dynamic is being manifested in that particular case.

Once you have clarity on how things actually work, decide upon the force needed to modify it.

Shortcuts lead nowhere. And even if it looks like you can save a lot of resources following them we should never follow them blindly.

Recipes for life are never useful to follow them by the book.

I am sure you are familiar with a research performed on a group of hotel workers. The researchers told them that the physical work (cleaning the rooms, doing the beds, etc.) performed great as a physical workout. And proceeded to tell them all the benefits of working out.

You can check it here.

The results: They loss weight, and improved in several other physiological metrics. They transformed their reality. The change in narrative did it. At least in this particular subject.

So that’s it? Do we come to someone, tell them something, that might or not be true, and they will change their reality and themselves? Have you seen it happen?

How about all those media outlets, social networks, magazines, etc.? How do they shape people’s reality to a extent that behaviors arise from it?

There is huge potential in using this kind of mindset shaping effect.

The magic wand could be here for us to use on ourselves.