Do you tell yourself that someday this part of your life will move to the front burner and become a priority? How will that actually happen?

Back burner items tend to remain on the back burner indefinitely. They rarely make it to the front burner on their own. The reason they’re on the back burner is because you put them there, probably because you deemed something else more important.

At one point you may have put your career first. Or your health. Or a particular relationship. But are those priorities still right for you today? Are your current priorities still correct?

If you ask this question in a cursory way, you’ll almost always answer yes. If you told yourself a year ago that your finances must be your #1 priority, they’ll have a tendency to stay there. Whether you’ve made measurable progress or not, you’ll have a tendency to stick to essentially the same priorities year after year.

A True Priority or a Distraction

If your current prioritization tends to be self-perpetuating, how do you know when it’s time for an adjustment? You probably won’t figure it out just by asking if anything needs to be adjusted.

Generally the way you’ll notice that an adjustment is needed is that you’ll notice a nagging feeling that something isn’t right with the way you’re currently living.

Another clue is that you won’t seem to be making much progress in your top priorities. If you look at your actual results in those areas, you’ll see evidence that you’re drifting or even declining.

Often this happens because we like to assume that we can improve some area of life by making it the #1 priority. For instance, if you feel that your finances are weak, you may decide to focus on making more money for a while. But then a few years pass, and your finances don’t seem to be that much better. Overall you feel more stressed too. The main reason you failed here is that making money wasn’t a true priority. It was actually a distraction from a deeper, more important part of your life.

Blocking

When false priorities are mistaken for true priorities, some blocking is bound to occur. You’ll feel resistance when you try to move forward on priorities that seem to make logical sense but which don’t connect with your true desires. No matter how hard you push against that resistance or what techniques you try to use to get past it, it will still be present. That’s because your mistake was further upstream. Your priorities weren’t aligned with your true desires.

When you realize you’re in a blocking situation, give yourself some time to pause and reflect. Even if you didn’t explicitly write down your priorities, what do your thoughts tell you about what’s most important to you?

If it’s convenient for you, jot down a quick list of your top mental priorities. Maybe you’ll come up with something like this:

1. Making more money
2. Improving my overall health and fitness
3. Spending time with my significant other
4. Being more focused and productive at work
5. Learning new skills

But if you were to actually look at your actions as an objective observer might do, you may see that you’ve been prioritizing your day very differently in practice:

1. Communication (email, texting, phone calls)
2. Social networking
3. Consuming information (blogs, news, videos, etc)
4. Doing urgent work
5. Being entertained

These aren’t complete lists, but I think you get the idea — your mental prioritization and your real world actions are not in sync.

If you discover something like this, don’t panic. It’s quite common for people to have two lists that are clearly not aligned. Fortunately this is a fixable problem.

The False Belief You Must Release

The reason for this dichotomy is a common false belief. It’s the belief that prioritizing is a logical affair, that it’s something you can achieve with your logical mind.

In fact, an equally mistaken approach is the belief that this is something you can discern intuitively. That approach will also fail.

Your logical mind is the part that comes up with solutions like: If my finances are the weakest part of my life, then I should make that my top priority for a while. Giving my finances more attention will surely improve them, and then when things are going really well in that area, I can make something else a priority.

This sounds very believable. So it comes as a real blow to the logical mind when this seemingly sensible solution doesn’t actually work. This throws the logical mind for a loop because after all, it should work, right?

Actually it shouldn’t work. There’s an error in the logic here. The assumption that turning a lagging area of your life into your top conscious priority will cause that area to improve is a false assumption. Much of the time, it turns out not to be true.

Many times when you take a lagging area of your life and make it your top priority, that area will continue to stagnate. Sometimes it will even get worse.

And sometimes you can ignore an area of your life, and it will improve all by itself.

We could go really deep into this, but for now I just want to plant the seed in your mind that turning a lagging area of your life into your top priority may in fact be a mistake. Sometimes it’s the worst thing you can do. You’ll see why this happens a little later in this article.

Why the Logical Mind Cannot Prioritize

If you try to set priorities in a logical manner, failure is guaranteed. This is because logic cannot provide a context for prioritizing.

There’s a special class of brain injuries whereby people cannot feel any emotions, or they’re unaware of their emotional states. Interestingly, these people cannot function well at all. They might spend a whole day deciding where to go for lunch, evaluating all sorts of irrelevant details such as the lighting conditions in each restaurant or which table they might get. Such people may brush their teeth 20 times a day, thinking it was a reasonable thing to do. They don’t have a context for separating the relevant from the irrelevant.

Some companies claim to make data-driven decisions, but that’s a misnomer since there must always be an emotional context behind the usage of data. There’s no logical reason for why a company must grow or why it must sell more products or have more impact. It could just as easily shut down, and the people could go do something else instead. Even the choice to make data-driven decisions is an emotional one. The emotional brain provides the context for feeling that it’s good to grow a company; then the data can be logically analyzed to determine what avenues may support that growth better than others. But ultimately the whole decision chain begins with an emotional context, and even data-driven decisions are normally littered with emotional checkpoints.

If you were to try to prioritize your life on a purely mental/logical level, you’d find the task impossible. You cannot logically evaluate and sort the infinite possibilities available to you. In fact, if you try to go that route, you’ll surely experience bouts of analysis paralysis, where you get so caught up in analysis that you hardly get anything done.

Let the Heart Lead

The solution to this trap is simple: Let the heart lead. Use your emotions to prioritize.

This may sound like a cop-out, but there’s a more empowering way to look at it.

First, you’re going to do this anyway. If you try to use the logical prioritization approach, some part of you won’t cooperate. Your mental priorities may look great on paper, but you won’t actually follow them. When have you ever prioritized your life logically and even come close to sticking to your priorities?

The closest you’ll get will be to use drugs like coffee to try to throw your hormones out of balance and overstimulate the logical mind, but your emotions will still reassert themselves from time to time, and the signals will only be more scrambled. In the end your emotions will make you feel worse when you try to graft a logical prioritization onto your life by force. This approach will take you further away from genuine happiness, and it’s ultimately counter-productive.

Maybe someday there will be a better substitute for your emotional brain, but for now you’re stuck with it. Fortunately that isn’t such a bad thing. Your emotional brain is much older than your logical mind, being subjected to many more cycles of evolutions. Your emotional subsystem is a finely honed instrument, far beyond the capabilities of even our most advanced supercomputers.

The logical mind is good at certain things, but prioritizing the big picture isn’t one of its strengths. This is, however, a major strength of the emotional mind. These two aspects of mind complement each other beautifully, but in the Western world we often have the relationship backwards. We need to learn to prioritize with the heart and the emotions, not with the logical mind.

Physically speaking, your emotional brain is mostly in your head, but it’s also partly in your chest. Your heart actually has its own tiny brain consisting of about 40,000 neurites. It’s primitive compared to the brain in your head, but it’s also loud. The communication channel that sends signals from heart to brain is like a firehose, whereas the channel going from brain to heart carries much less bandwidth — more like a thin straw. Essentially the heart functions as a state controller for the brain. The heart can easily tune out the brain, but the brain cannot easily tune out the heart. When you feel strong emotions, those emotions will take over your thinking, determine the types of thoughts you can or can’t have in those moments. But you may find it very difficult to think your way out of strong feelings.

Heart-Centered Prioritizing

When you prioritize with the heart, it’s important to get a clear signal. I recommend that you consume no drugs like caffeine or alcohol for at least a week just to be safe. Otherwise your nervous system is likely to be out of whack, and the heart-mind communication won’t work as well. If you really want to amp it up, eat all raw for a week, or try fasting, juice fasting, or mono meals for a few days first.

You’ll want to achieve a state known as coherence, where the heart and brain synchronize their communication patterns. This is the difference between listening to music and listening to noise.

To achieve coherence, you need to focus on creating a certain emotional state. Once you’re in that state, your brain will sync to your heart. This can be physically measured with the proper equipment. Perhaps the most significant change is in your HRV (heart rate variability). When you’re out of coherence, your HRV bounces around chaotically. When you’re in coherence, your HRV looks like a smooth sine wave if you were to graph it over time. Your heart actually speeds up and then slows down in a very flowing pattern, almost like music.

Emotionally this state of coherence can be described as: unconditional love, compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. If you’re feeling these emotions, you’re there. If you’re not feeling these emotions, you’re not there. Feeling neutral or okay or fine is not coherence.

Coherence has many benefits. It feels good emotionally, but it’s also good for your health, your mental performance, your social life, and beyond.

While the heart is the loudest voice in heart-brain communication, the brain can still influence the heart. So you can create this coherence state by holding thoughts in your mind that are congruent with these feelings. You can recall positive memories or use visualization. Another method is to listen to music that evokes these emotions. I like the song One by U2.

Play around to find a method that works for you. You can do it all in your mind if you want, such as by visualizing a positive scene, but you can just as easily induce coherence through external means, such as by cuddling someone you care about.

The reason to put yourself into a state of coherence first is simple: incredible clarity. Once you’re in this state of coherence, you can trust that your heart-brain communication will be at peak efficiency. You can still attempt to prioritize outside of this state, but the results won’t be as reliable.

Now while you’re enjoying this warm, glowing heart-centeredness, ask yourself what’s most important to you in life. Create your prioritization list by focusing on your feelings. I expect you’ll find this pretty easy to do.

You’ll probably notice that the way your heart prioritizes is very different from the way your logical brain works. For instance, when you’re in coherence, it’s pretty obvious that making lots of money isn’t that important, and it may not make it onto your priority list at all.

You may come up with a list that looks something like this:

1. Feeling connected
2. Helping people
3. Serving the greater good
4. Being kind
5. Sharing my gifts and talents with the world

Please do try this for yourself. Don’t just read this article and skip this exercise.

You’ll probably notice that heart-centered prioritizing is actually faster and easier than logical prioritizing.

The heart-centered approach is also more consistent. When you use the logical approach, you’ll get different answers each time. Every month you apply hard logic to set your priorities, your answers will keep shifting, sometimes radically. But with the heart-based approach, you’ll find that your answers remain remarkably consistent. You may use different words to describe your priorities and shift the ordering around a little, but you’ll be struck by a feeling of coming home to a delightful sense of clarity each time you do this. It may feel like remembering rather than prioritizing. The answers flow with little effort.

When you’re in coherence, your logical brain will function better too, and it will work harmoniously with your emotions to help you create what you desire.

We can also see why it doesn’t work to prioritize based on logic alone. Even prioritizing based on intuition doesn’t work. The reason is that these approaches ignore the importance of coherence. Each time you try to apply your logic or intuition to a problem, you’ll be in a slightly different emotional state. That emotional state will dictate what sorts of solutions you come up with. And if the emotional states don’t match from one month to the next, your solutions will be discordant, and you’ll find it hard to create plans that stick. It’s like listening to music where each track keeps drifting off key — it may still look like music on paper… but not when you listen to it.

We can also see why turning a lagging area of your life into your top priority will often backfire. If focusing more attention on that lagging area makes it harder to achieve coherence, your results will suffer. So if you feel a sense of financial lack and then try to push yourself to make more money, you’ll probably be more likely to induce feelings of stress and overwhelm instead of appreciation and gratitude. And so your emotional brain will lead you to procrastinate. It’s actually trying to get you away from those negative feelings and nudge you in the direction of coherence. This is why you may find yourself addicted to email or social media, which may help you feel better than stressing yourself out with work you don’t enjoy. A better solution is to enter the coherence state deliberately and then decide what to do from there.

Taking Action

When you’re ready to take action on your priorities, start by returning to coherence again. Use your favorite method to create feelings of unconditional love, compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. This way you’ll be syncing to the same state you used to create your priorities, so you won’t have the feeling of second-guessing yourself.

In this state, the right actions will tend to emerge fairly easily. For me it was the desire to write and publish a new article on this beautiful Saturday morning while sipping a banana-coconut smoothie. My desire is to help you gain more clarity and experience more flow and happiness in your life.

Returning to this state of coherence when you set priorities and when you act on them is better than trying to prioritize while you’re in one state and then taking actions in discordant states. Don’t expect good results if you prioritize from a state of desperation and then try to take action from a feeling of stress. Sync your emotions to the coherence state before you prioritize and before you take action. With practice you can do this in a matter of seconds. This is a high leverage practice that makes a world of difference.

A Global Perspective

Imagine how the planet would change if more people began each day by syncing to coherence first. Imagine if governments and corporate boardrooms took a couple minutes to sync to unconditional love before they made key decisions. How many problems could we avoid with this one simple practice?

Wouldn’t this be more impactful and consistent than having each person show up with discordant feelings such as fear, greed, overwhelm, etc?

You can try this with your family and friends as well. The next time you have a disagreement with someone close to you, pause for a moment and see if you can get yourself and the other person to sync to coherence first. Then see what becomes of your disagreement.

Syncing between multiple people is like playing in an orchestra. Each individual may have a different instrument and may play different notes at different times, but their output can flow together harmoniously. When multiple people sync with coherence, they create beautiful music. When they’re out of sync, they create some form of noise.

Consider a 30-Day Coherence Trial

If you want to make syncing to coherence a habit, consider kicking off a 30-day trial. It’s really not that difficult to do, and the potential benefits are huge.

To start the trial, take a few minutes to sync to coherence, and then jot down a list of your top priorities in life. It doesn’t have to be a long list, and the exact ordering isn’t that important. Just write down whatever comes to you.

When you’re ready to begin the action part of each day, pause again for a moment and sync to coherence. Then get started by taking the next action you feel inspired to take.

This synching step only takes a few minutes at most. It can be as simple as playing a song that makes you feel appreciative and loving. Then proceed from that state as you move forward. Try to hold onto it as long as you can.

When you notice that you’ve lost touch with the coherence state and you’re drifting into discordant feelings and losing clarity, take another time-out to re-sync to coherence. Again, this doesn’t take long at all. Recall a happy memory. Play some inspiring music. Or send a quick text message to someone you love: I’m really grateful you’re in my life. I deeply love and appreciate you. <3

Since I completed my 30-day music trial this week, I’m kicking off this new 30-day trial today. My commitment is to sync to coherence at least twice per day. I started this morning by syncing to that state and feeling inspired to write and share this article with you. I hope you find it helpful. Have a beautiful day!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Arbeit Macht Frei is a slogan on a sign above the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland (among other concentration camps used by the Nazis). It roughly translates as, “Work sets you free.” What the Nazis expressed with cruel irony, I say seriously. Embracing work is a path to freedom. Resisting work is a path to enslavement.

Much struggle is the result of hard work resisted, but hard work is more than just putting in the time. To ensure that hard work pays off, an intelligent effort is required.

Justifying Laziness

Laziness is an emotional impulse — a common desire to enjoy the pleasures of life before we’ve earned them — but it’s not a very effective or sustainable approach.

Do you need to earn the pleasures of life? That depends on what you want. If you want something that’s free or freely offered — by nature or by people — you can simply claim it. If you’re walking through a field and want to eat some of the wild plants, go ahead and enjoy nature’s bounty.

If, however, you desire something that was created by human hands (especially hands that expect to be fairly compensated for their efforts) such as a nice home or a speedy piece of technology, then laziness is largely a path to scarcity. Get used to being denied many of life’s benefits if your attitude is entrenched in laziness.

If you resist the emotion of laziness when you experience it, then the emotional feeling of laziness combined with your beliefs about what it means to be lazy will signal your brain to come up with plenty of logical-sounding justifications for your laziness-induced episodes, such as:

• Everything should be free without requiring effort.
• It’s okay to mooch off of others, just this one time.
• I can manifest whatever I want, even if I’m not willing to work for it.
• Laziness is more spiritual than hard work.

The problem with these justifications is that they don’t mesh well with reality. Laziness is an emotional impulse, not a logical choice. Justifying laziness with logic is like breaking your dishes in anger and then claiming that you did it because you needed new dishes. You broke your dishes because you were pissed and lost control. You slacked off because you felt lazy and unmotivated. Don’t overcomplicate this.

Regardless of your personal “shoulds,” there are lots of items and experiences in life that aren’t free but which can easily be attained by earning and spending money. A full wallet can do a lot of manifesting with grace and ease.

You can try manifesting your desires without lifting a finger. This can work for small things, and sometimes you’ll get lucky, but if you resist working towards your desires directly, it’s delusional to claim that you’re a vibrational match for receiving them.

If you want to improve your manifesting, at least meet the universe halfway. It’s hard to say you’re committed to experiencing a result if you aren’t actively moving towards it. Rest in the space of allowing when you get stuck and need inspiration, but when the next action is staring you in the face, taunting you to get moving, then release the parking brake and go, go, go!

Laziness isn’t spiritual — unless your intent is to cultivate an unrefined and slothful spirit. If that’s the case though, you should have incarnated as a rock… perhaps below the tree in my backyard where the birds like to poop.

Justifying laziness with seemingly logical explanations after the fact is pointless — pure nonsense used to explain a resisted emotion. The emotion of laziness requires no justification, however. Next time you’re feeling lazy, just admit that you’re feeling lazy, and leave it at that. Don’t try to justify it. If you decide to act on that emotion, make it clear to yourself that you’re acting emotionally. Be congruent with your emotional truth in that moment, and don’t try to layer it with nonsensical explanations to make your actions seem logical. Occasional laziness has its place — we all need a break sometimes — but if you resist it, you’re only going to expand it.

Recognize pervasive laziness for what it is — a block that stands between you and your desires. Don’t feed laziness with pointless justification. Feed your desires with action instead. If you’re going to indulge in laziness, then indulge in it fully and consciously till it runs its course.

Cultivating High Standards for Work

Hard work can be very enjoyable if you’re working towards desires of your choosing.

Let your desires motivate you towards action. Know that you can achieve them and that you will achieve them — if you’re willing to make a serious, committed effort. Don’t expect much progress though if you’re only willing to take a half-assed approach. Achieving meaningful goals requires that you commit your entire ass, not just one cheek.

It’s possible to work hard and not get much done if your standards for work are too low. These standards include:

• what kinds of work you’re willing to do
• how well you maintain focus and avoid distractions
• how well you’re leveraging your skills and talents
• what levels of quality you consider to be acceptable output
• favoring work you enjoy

If your standards for the kinds of work you do are low, you’ll get caught up doing a lot of pointless busywork that you don’t need to be doing and which doesn’t provide much social value. Doing work that’s beneath you can be a mild diversion for a while, but if you do too much of it, it’s just another time waster.

If you work with poor focus and succumb to distractions, you’re not working hard, and your results will suffer for it. Working for 3 hours with good purpose and focus is often much more productive than putting in 8 hours of distraction-laden half-work.

If you do too much work you’re not very good at, and you aren’t improving much, shift your work around to align more closely with your skills and talents. You’ll get more done in less time, and you’ll be able to take on bigger challenges as well. Regardless of whether you believe you work for yourself or for someone else, you ultimately choose the work that lands on your plate, either by direct consent or through silent approval.

Maintain high standards for the quality of your output. When you’re working on something important to you, do your best work. If you aren’t willing to do your best, then switch to work that demands the best of you.

Keep shifting your work in the direction of what you love to do. This week do more of what you love than you did last week. The more you enjoy your work, the easier it is to feel motivated. This kind of hard work feels good.

Think improvement, not perfection. Keep raising your standards over time. Strive to become more dedicated to your work this year than you were last year.

High standards require commitment. You cannot maintain high standards while simultaneously tolerating low standards. Start noticing where your standards are out of alignment with your best efforts, and make some real changes. Disconnect from those who are constantly dragging you down. Dump the uninspired work that makes you feel like procrastinating instead of contributing. Brainstorm a list of 20 things you can do to increase the quality of your work output; then implement one of those items immediately.

Hard Work and Growth

Holding public workshops is very challenging for me. I know my material well enough that I could surely wing it through a whole workshop, especially if it’s one I’ve done many times before, but I’m not willing to do that. Even if other people didn’t notice, I’d notice, and I wouldn’t feel good about it.

And so I work very hard at each workshop, from preparation to delivery to completion. I show up well prepared and well rested. I prepare myself mentally and emotionally for a demanding weekend. I arrive early, and I hang out during breaks and at the end of each day of the workshop to answer people’s questions. This work is very challenging, and I do the best I can each time, always trying to top what I did last time. After each workshop I do a postmortem to look for ways I can improve the experience for next time. I embrace the principle of kaizen — continuous improvement.

This is hard work, but it’s intelligent hard work. Small improvements in the workshop format and delivery can increase the value that people receive from it.

I could simply lock down the workshop format and coast for a while if I wanted to, but I wouldn’t respect myself as much if I did. If I’m going to teach others about personal growth, then I must embody that value. I want to keep growing and improving, both personally and professionally, and so my workshops must keep improving as well.

Perfection is an unattainable ideal. No human work product will be perfect. But growth and improvement are grounded and practical values. They’re achievable under real-world conditions. You can work smarter and harder today than you did yesterday. You can eliminate one distraction today that you succumbed to yesterday. You can do more work today that you enjoy and that matches your skills and talents. And this is all that’s required.

Make your best effort not to be perfect but to improve upon yesterday or last week. Take on one little change at a time. Find one small improvement you can make today, and do that day after day. After months and years of iteration, you’ll find your work much more productive, enjoyable, and rewarding.

Fulfillment

If you maintain high standards for your work, the work provides its own intrinsic rewards. Nevertheless, it’s well and good to be fairly compensated for your work.

A tremendous amount of neurological and psychological experimentation has shown that, barring abnormal conditions such as being a sociopath, our brains are hard-wired with a sense of social fairness. We typically reject approaches to life that are either too selfish or too selfless. People will even reject certain forms of personal gain if they perceive that those gains are unfair. Somewhere between thievery and sacrifice, we seek to find the right balance that keeps us feeling good about our exchanges with others.

These behaviors are normally subconscious. We don’t even think about them most of the time, but we often notice when such standards are violated, either by ourselves or by others.

I ask you to look within for a moment. Are you living up to your own standards of social fairness? How much value are you receiving from others, and what are you contributing in return? Are you too much of a moocher, taking more than you’re giving? Are you too much of a martyr, draining yourself to keeping giving even as you decline the best that life is willing to provide you?

I found that when I was mired in scarcity, I wasn’t contributing my best. I was usually working hard, but I wasn’t doing the kind of work that I felt close to my best potential contribution. And so my compensation was commensurate with that mismatch — weak.

When I shifted to work that I felt more congruent with, I didn’t have to put in as many hours, but I could still feel at the end of the day that I’d done my best. Writing one good article, even though it isn’t difficult work for me these days in terms of the skill required, is still an area where I invest a lot of hard work, and I seek ongoing improvement. I enjoy expressing inspired ideas through writing, and I share them through an efficient medium that allows people to receive them immediately after publication. I push myself to publish fresh content that can help people grow. I put a lot of myself into my work. I take risks. The payoff is that I respect myself, and I value what I’m contributing. I wouldn’t feel this way, however, if I constantly succumbed to laziness and then tried to justify it as “spiritual allowing” or some such nonsense.

When you respect your work and your contribution, it’s easier to allow yourself to receive the rewards of hard work. Abundance can flow through your life with less resistance. You’ll be able to receive more rewards if you make a bigger contribution because you’ll feel you deserve it; it won’t violate your biologically pre-programmed standards of fairness. But if you know deep down that you aren’t doing your best, some part of you will block that abundance. You’ll know you didn’t really earn it.

Earn It!

Fulfillment is earned, not bestowed. I know many people would like to convince themselves that this isn’t true, and I wish them the best of luck, but I still consider it a lazy and slothful mindset to expect the universe to open the floodgates of abundance in such cases. I’m privy to the results such people consistently achieve. Year after year they struggle to pay their bills. They deny themselves wonderful experiences due to lack of funds — funds that they could be earning if they’d finally devote themselves to intelligent hard work. I share from direct experience as well. I can look to my own past and see how weak my results were when I subscribed to this mindset.

It’s a serious character weakness to think you can get something of value for little or nothing, to believe that life will flood you with abundance when you won’t commit yourself to delivering your best contribution in exchange. In fact, it’s a safe bet that you’ll subconsciously sabotage yourself from being in such a place for long. You won’t allow yourself to receive what you don’t feel you’ve earned. To receive life’s bounty, you must know without a doubt that you deserve it.

I do believe it’s well and good to adopt an abundance mindset. But this mindset isn’t to be found behind Door #1: Laziness, Hope, and Wishful Thinking. It’s only behind Door #2: Intelligent Hard Work, Doing Your Best, and Making a Meaningful Social Contribution.

Do Your Best

Are you doing your BEST? Not just working hard… Not just putting in the time… Not just showing up…

Are you doing your personal best to grow and improve today? Are you besting what you did last week? Are you working on the best project you can be working on to make a meaningful social contribution?

If you aren’t doing your best, how can you shamelessly expect the best in return? If you output mediocrity, expect to receive that. That’s only fair, isn’t it?

If you truly do your best, then you have good cause to expect the best in return. Time and again you’ll see that when you really do your best, the universe will back you up. Social support will come to you. Resources will arrive. Obstacles will be overcome. Encouraging signs will appear. Life will flow with grace and ease.

Arbeit Macht Frei contains another level of irony. On the surface it may appear that hard work is in conflict with freedom. But the truth is that in order to extract real value from your freedom, you must make a serious effort. Freedom is a blank canvas. Hard work makes it a masterpiece.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Acknowledge Recurring Ideas

I find it helpful to verbally acknowledge when an idea keeps popping up, even if I don’t feel ready to act on it — and even if I’m not sure I ever will act on it. I still feel it’s a significant step forward to give those ideas a nod, as if I’m saying to the universe, “Okay, I hear you. I don’t know what, if anything, I’ll do about this yet, but I hear and acknowledge this idea.”

This may seem like an overly simplistic step, maybe even a pointless thing to do. But for me it’s an important and empowering step to elevate some ideas to the level of conscious awareness.

When you consciously acknowledge an idea, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to act on it, but it’s a good first step towards making sense of the idea and preparing yourself to make a real decision. It’s also easy since it only takes a few seconds to verbally acknowledge an idea. If you prefer, you can acknowledge an idea by writing it down or by sharing it with someone too.

Which potential actions do you keep thinking about from time to time? Can you name one or two of those ideas now? Can you consciously acknowledge what’s arising for you, even if it’s very underdeveloped?

Maybe you feel certain it’s a really bad idea, but go ahead and consciously acknowledge it anyway. If it keeps coming up, perhaps there’s a good reason. Acknowledging an idea doesn’t commit you to act on it.

Many times when I acknowledge an idea, it fizzles and never comes up again. It was just information, and I didn’t need to act on it. This routinely happens every week.

People who frequently hang out with me in person can attest that I come up with crazy ideas all the time. I never act on most of them, but I like sharing them anyway — first, because it’s fun to scare people, and second, because I’m able to let go of an idea more easily once I’ve verbally acknowledged it. Then I can move on to something even scarier.

Sometimes after I acknowledge an idea, it continues to make its presence known. Every few days, weeks, or months, the idea comes up again. Sometimes it arises in different packages, but I can see that it’s essentially the same core idea each time.

For instance, you may have an idea to start a certain type of business. You acknowledge it, and for a while it fizzles. But a few weeks later, you get another idea to start a different type of business. This may seem like a new idea, but recognize that the core element is essentially the same — to start your own business.

Make a Starter Decision

When an idea keeps coming up for you, even after you’ve consciously acknowledged its presence, it can have a variety of emotional effects on you. Sometimes you may find it motivating, other times confusing, and other times annoying or distracting or even stressful to think about. If you don’t move the idea forward, these patterns can keep cycling. The same idea will keep visiting you until you take the next step to process it.

To move the idea forward another step, make a starter decision. This doesn’t need to be a final committed decision to act on the idea. It’s just a commitment to do something with the decision to take it beyond the idea stage, to move it forward in some small way.

A good way to make a starter decision is to set aside some time in your schedule to explore the idea more thoroughly. For many new ideas, you may not have enough information to make a real decision either way, but you can commit yourself to further exploration.

Do you need to research the idea? Ponder the consequences? Journal about it? Talk it over with someone? Hang out with people who are already doing something similar? Test it in some fashion to see if you like it?

Make a starter decision to take those first investigative steps.

If you don’t make a starter decision, the idea may fade, but it could just as easily keep recurring, in which case it becomes an ongoing distraction. If you avoid moving these ideas forward, then many of your mental patterns will become cyclical — you’ll keep dwelling on the same thoughts you had a month ago. This is a mental dead end, so don’t get stuck here. Move those thoughts forward with decent starter decisions.

Once you investigate your idea a little more thoroughly, you may decide to keep moving it forward, or you may realize it’s not such a great idea after all and drop it. Either outcome is beneficial since you’ve freed your mind to release the idea, either through action or conscious dismissal.

If you do a summary investigation and reject the idea, but it still keeps popping into your mind, then some part of you still thinks it’s reasonable. That part of you doesn’t agree with your initial conclusions; it thinks you’re overlooking something important. In such cases I recommend that you commit to another round of investigation. Ultimately you may need to go through many more rounds before a real decision sticks, just as a startup company might go through multiple rounds of fundraising. Maybe there are hidden merits to the idea that your emotional brain is picking up, but your logical brain isn’t quite seeing. In many cases your emotional brain will be correct — it may be more primitive, but it’s also been refined over a much longer evolutionary period than your logical brain.

Some ideas may give you a twinge of fear when you think about them, like potentially quitting your job to start a new business, transitioning out of a long-term relationship, or adopting a major lifestyle change. Simply investigating these possibilities will often reduce or eliminate the fear. For more on this, see Education Kills Fear.

A single starter decision can get you moving down a delightful new path. It’s not just the initial decision you’re facing. Consider that this one baby step may unlock an exciting chain of future events.

For years I had the recurring thought that I should get into public speaking, but I kept pushing it aside. I was a game developer, not a speaker. When I finally volunteered to speak at some tech conferences, I found that I enjoyed it very much. It was thrilling and rewarding to share ideas with groups of people that could benefit from them. That baby step sparked a long chain of events that led to our 3-day Conscious Growth Workshops. Now there are 4 different workshops available, so this path is still unfolding. But if I hadn’t made that starter decision to try out public speaking, I might still be regarding that original idea as a cyclical distraction… along with other ideas like “this marriage isn’t really working,” “you should travel a lot more,” and “maybe you ought to look into this WordPress thing.”

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Sometimes they screw up and accidentally do something right. They’re usually able to sabotage these unwanted successes in short order, but they like it best when they can prevent these positive experiences from ever happening in the first place.

If you count yourself among this under-acknowledged and under-appreciated group, here are some suggestions for how you can do a better job of staving off success and ensuring absolute failure till you die.

Wrong Road

Notice the paths that happy and successful people take, and avoid those paths. Favor the popular paths since those will help you achieve average results at best, and average results should safely prevent undesirable feelings of fulfillment. The best roads are those that leave you feeling like you’re walking in circles till you’re too tired to walk anymore and must retire. Roads that are flat or which slope downhill are often good choices, and they tend to satisfy the popularity requirement as well. Avoid any paths that lead over hills or near mountains; the elevated views are disturbing. Head towards terrain you dislike since it’s easier to hate your life when you hate your surroundings. If you can manage to get lost as well, that’s wonderful.

Wrong Tendencies

Take stock of which habits are creating the best results for you, and abandon them. Replace them with habits that ensure no forward progress. Even better are habits that cause backsliding. Watch lots of TV. Eat fast food. Avoid exercising. Make Facebooking the highlight of your day.

Wrong Place

It’s important to live in a place that emanates a going-nowhere vibe. Look for spots that attract people with average or below average incomes, and favor surroundings that are so ugly, even Shakespeare would succumb to writer’s block. Live with people who will encourage you to take paths you clearly don’t want; living with your parents for as long as possible can be very helpful here.

Wrong Time

Never take action when you can justify delay. Stay on the sidelines for as long as you can, and avoid the field for as long as possible. Be non-punctual. Eventually the opportunities will pass. There’s less pressure in showing up late since no one will expect much of you. If you act too soon, you’re risking success.

Wrong Reason

People are notoriously nosy, and sooner or later they’ll inquire about your plans. There’s an unfair assumption that everyone should be looking to improve their lives, so you’ll need to get good at deflecting their queries with false responses. When they eventually take note of your seeming lack of forward progress, put the blame on external factors such as the economy, how unfair your boss is, how unreasonable your ex was, etc. If you tell people the truth, they may try to motivate you to make some changes, and you definitely don’t want that.

Wrong Day

Get up late if you feel best as an early riser, and drag yourself out of bed early if you feel best sleeping in late. Throughout the day, strive to do the opposite of whatever makes you feel happy and productive. Most people find it helpful to get a job doing work they dislike. This ensures that even if they manage to enjoy a nice morning and/or evening, the hours spent at work will drag the whole day down, ensuring an unpleasant overall experience.

Wrong Week

String several wrong days in a row, and you can create a very mediocre week — perhaps even a downright bad week if you work at it. It’s important not to do anything genuinely restorative on the weekend — burn up the time with laziness, inactivity, and pointless entertainment as much as possible. You want to head into Monday morning feeling disempowered from the get-go. If you can manage to maintain feelings of stress, depression, or boredom throughout the whole week, you’re golden. Once you’re locked into such a pattern, don’t do anything to upset it.

Wrong Method

Learn from other people’s failures, and copy them. Use methods that have proven ineffective in the past, ensuring that you’ll get similar lousy results. Look to your own past as well. Notice what has never worked for you, and keep doing it. If it didn’t work back then, it will continue not working today.

Wrong Technique

Don’t be too creative or try to innovate. Copy someone else’s technique if you can. Fitting in with the crowd is safer than standing out as a distinct individual. It’s easier to stave off success if you favor the popular techniques of the masses — don’t do anything too fancy. Style is too close to success.

Wrong Mix

Make sure the key ingredients you’re putting into your life don’t mix well together. Get a job that doesn’t pay enough to cover your expenses, so you can’t make ends meet. Get a relationship partner who can’t get along with your friends. Stock your kitchen with foods that keep you feeling slightly sick much of the time. Keep yourself off balance.

Wrong Genes

Disempower yourself by blaming your problems on your DNA. Let your genes serve as the ultimate limitation. Ignore the truth that your thoughts largely determine how your genes express themselves.

Wrong Ends

It’s hard to avoid setting goals altogether because part of your brain will want to fill this void. Keep this spot filled with analog pseudo-goals that will attach to your goal receptors and effectively block real goals from accidentally falling into place. These have been proven to work well: make more money, get a relationship, find a job, etc. The lack of specificity makes procrastination go down easier.

Wrong Means

If you ever do get sucked into working on a goal, take the most circuitous route you can. Instead of starting a real business that provides value and makes money, keep yourself occupied with pointless busywork like fussing over the design of your logo and business cards. Switch projects frequently so that nothing ever ships. Create the illusion of progress without causing anything quantifiable to occur.

Wrong Plan 

Create flawed plans to reach your goals, plans that any reasonably intelligent person would be able to poke full of holes. Be sure that at least one crucial step requires a horcrux.

Wrong Hands

Avoid becoming too good at anything. Skill is a recipe for success, so keep yourself as unskilled as possible. Avoid books, audio programs, seminars, and educated people. Your education ended a long time ago; don’t try to resurrect it. Let your unskilled hands fall further behind with each passing year.

Wrong Eyes

Use a perspective that disempowers you. Rule out the angles that would make your problems look too easily solvable. If you blow problems out of proportion, it’s easier to stay stuck. If a problem looks too solvable, you might be tempted to actually solve it, and that’s only going to speed you along the path of success — bad idea!

Wrong Prize

Set goals that others expect you to achieve, even if you don’t really care about them. Surely everyone else is right, and you’re wrong, so get with the program and pretend you like it.

Wrong Questions

Ask questions that cannot possibly provide you with helpful answers, such as Why can I never get ahead? Why are people always mean to me? Why am I such a ‘fraidy cat all the time?

Wrong Replies

Now take those lame questions, and try to answer them anyway. Be as disempowering as you can. I can never get ahead because I’m stupid. People are mean to me because I’m a loser. I’m a ‘fraidy cat because I have no social skills, so I know I’ll embarrass myself as soon as I open my mouth.

Wrong Drum

March to the beat of someone else’s drum, never your own. The best advice for you to follow is that which comes from people who seem to care about you but who are too incompetent to know what they’re talking about. Seek health advice from overweight smokers. Consider money advice from people who can barely pay their own bills. Relatives are often great choices for this.

Wrong Scum

Hang out with disenchanted losers regularly, elevating them to buddy status. Better yet, swear loyalty to them as your peer group. If anyone shows the slightest hint of ambition or brilliance, accuse them of being crazy, and either numb them with sufficient quantities of alcohol, or boot them out of your tribe. Openly welcome new members who demonstrate their adeptness at sarcasm and who wield a video game collection that rivals your own.

Wrong Energy

Keep your vibe intentionally out of sync with happiness, success, and fulfillment. Visualize failure whenever you get a chance. When you feel pissed off, amplify it into rage. When you feel sad, feed the sadness into a mopey numbness that you can drag out for weeks. Worry a lot. Know that things are always going downhill for you.

Wrong Signs

Determine that you’ve consumed a sufficient number of venti lattes that your dormant psychic abilities must have finally awakened. Interpret every incoming text message as a sign that you’re on the right path, even though the only people who seem to care that you exist are just as lost as you are. Interpret the seeming lack of forward progress in any quantifiable areas of your life as spiritual growth. Inner growth is always invisible.

Wrong Intensity

Be a hapless couch potato for 28 out of every 30 days who thinks that getting up at 7am is the height of ambition. Then follow it with a 48-hour mania spree where you tell everyone you can about an inspired idea you’re never going to implement. Blow your wad with excited talk once a month; then return to the cozy comfort of inaction.

Wrong Tune

You know you’re on track to misery when you listen to the overall song of your life, and all you can perceive is discordant noise where everything sounds like it’s out of tune. If something starts working, and you begin to hear something resembling music, then figure out what’s creating those nasty harmonies, and break it.

Wrong Too Long

If you’re already applying most of the above, then you shouldn’t have to worry about success, happiness, and fulfillment infecting your dreary existence. You can relax and coast to the coffin from here. Keep it up! :)

Incidentally, this post was inspired by the song “Wrong” by Depeche Mode. Watch the video on YouTube.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Your overall results in life largely depend on your ability to follow through until you achieve completion. Many projects produce essentially zero results if they’re 90% complete. The key results only appear when you reach 100% completion.

For example, if I write 90% of an article and don’t publish it, it produces no value other than being a private journaling exercise. The value cannot be delivered until the article is 100% complete and published.

Incompletes

Incompletes can produce feelings like dissatisfaction, discomfort, stress, worry, shame, and regret. We worry that we may have wasted too much time and energy on such projects with little to show for our efforts.

One way to avoid racking up too many incompletes is to give more careful thought to which particular projects you’re willing to accept in the first place. Having too many active projects at the same time makes it hard to complete them. It’s like trying to juggle too many balls at once. You end up dropping every ball.

One reason we take on too many projects is the desire for variety. Working on the same project day after day can get boring. Another reason is that projects tend to be easier and more motivating in the beginning. Starting a new project is often fun. It’s much more difficult to work through the middling grind of a project and see it through to completion.

Learning Your Lessons

In order to move forward into a better place of achievement, we first need to absorb the lessons from our incompletes. If you’re carrying around some psychological baggage from past incompletes, then take a moment to forgive yourself for those mistakes. You screwed up. It’s okay. You’re human.

At the same time, it’s wise to allow a little of that sting from past incompletes to hang around. That feeling of regret is there for a reason. It serves as an ongoing warning that we don’t want to get into similar situations again. The feeling of regret has a positive message, encouraging you to avoid starting too many projects if you won’t complete them.

Instead of trying to drug this seemingly negative feeling with excess food or drink, turn towards it. Give it your full attention for a moment, and listen to what it has to say.

Ask yourself, What lessons can I learn from my incompletes? How can this make me stronger?

You might hear something like this: I’m tired of wasting time on projects that never go anywhere. Obviously I’m only going to get results if I complete something. So before I set any new goals or tackle any new projects, I’d better be sure I’m going to see them through to completion. If circumstances really do change in unexpected ways, and the project becomes obsolete before it’s done, then it’s okay to dump it and move on to something else. But if the original decision is still sound, then let’s keep pushing through to the end and get it done.

I need to avoid overloading myself with too many projects at once. Ideally I should keep things simple and stick to one serious project at a time, perhaps two projects for variety. When I’m done, then I can add something new. But trying to do 10 things at once obviously isn’t working. I need to stop saying yes to new projects when I still have important incompletes to close.

Abandoning Failed Strategies

Notice which strategies you’ve already tried to get yourself to take action consistently. If you’ve tried something a few times, and it has never worked, stop doing it.

Quite often people get into circular patterns where they keep trying the same failed strategies every few years, hoping that somehow things will be different. That doesn’t work.

An example of a strategy that has never worked for me is trying to associate more pain to incompletion and more pleasure to completing a project, such as by using NLP techniques. I can safely abandon this strategy because I know it’s a dead end. My mind is smart enough to see right through these silly attempts at conditioning. It might work for a dog, but my mind resists such obvious attempts to make it less conscious. I always know that I have a choice. So I don’t use or revisit this strategy because it’s ineffective.

Consciously acknowledging this realization helps me avoid using the wrong approach. When I feel overwhelmed, instead of trying to get myself to feel more motivated and work harder and faster, I say no more often, cancel some items, and pay more attention to simplifying my life.

What are your failed strategies? Are you willing to drop them, so you can free your mind to figure out something more intelligent that might actually work?

Resting in the Space of Possibility

One positive step forward is to recognize that it’s at least possible for you to complete projects, even very difficult ones.

Perhaps if you think back, you can recall some projects you did actually complete, and you can remember the results you got from them. Maybe it was something as simple as completing a school project and getting a good grade on it.

Take a moment to acknowledge that for whatever goal or project you’d like to tackle next, it is at least possible for you to complete it in a timely manner. You aren’t attempting the impossible. There is a way to get it done. The action steps are doable. The project is achievable.

Accepting the Difficult Work

Worthwhile projects don’t normally complete themselves. A good project will frequently require a serious investment of time and energy. Even if the work is enjoyable, you may still need to put in many hours to see it through to the end.

Almost every meaningful project will include some unpleasant or difficult tasks. You aren’t going to enjoy those tasks, but they’re essential for the project’s completion.

You have the option of only doing what’s easy, but if you stick with what’s easy all the time, most of your projects will be pretty low on the value scale. Even if you complete them, they aren’t going to make much of a difference.

If you wish to stop having so many incompletes and see more of your projects through to completion, you must accept that certain tasks will be difficult and to decide to do them anyway.

It’s easy to say that you’re committed to completing a project. Anyone can say they’re committed. But a real commitment means that you’re willing to do the dirty work. It may slow you down. It may frustrate you. You may need to take more breaks in order to get through it. But when you’re committed, you accept the existence of difficult work, and you decide to push through it regardless of the difficulty. This is a key difference between starting projects and finishing them.

Most of the perceived difficulty has nothing to do with the true nature of the task anyway. You’re simply interpreting the task in a way that creates resistance. So a commitment to complete difficult tasks is really a commitment to face and overcome your own resistance. It’s a commitment to overcome the limiting beliefs that bias you against doing certain types of work.

To complete a project, you must eventually do the steps required for project completion. If you don’t feel like doing a particular step, and you use your feelings to justify avoidance of that step, then your project will remain stuck in an incomplete state. A better approach is to recognize that a task is just a task, and it’s subject to many different interpretations as to how pleasant or unpleasant it may be, so instead of looking at it from a perspective that creates unpleasantness, you can choose to regard the task as simply one more stepping stone on par with all the others.

Asserting Your Dominant Will

There are countless techniques you can use to push through inner resistance when the going gets tough. I’ve shared many of them in previous articles like Do It Now and Overcoming Procrastination.

It’s nice to have a toolkit of techniques, but that isn’t enough by itself. Many people know plenty of anti-procrastination techniques, but they can’t get themselves to apply them consistently. The problem is if once you fall into the trap of procrastinating, you can just as easily procrastinate on overcoming procrastination. Anti-procrastination techniques don’t self-activate. The nature of this problem is that it encourages you to resist solving it.

A strategy I’ve found that works well is more of a mindset than a technique. It’s the mindset that says, No matter what, my conscious will is ultimately in charge, and it always has the ability to step in and take command immediately.

When you tackle a challenging goal, you’re going to catch yourself going dark now and then. At some point your conscious will steps in and says, Hey, you’re procrastinating. This is a waste of time. That barely noticeable voice is your inner alarm clock. Instead of hitting the snooze button, pull that thought into the center of your consciousness and amplify it. Give it your full attention.

When you give that thought your full attention and let its voice be heard, it gets louder: WTF, you lazy ass! You don’t need to be checking the news right now. You have much more important things to be doing. Get your ass back to work!

The mindset aspect here has to do with your relationship to that voice.

When you succumb to procrastination for long periods of time, and that voice shows up, you’ll have a tendency to push it away. You define the part of you that procrastinates as “me” and the part of you that wants to get some real work done as “not me,” as if the strong part (not you) is trying to push the weaker part (you) into action. As long as you maintain these kinds of inner relationships, procrastination will be your constant companion.

To overcome procrastination, do the opposite. When that alarm clock voice shows up, realize that this strong voice is the real you. And the lazy procrastinator is not you. When you procrastinate, you go dark and become something less than your true self. When you wake up and recommit to your goals and projects, that’s the real you.

Self-Dominance vs. Self-Abuse

When you wrap your identity into the part of you that wants to procrastinate, you’ll have a tendency to beat yourself up. When you look back and realize you wasted a lot of time, you’re identifying with the part of you that procrastinates. So when you get frustrated with that part, you’re getting frustrated with yourself. And when you beat up that part of yourself for its bad habits, you’re abusing yourself.

This won’t help. It will simply perpetuate the cycle and keep you stuck.

The problem is that when you self-identify with the part of you that procrastinates, and then you beat up that part of yourself, you’re lowering your self-esteem. You’re saying to yourself, I’m such a loser. I suck. I can’t get anything done.

This is self-abuse. It cannot help you. Don’t do this.

Avoid self-identifying with the part of you that procrastinates. Imagine that the part of you that procrastinates is the animal part of you. It’s prehistoric baggage. It has many positive aspects that keep you alive, but you can’t let this part of you run amok. Your conscious mind needs to keep a tight leash on it.

The real you is the part of you that’s conscious and aware. This is the part of you that’s capable of making high-level decisions. This is the part of you that sets goals and takes on projects that aren’t essential for survival.

Your arms are a part of you, but you probably wouldn’t say that your identity is that of an arm. Your conscious will dominates your arms. You can wave them around, use them to pick up objects, train them to get stronger — whatever you desire. You’re the boss of your arms.

Similarly, you’re the boss of the lazy part of yourself that wants to procrastinate. Acknowledge that it’s there. Recognize that it’s a part of you, but it can’t fully define you, just as your arm can’t define your body. Appreciate the good it does for you, like directing your fight or flight impulse to keep you alive in emergency situations. But whatever you do, don’t give your power away to this part of you. It is your servant. It isn’t meant to be your Master.

In order to shift yourself to a place of achievement, you must claim your role as Master over the part of you that wants to be lazy and expedient. You have the power to be dominant over this part of you. Your conscious will is so much stronger.

Strengthening Your Will

Just like a muscle, your conscious will grows stronger when you exercise it regularly, and it atrophies when you fail to exercise it.

Fortunately, no matter how weak you’ve allowed yourself to become in this area, you can always train yourself back up to a place of strength.

Practicing self-dominance can actually be fun. A good way to practice is to verbalize your commands to yourself out loud. Tell yourself what to do, as if commanding the lazy part to get in line.

For example, if you have a tendency to want to linger in bed when your alarm goes off, say to yourself, On your feet now! Get dressed and brush your teeth. Imagine that this commanding voice is your true self commanding aspects of your lower self. Your fully conscious self is commanding parts of you that are less conscious. See the truth that the real you really does want to get out of bed. You want to have that experience today. Choosing to do the opposite isn’t really you.

No matter how much you struggle with this, that’s okay. It’s a lifelong challenge, and perfection isn’t a realistic standard. Sometimes you’ll go dark. But when you eventually rise again to a new level of consciousness, strive to maintain it as long as you can.

I’m taking a 10-week course where the current assignment is to check in with myself every hour for two full weeks (an hourly alarm can serve as a reminder). At least once per hour I must pause and reflect on what I’m thinking and doing in that moment. Am I behaving wisely? Or have I slipped into unconsciousness? Am I creating my life, or am I merely reacting?

I’d encourage you to try a similar challenge. Whenever you catch yourself slipping into negative emotions, unconscious behavior, or self-identification with laziness and procrastination, take a moment to reassert your dominant will. Take stock of who you really are, and issue the proper commands for what you are to do in this moment.

Don’t project your higher self as something outside of you. Embrace the beingness of your higher self in each moment. Your higher self is the real you.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

It would be nice if effort equaled results, but it’s very common to apply effort without generating measurable results.

Let me share a personal story to illustrate this…

Based on my efforts at studying and practicing the game of blackjack, I could make a case that I’m an expert blackjack player.

In my 20s I read a dozen or so books about the game of blackjack and a dozen more more about casino gambling in general. I did some independent study on games of chance in college, both for fun and as part of my education for my math degree. In high school I even programmed my Casio fx-8000G calculator to play blackjack, including drawing all the cards pixel by pixel.

However, I soon learned that it’s one thing to hold this knowledge in my mind, and it’s quite another thing to apply it as a real-world skill to get positive results.

Shortly after my 21st birthday, I made my first adult trip to Las Vegas with some friends. Before we left, I practiced counting cards just as I had learned from books. It took hours to memorize the correct play of every hand and to practice counting down a deck until I could do it in 13-14 seconds consistently (about as fast as I could physically flip through all the cards). I felt very well prepared before I ever set foot in a real casino.

On that first trip, I played the lowest limits available, mostly varying my bets from $2 to $10. I won $125 total, giving me a nice reward for my efforts.

This positive result encouraged me to keep playing. I made the 4-hour drive from L.A. to Vegas dozens of times, taking advantage of the cheap rooms and food that were in abundance at the time. I continued to invest in learning more about blackjack. I studied advanced techniques that could add a bit more edge. I learned more about the social aspects of the game. I started betting a bit more, usually $5-25 or $10-50 ranges, sometimes $25-125. I got used to bigger swings, such as losing $700 or winning $900 in a single sitting. I got kicked out of a casino for winning $200 in a few minutes, so I learned to disguise my play better. I learned how to get comps. I was very disciplined and never risked rent money or went on tilt. For me it was mostly about the challenge. I loved the combination of mathematics and emotional discipline that was required to do well.

Now fast forward 20 years. I’ve been living in Vegas since 2004. There’s a popular casino just 5 minutes from my house. I can walk there if I want. I could go play blackjack at any time of day. But I rarely do these days. And if I do play, I don’t count cards. I would only play for fun, and only at a betting level that’s so far below my means so that it can’t possibly make a difference in my finances. I would never go as high as risking even half a percent of my income over the course of a year.

So on the one hand, I can claim that I have a lot of expertise in this area. I invested a lot of time in learning, and I have many hours of real-world practice. But what are the actual results? I certainly didn’t do anything like the M.I.T. blackjack team did. Given my low betting levels and infrequent play, I wouldn’t even earn enough to reach minimum wage. Over the long run, my results were insignificant from a financial perspective.

If I evaluate this pursuit through the lens of study and effort and practice, then I could argue that I’ve grown tremendously in my skill at blackjack. But if I use the lens of real-world results, then I must admit that I have virtually no results to speak of. I never did what would have been necessary to generate serious results from this pursuit. It was merely a side hobby that I explored for fun.

So can I claim to be an expert blackjack player? That may be an issue of semantics, but I certainly can’t claim to have won any serious money at the game, which is generally how a blackjack player would measure their long-term success.

Evaluating Your Progress

How do you assess your progress?

Do you feel you’re making progress if you’ve studied and practiced a great deal? Or do you only give yourself credit for real-world results that other people can perceive as well?

I think that both types of assessment are valid. I don’t think we should completely discount learning, study, and practice as ends unto themselves. However, I also think many of us need to move our evaluation criteria further in the direction of measurable, real-world results.

Here are some questions to get you thinking about the differences between study and results…

Study: Do you think you know a lot about relationships? Have you read books or attended workshops on relationships? Do you know how to approach people and start conversations? Do you know how to build rapport? Do you know how to communicate well with people?

Results: Are you currently enjoying positive relationships in your life right now? Are you happy and fulfilled in this part of your life? Do other people notice how happy you are with your relationships? How many people would name you as a friend? How many invites do you get in a typical month?

Study: Do you think you know a lot about making money? Do you have ideas about what you can do to increase your income? Do you have goals, plans, and to-do lists? What financial skills have you acquired?

Results: How much money have you earned so far this year? What does your financial balance sheet look like? If an independent financial consultant looked at your balance, would s/he say you’re wealthy, average, or pretty much broke? Would s/he see evidence of positive change over the past 3 years?

Study: Do you believe you’re a caring and compassionate person? Do you care about people, animals, and the environment? Do you have ideas regarding how to make the world a better place? Do you ever wish more people would think as you do?

Results: What is the measurable evidence of your ongoing contribution in the real world? What results are other people now getting that they weren’t before, thanks to you? Which specific people will testify that you’ve helped them, and how will they say you’ve helped? Which parts of the environment are better off now, thanks to you, and how are they better? Is your caring and compassion flowing out into the world and affecting real people, or is it just a feeling you have?

When you look back at how your life was 3 years ago, which areas would seem to be about the same if examined by an impartial observer? Where would this observer testify that you’ve made measurable progress? Where would s/he testify that you’ve failed to make any discernable progress?

Have you been assessing your progress as objectively and fair-mindedly as this impartial observer would? Have you been giving yourself credit for non-existent results? Have you been failing to credit yourself for results you really did achieve?

Results-Orientation

If you’re beginning to realize that you have a strong bias towards over-crediting yourself for study, effort, and practice as opposed to real-world results, I’d encourage you to shift your evaluation criteria to the results side. This may feel a bit alien at first… perhaps a bit harsher than you’re used to… but I think you’ll like it better in the long run.

I’m a person who loves to read, explore, and experiment, so it’s easy for me to get caught up on the learning side and convince myself that I’m making real progress simply by making an effort. But I’ve learned over the years that my study tends to flow much better when I’m working towards a results-based goal.

During college I got a contract job to program some computer games for a local game company. At the time I only knew DOS game programming, and they were developing games for Windows 3.1. Windows game programming was a whole different animal, so I committed myself to the project before I really knew what I was getting into. But as “luck” would have it, I got jury duty right when I was supposed to begin working on the first game, so the start of the project had to be delayed. I went to a bookstore and bought a stack of books on Windows game programming. Since there was so much downtime during the court case, I was able to go through those books in a matter of days. Since my learning was results-driven from the get-go, I was able to learn a lot faster. I could focus on the concepts that I would need to apply and ignore the irrelevant bits.

Consequently, I had a working demo of the first game running only 9 days after I started the project. About six months later, I got to see the 4-pack of games I had programmed selling in stores like Comp USA and Software Etc. I also received royalty checks for more than $20K in addition to my contract pay. My learning efforts generated measurable results. I wasn’t just learning for the sake of learning. Later I applied those skills to design, program, and publish other games as well. And I helped teach other independent developers how to do the same.

When I engage in learning just to learn something new, I almost always learn more slowly. I learn fastest when my learning is results-oriented, such as if I’m figuring out how to implement some particular feature for a specific project.

Learning just to learn can be very seductive. Read any random nonfiction book, and you may be able to convince yourself that you’re doing something valuable and worthwhile. But what are you going to do with that knowledge? Will it be largely forgotten a year later? Or will you apply it in the real world?

I’ve read so many books that it’s hard to keep them all straight. I have bits and pieces of knowledge about a great variety of subjects. At the time I studied these topics, they usually seemed important. Yesterday I was reading a fascinating book about the history of Goldman Sachs, a powerful investment bank that started in the 1800s and took a lot of flak for its role in the recent financial crisis. But what can I do with this knowledge? How will it generate fresh real-world results? It may be an educational, eye-opening read, but since I’m not reading it with any results-orientation in mind, I could say that I’m better off learning something else that I can apply right away.

Learning for the sake of learning can indeed be pleasurable, and it can offer up hidden benefits over time. But my experience suggests that learning for the sake of creating real-world results can be just as pleasurable — and a lot faster too. You not only enjoy the learning process, but you also get to experience new results. All else being equal, doesn’t it make more sense to learn with a strong results-orientation in mind?

What are the results you’d like to achieve next? Can you direct your learning to help you achieve those results faster?

The Best of Both Worlds

Study, effort, and practice needn’t be in opposition to real-world results. The truth is that we can enjoy both.

A straightforward way to do this is to clarify some new results you’d like to achieve, and then focus on learning what you need to learn to achieve those results.

While I enjoyed learning to play blackjack, my blackjack knowledge doesn’t do much for me or anyone else in terms of real-world results; it never did. On the other hand, learning how to create a web business has allowed me to enjoy life without the hassle of a regular job, to provide a worthwhile and sustainable service for people around the world, and to give me sufficient freedom to keep learning and growing.

Never say “I don’t know how” to excuse yourself from pursuing a particular result you desire. “I don’t know how” is the mantra of fools. It’s okay to say, “I don’t know how yet,” but better still is to drop such phrases from your repertoire altogether. Just dive in and start learning what you need to learn. Don’t excuse yourself due to a lack of knowledge. If you don’t know how, learn how. You learned how to walk and talk. Surely you can learn other skills too.

I like Jack Canfield’s advice to “lean into it.” When you don’t know how to achieve a particular result, don’t worry about learning everything overnight. Just lean into it. Get one book that seems remotely relevant, and read it. That book should give you new leads to follow. It might turn you on to other books, teachers, workshops, or experiments you can try. Keep following the trail of breadcrumbs as you gradually learn how to achieve the new results you desire. But be careful not to fall back into the seductive trap of learning merely for the sake of learning.

Again, learning for the sake of learning is still perfectly okay. I think it’s well and good to broaden your horizons, and not everything you learn has to be so results-oriented. But when you’re pursuing a particular goal, stick to results-oriented learning, and don’t let yourself get sidetracked.

When you look back on the past several years of your life, are you pleased with the results you’ve achieved? Can you see that your investments in personal growth and learning are paying off in terms of measurable results? What is the evidence of your real-world progress? Is your “progress” all in your mind? Are you happy with your current balance between learning for the sake of learning vs. learning to achieve specific results?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those who achieve high levels of success in some areas of life tend to take a LOT more action than those who settle for average or below average results.

Lots of people come up with interesting ideas to pursue. You’ll probably come up with some great ideas while going about your day. But very often when you come up with an idea that could be actionable, you’ll let it fade, or you’ll talk yourself out of it, or you’ll overcomplicate it to the point where it dies on the vine.

This isn’t what the most successful people typically do, however. These people are more likely to take action — either right away or shortly after they generate the cool idea.

Bias for Inaction

When you come up with an interesting idea, it’s easy to avoid taking action. I mentioned some of these a few sentences ago, but let me elaborate a bit.

One way to avoid taking action is to lose focus. You come up with a cool idea, but instead of staying focused on it, you distract yourself from it. Instead of making the new idea a top priority, you switch your attention to something else. When you withdraw your focus from the new idea, the idea gets fuzzier. The initial enthusiasm fades. Your mental RAM gets overwritten by something else. Soon the cool idea is essentially forgotten.

Another way to avoid taking action is to talk yourself out of it. This requires shifting your focus to the anti-idea. What about this idea won’t work? Where might it lead to failure? What could go wrong? By shifting your focus to the anti-idea instead of the idea, you magnify problems instead of opportunities, so the idea becomes less attractive to you. Eventually you sense that the idea is probably more trouble than it’s worth, so you reject it.

You can also allow others to talk you out of your idea. This is essentially the same thing because you must internalize their attitudes in order to kill the idea.

Finally, you can overcomplicate the idea. Instead of focusing on the critical core, you can keep adding and expanding the idea until it’s so monstrous that there’s no way you could implement it in a reasonable period of time. Perfectionists often do this. Many implementations that are “good enough” can still provide a lot more value than doing nothing, but when you overcomplicate an idea, you make doing nothing the more attractive choice.

I don’t want to suggest that these mental processes are wrong per se, but the long-term consequence is that if you run any of these subroutines, you’ll avoid taking action most of the time when you come up with an interesting idea. These processes favor maintaining the status quo because they derail you from implementing new ideas.

If maintaining the status quo is very important to you, then it may be reasonable to apply such processes to your life. The potential upside is that you’ll avoid making errors of commission. Because you aren’t taking action, you won’t have to worry about new failures and rejections caused by your mistakes.

Bias for Action

Just as you can apply a mental process that leads to inaction, you can also do the opposite. You can run subroutines that favor action.

When you come up with an interesting idea, you can stay focused on that idea until your focus naturally flows into direct action. Instead of letting other things get in the way, you can clear your schedule and stay with the idea to see where it leads. You can elevate the status of spontaneously cool ideas in your life, so they take precedent over maintaining the status quo. When you feel you’ve been struck by an inspired idea, you drop everything else, so you can run with the new idea and see where it leads.

You can also talk yourself into taking action on an idea. You can focus your attention on the possibilities of what might work as opposed to the potential problems. You can ponder the upside more than the downside. Or you can allow others to talk you into action, which again is pretty much the same thing. When you want to be talked into action, you’ll probably seek out others who will help push you over the edge.

And finally, you can simplify the idea to make it easier to take action. You can strip the idea down to its core essence. You can scale it down until it becomes accessible and readily actionable.

If you apply these mental processes as opposed to the processes in the previous section, you’re going to take a lot more action. You’ll start more projects. You’ll ask for what you want more often. You’ll pick up the phone many more times than you would otherwise. You’ll risk failure and rejection more often.

The upside here is that you’ll avoid many errors of omission. You’re much less likely to miss golden opportunities.

Which Approach Is Better for You?

Which approach is better for you depends on how comfortable and happy you are with the status quo of your life.

Do you feel your life is about 95% where you want it to be? Would you be delighted to maintain your current situation? Do you feel your momentum is taking you down a wonderful path? If so, you may wish to favor the processes in the first group. Talk yourself out of taking action when you feel the risk of upsetting the status quo is too great. You may not experience as much personal growth on this path, but there’s no rule that says you have to. If you’re very happy and fulfilled where you are, it’s fine if you want to coast and enjoy that for a while. You can always shift gears later.

On the other hand, do you feel you have a lot more growing to do? Do you feel more drawn to new experiences? Would you rather create something new for yourself vs. maintaining your current situation?  Are you willing to upset the status quo for a shot at something better? If that’s the case, then you’re better off favoring the second set of processes that will get you into action faster and more frequently. Risking failure and rejection would be a small price to pay to ensure that you don’t let potential opportunities pass you by. You’d kick yourself more for the opportunities you missed as opposed to the mistakes you made.

Do you often catch yourself saying, “I really wish I hadn’t…” or “How could I have done something so stupid?” or “I should have thought that through more carefully”? If so, then you may be acting too haphazardly, and you need to pause and think things through a bit more. It’s okay to slow down and be more deliberate.

Or do you catch yourself saying, “Why didn’t I jump on that opportunity when I had the chance?” or “I wish I’d signed up for that years ago” or “I’m feeling behind relative where I think I should be at this time in my life”? If so, you may wish to shift yourself towards a greater action bias. Start talking yourself into action instead of talking yourself out of it. It’s okay to speed up and be more spontaneous.

Throughout your life you’ll probably shift back and forth between these sets of processes many times. Sometimes you’ll dislike the status quo, or you’ll feel a strong desire for something new. At those times, you’ll want to cultivate an action bias. At other times you may need a break from so much action and rapid change, and you may want to coast for a while.

You can also mix and match based on what you want in different areas of your life. One year you may want to maintain your health status while improving your social life, and the next year you may want to upgrade your fitness levels while maintaining the status quo in other parts of your life.

Sometimes I’ll say aloud, as if I’m speaking to the Universe, “I’m feeling overwhelmed and need a breather. Let’s slow things down.” Other times I’ll say, “This pace is too slow for me. I’m ready to move faster. Speed up!” I can’t say if this is just a trigger for my own subconscious or a genuine message to the Universe, but I do notice that within a few days, the pace will begin to shift. Maybe I’m somehow directing the pacing of new opportunities, or maybe I’m just shifting my perspective. Either way, it works for me. I suggest you try it to see if it works for you. Ask for a shift in pacing when you feel your current pacing is too fast or slow.

Long-Term Consequences

Short-term fluctuations in your action bias tend to average out over time. Some weeks you’ll take a lot of action, and other weeks will see a slower pacing. But what does your long-term pattern look like? Do you usually run mental processes that favor inaction or action? When you come up with new ideas, do you normally decline to act? Or do you normally find a way to get moving ASAP? How many ideas do you talk yourself into vs. talk yourself out of? Are you normally busy with direct action on your ideas, or do you spend more time pondering them without any observable progress?

It shouldn’t be too difficult to see why very successful men and women tend to have a strong bias in favor of action. They lean in the direction of focusing on their new ideas, looking at the positive possibilities, and talking themselves into action.

Is it reasonable to favor action though? Wouldn’t it be better to spend more time deliberating and thinking things through carefully?

I think this depends on what you’re working on. If you’re launching a NASA mission, you want to triple-check everything to make sure it’s safe. The consequences of failure can be very high. But in cases where the consequences of failure aren’t fatal, like if you’re risking some embarrassment or a break-up or a bankruptcy, well… that may sting a little, but you’ll recover.

Ask yourself, “What are the realistic worst-case consequences if my idea fails to work?” In many cases you’ll have to admit that in the grand scheme of things, the negative consequences just aren’t a big deal. You may make them a big deal in your mind, but are people going to lose their lives if you make an honest mistake? Taking action is rarely fatal these days. You can screw up a lot, recover, and keep right on going.

If you favor an action bias in the long run, you’re more likely to experience greater long-term success.

By taking lots of action, you’ll invite a tremendous amount of experiential learning. While we can learn a great deal from books and teachers and coaches, we must still learn certain things from experience. This includes learning to walk, talk, dance, drive a car, raise kids, run a business, and so on.

If you want to learn to drive a car, an action bias will help you develop that skill quickly. Focus on learning to drive. Focus on the positive aspects of driving, like more freedom to come and go as you please. Talk yourself into it. Let peer pressure talk you into it. Keep it simple, such as by driving an automatic instead of a stick shift. Run the mental processes that encourage action, and you’ll soon be driving.

If you use the opposite approach, you won’t learn how to drive. You may think about it and then distract yourself by thinking of something else. You may focus on the negatives such as the learning curve, cost, risk, inconvenience, or your nervousness. You may overcomplicate it. Run the mental processes that discourage action, and you’ll maintain the status quo of being a non-driver.

Extend these kinds of results across many years and multiple areas of life, and it isn’t too difficult to predict what will happen. If you avoid taking action, you’ll suffer fewer mistakes and failures (errors of commission), but you’ll also deny yourself many valuable skills and opportunities. You won’t have as much flexibility to earn money, to attract positive relationships, to do work you love, etc.

If you cultivate an action bias, you’ll suffer fewer errors of omission. You won’t miss as many opportunities in life.

In the long run, missing opportunities will probably hurt your results a lot more than making mistakes. The biggest failure is the failure to act.

If you want to experience lots of positive change throughout your life, then you must be willing to embrace more change in general. You can’t always guarantee that each change will be positive. Sometimes things won’t work out the way you’d have liked. If you wish to avoid making mistakes and suffering setbacks, you’ll have to avoid virtually all change, and that means you’ll miss many golden opportunities. This is because virtually all good opportunities entail some degree of risk. To avoid risk, you must avoid positive results too. Only the low-hanging fruit remains accessible, and that usually won’t fuel much change.

Improving Through Action

Ideally we want to take actions that we predict will lead to success, and we want to avoid taking actions that we predict will lead to failure.

Unfortunately, the best opportunities tend to be unpredictable. Even when we do everything we can to reduce risk and guarantee success, there are no guarantees. We can never eliminate all uncertainty. There’s still a randomness factor. You could get injured without trying to. You could lose your money through no fault of your own. You could be blindsided by a completely unexpected setback or loss. It happens.

When you take action, there’s always some doubt as to how well it will turn out. You can’t even accurately measure this doubt. Even when people try to do this with the best processes available, they still suffer failures and setbacks. Insurance companies still go bust, even when they make the best bets they can.

It isn’t wise to be reckless. It’s still a good idea to put the odds on your side as much as possible. But it’s just as important to accept that there’s inherent risk in taking action. You might succeed. You might fail. Or you might experience something in the middle.

An action bias gives you a long-term advantage here because the more you take action, the more you learn about risk. You develop a better feel for how to tell when the odds are on your side. You become better at placing high-payoff bets, and you learn to avoid the sucker bets. In some limited domains, you can learn this from a book or a teacher. In other areas, especially new areas that are rich with untapped opportunities, you mainly have to learn by trial and error.

Trial and error may sound like a slow and tedious process, but often it’s the fastest way to learn. Humans are capable of single-trial learning. We don’t necessarily have to repeat mistakes to learn to avoid them. One bad experience can teach us to avoid specific problems for the rest of our lives. Sometimes you’ll make a mistake and say to yourself, “I’m never doing that again,” and you never will. You may have learned this lesson in a matter of seconds.

Without an action bias, you don’t gain the benefit of feedback. If you fail to take action, you’ll never know what might have been. This isn’t like sports betting, where you place a bet on a team and then watch the game from a distance. In many cases you’re like the quarterback on the field who can strongly influence the outcome of the game. The feedback you receive from the sidelines isn’t the same as what you receive on the field. So if you avoid the field, you avoid the best feedback. This greatly limits your ability to grow and improve.

When you favor action, you gain the long-term benefits of action-based feedback. In the long run, these benefits can be massive.

If you read a lot of biographies of highly successful men and women, you’ll see just how critical action-based feedback is. I can’t recall any stories where people set a clear goal and achieved massive success right away. Success came as a result of refinement over many years and decades.

You take action. You see what happens. You make some adjustments. And you take more action.

Most of the time, your first stab will fail. So will the second and the third. But eventually you’ll figure it out. Sometimes you won’t figure it out though. And that’s okay too because there are always new ideas to try, and quite often your failure experiences will help you take better stabs at future ideas.

Persistence

One thing I’ve been seeing in a lot of 20-somethings today is that they often want massive positive results without going through that long-term process of trial and error learning. Many of them have a low tolerance for failure. They give up easily. They see persistence as a 6-month commitment instead of a 5- or 10-year commitment (or longer). A 6-month commitment is an oxymoron — that’s merely dabbling.

For example, someone will read an article like 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job, and they’ll get inspired by the idea that they can start their own business and work for themselves. If they take action, then 6-12 months later they’re often stuck in setback land. Their new business is struggling. They aren’t making enough money. They’re working for less than minimum wage. So they give up and go back to job land, concluding they aren’t cut out for this sort of thing. But again, even a yearlong commitment isn’t a true commitment — that’s dabbling. The serious contenders are looking ahead for several years minimum.

When I started my first business in my early 20s, it took 5 years of full-time work just to achieve my first profitable year. I thought I was a pretty smart guy, but there was so much I didn’t know about business. I made countless mistakes. I sank into debt. I went bankrupt. I got kicked out of my apartment because I couldn’t pay the rent. I made some bad decisions, and I suffered the consequences. Sometimes I worked with the wrong people, and I suffered the consequences. Sometimes I got blindsided by problems outside my direct control, and I suffered the consequences. But I just kept going. I didn’t let these setbacks stop me. I kept taking more action. I simply refused to stop or to be stopped.

Seriously… is getting kicked out of your home fatal? Is bankruptcy fatal? Are these reasons to quit? Hardly. These are minor bumps in the road.

Money is just a number in a bank account. If it hits zero or negative, so what? Does a number in a computer database have power over you? Can it stop you from taking action? Hardly. Short of being physically restrained, what can stop you from taking action? If you can physically move your body, you can still take action. If you use these events (or the fear of these events) to talk yourself out of taking action, this is no different than anyone else who runs the mental subroutines for inaction. If you aren’t physically tied up or otherwise immobilized, you can always act.

One reason I kept going was that even by that time in my life, I was already reading the biographies of very successful people. I kept seeing the same patterns. It takes time to get good at anything new. The early years of a new venture are more about figuring things out than they are about making things work well. I think this gave me an advantage because I was willing to stick it out through the tough times. I had more reasonable expectations about how long it might take. Of course I wanted to succeed faster, but I was willing to let it take as long as it took. I saw a lot of other people dabble in the field and then leave, but I hung around and kept going, despite experiencing a lot of setbacks.

When I started my blog in 2004, I was able to grow my web traffic to 100,000 visitors per month within the first 6 months… and to 400,000 visitors per month by the end of the first year. No money was spent on marketing or promotion. Even by today’s standards, that’s pretty solid growth, even though the Internet was significantly smaller back then. And it really wasn’t that difficult to achieve this. I largely expected it.

Unfortunately when people ask me how I did it, they’re mainly looking for techniques and tactics and tricks. What method can they apply to achieve similar results? I’ve shared some of those before, but the truth is that most of the time I probably wasn’t even aware of what I was doing. The actions I took were largely subconscious and habitual. If someone watched me working in late 2004 or 2005, they might have labeled some of my actions as random and impulsive. But there was a reason for them. My subconscious mind was good at spotting opportunities and instantly acting on them, and it was good at spotting dead ends and avoiding them. I did what I’d spent the previous 10 years learning how to do, much like a surgeon can go in and make a few precise snips, and they’re done. I was able to succeed much faster with this business because I’d spent the previous 10 years figuring out how to run an Internet business. Doing it again was about as difficult as making dinner — it just took longer. But people don’t want to hear my honest answer — that fast results are the result of many years spent building and refining your skills.

Many people, especially 20-somethings, seem to think that an action bias is a tool for short-term success. It isn’t. It’s a long-term process that plays out over many years and decades. It takes time to sculpt your mind to adopt the right focus, attitudes, and behaviors that will lead to success. But once you learn what you need to learn, then you can enjoy the benefits of running on autopilot in many areas of your life. You simply do what feels natural to you, and it tends to work well. What you can do in the short term though is to develop the habit of favoring action more often than not. When new opportunities and ideas present themselves, lean further in the direction of action.

If you’re thinking that a commitment is something you’ll try for 6-12 months, I doubt you’ll get very far. Surely you’ll make some interesting distinctions during that time, but you’ll have many more lessons to learn after that. You could get lucky of course, but too much luck is a dangerous thing. Lucky people are the ones who get blindsided by market downturns. It’s easy to succeed when all the dice are rolling with you, but what happens when they inevitably turn? When the rules change, can you successfully manage the new risks and maintain momentum?

Commitment

If you think it’s difficult to commit to something for so many years, you’re right. It is difficult. That’s why average and below average results are more common than exceptional results. Most people aren’t going to commit. But therein lies your greatest advantage. If you simply stick it out longer than most people, your odds of success increase.

Your field may look crowded, but that’s most likely because it’s flooded with dabblers. They’ll be gone within a year or less, replaced by new dabblers. These people don’t represent any serious competition. In fact, they’re most likely helping you. They’ll introduce new people to your field before they give up. Think of these dabblers as your volunteer marketing team. They help to expand the market for the products and services that you’ll eventually deliver.

If you read the bios of those who seem to have achieved tremendous success early in life, you’ll often see that their path to success began in childhood. Steve Wozniak, for instance, started learning about electronics when he was about 4 years old (his Dad was an engineer who worked on missile programs), and he was winning science fairs and building computers while in grammar school. Building the first Apple computer was the result of a progression that began many years earlier.

Commitment doesn’t mean trapping or limiting yourself. It’s not about putting yourself in a box or a cage. It’s about choosing a certain line of development and running with it, which isn’t that difficult to do when you discover something you really love. Then your commitment is a commitment to enjoy your life and to express what feels good to you. It’s still going to involve a lot of work, but that work is mostly a labor of love. The question is whether or not you’re willing to put in the time.

Commitment and action bias are teammates. If you have a strong action bias but your actions are random and haphazard, you’ll pile up a lot of feedback, but it will be tough to make sense of it. On the other hand if you make a commitment to pursue a certain direction, and you cultivate a strong action bias too, then you’re going to acquire feedback that you can use to go further and further down that path. This is a terrific way to experience a fulfilling life that makes you happy and contributes to others.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

It doesn’t work for all videos, but it works for anything Flash-based like YouTube videos and TED Talks videos. So you can watch a 20-minute video in about 10 minutes, or watch two videos in the time it used to take to watch just one.

You can increase the playback speed up to 5 times faster, but you’ll probably want to use 1.5x to 2.5x for most videos. I usually start at 2x and then gradually increase it once I get used to the speaker’s speech patterns. For a slow speaker, you can still get a comprehensible video at 3x speed.

You can also decrease the playback speed to as slow as 0.3x normal, which can be useful for highly technical information that you wish to digest more slowly. It’s also good for watching videos in languages where you aren’t perfectly fluent — you can slow down the rate of speech to hear each individual word more clearly.

The videos are automatically pitch-adjusted, so you won’t hear chipmunk voices. I was impressed with how easy it is to understand the audio as you change the speed. It may take your brain a few seconds to adjust though if you set it to 2x or faster.

The app comes with a 7-day free trial, and it’s very easy to use. You can download it, install it, and have it all figured out within 5 minutes or less.

The main control is a slider bar that pops up on your screen whenever you view a video in your web browser. It tells you whether or not the video is Flash-based, so then you know if you can speed it up.

This is one of those no-brainer apps that will boost your productivity right away. There’s really no learning curve to speak of. If you can use your mouse to move a slider left and right, you’ve mastered it. It does one thing and does it well.

If you watch online videos, especially “talking heads” videos, you’ll definitely save yourself some time, probably many hours over the course of each year. The faster playback is more engaging too. You can listen and comprehend material at least twice as fast as someone can speak it.

The full version is inexpensive (less than $30 at the time of this post). There’s also a premium version that works for offline videos too (under $100).

I was going to recommend this utility no matter what, but since they have an affiliate program, I’ll earn a small commission on each sale that results from my links. After doing the free trial, I purchased a copy of this app for myself, so in this case I’m a regular customer passing on something I think you’ll appreciate. Any commissions I happen to earn will be used to help me bring on new staff members.

On the publisher’s website you can play a little demo video to see how MySpeed works. Do the free trial, and you’ll see right away that this app will save you time and help you digest educational videos in half the time (and sometimes a third of the time).

Maybe now I can actually make it to the end of an Eckhart Tolle video without wanting to commit seppuku.

Thanks to Jim Kwik for telling me about this app.

For a related post I wrote on how to speed up audio, see Overclock Your Audio Learning.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

First off, adapting to biphasic sleep was really no big deal. Compared to the first week of polyphasic sleep, this was easier by at least an order of magnitude. I feel pretty well adapted to biphasic sleep physically now, but it may take a while longer to become mentally and emotionally comfortable with it. It still feels a little strange, but that’s to be expected.

For the first several days it was very much like having jetlag. I felt out of sync with the time of day. During this time I relied heavily on Paraliminals as an extra pick-me-up — this was very effective at eliminating drowsiness and keeping me alert for a few more hours when I needed a boost.

It was tough getting out of bed at 5am some mornings, but it surely helped that I was already used to getting up at this time.

The worst time of day during the adaptation was late morning, roughly 9am to 11am. I usually felt the best in the afternoons around 3-5pm and in the evening around 9-11pm. I was impressed with how awake I felt at 11pm sometimes — on my monophasic schedule I’d normally be asleep by then.

The adaptation period was definitely easier when I ate lighter foods. If I ate something cooked like a bowl of brown rice, some drowsiness would hit me about 30 minutes after eating. But when I stuck with fresh fruit and green smoothies, I usually felt okay.

Now I’m feeling generally fine. I still have some bouts of drowsiness now and then, but it’s been getting better.

The daily rhythms of when I feel alert vs. drowsy are totally different than what I’m used to on monophasic sleep. It’s strange to feel so wide awake after 10pm. This part takes some getting used to. I feel like I have this whole extra productive period after the time I used to go to bed.

Just yesterday I discovered that my alarm clock, which I’ve owned for years, actually has a nap button. I set the nap timer for 90 minutes, so now all I have to do is push that one button, and it automatically sounds the alarm after 90 minutes have passed. It’s a fairly complicated alarm clock that includes an iPod docking station, so it was very timely to discover this feature now.

My naps aren’t consistently 90 minutes though. Sometimes it’s hard to fall asleep or to stay asleep for 90 minutes straight. Today it took me about 30 minutes to fall asleep at nap time, and then I woke up 15 minutes before the alarm went off. So I only slept about 45 minutes. I suspect this will get better with practice though. Another possibility is that I may not need the full 4.5 hours of sleep at night. I might be able to drop that to 3 hours. For now I’ll stick with 4.5 though — I want to give myself more time to get used to this in its current form. This sleep pattern is working well enough that I want to lock in what I have. I can tweak it later.

One biphasic sleeper said he got the best results from napping on his couch and sleeping at night in his bed. I tried couch naps and bed naps and don’t notice much difference either way. Presently I prefer to nap in my bed. I don’t find it any more difficult to get out of bed than it is to get off the couch.

Overall I’m definitely liking it. Biphasic sleep really does seem to deliver the best of both worlds. I can stay up past midnight each day and still get up at 5am. A couple nights I went out at 10pm, just because I could. It’s nice to live in a city where lots of places are open late.

I need a bit more time to get comfortable with this though. It’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that I can be a morning person and a night person without having to choose between them. And I can do this every single day.

I already seem to be more productive on this sleep schedule too. The extra waking time, which may only be 60-90 minutes per day, is very noticeable. It may not sound like a lot, but it sure feels like a lot. Many biphasic sleepers reported having more energy on this sleep schedule. I think I’m just beginning to experience that too, which is really nice.

I’m also feeling more relaxed on this sleep schedule. I feel like I have more time than I need each day. Some nights when I expect it’s nearly time to wind down and go to bed, I check the time and see that I still have 2-3 hours left before bedtime. I’ve been having to come up with extra activities to fill the time. Since I began this trial, I’ve listened to 4 or 5 audio programs (ranging from 1 hour to 8 hours each) and read 2 books. It’s nice to have extra time to invest in personal growth.

One thing I’m not sure about yet is when to take my 90-minute nap each day. Compared to the 20-minute nap cycles I was used to, 90 minutes really feels like a lot of time. At first it was hard for me to sleep that long, but I’m gradually getting used to the longer cycles. I’ve tried taking these naps at different times, as early as 2pm and as late as 8pm. Most days I began the nap between 5pm and 7pm. I still don’t know what time works best for me yet. I’ll have to continue to experiment. I have the flexibility to take the nap whenever I want, so my main consideration is how to achieve the best overall energy and alertness.

I’m not sure how important it is to take the nap on a consistent schedule or if it’s fine to shift it around each day. Presently I wait until I feel a certain threshold of pressure telling me to go to sleep. This pressure is similar to what I experienced on polyphasic sleep when my next nap time approached. It’s a rather gentle sensation that gradually increases the longer I go without a nap.

Right now I’m pretty optimistic about biphasic sleep, so I intend to stick with it for now. Rachelle will be back in town next week, and I’m curious to see how it works when I have someone living with me. She even suggested that she might want to try it with me.

Wow… I still have 2-1/2 hours till bedtime. What to do now?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

A final work product doesn’t have to be perfect to produce strong results. However, the project must be essentially complete.

A mediocre but complete film script can still be made into a movie. A beautifully crafted but half-finished script is largely worthless.

An unpolished but shippable software program can still provide value to customers and generate sales. A feature-rich but perpetually unshippable piece of software will usually generate zero sales (QuickBooks notwithstanding).

Completion generates results. Perfectionism delays or kills results.

Perfectionism vs. Polish

Perfectionism isn’t the same thing as polishing. Polishing a completed project can make it even better, as long as the polishing process doesn’t incur unreasonable delays or lead to the cancelation of the project. In many cases polishing can be done after the initial project is declared complete. A book can be revised in future editions. A song can be remixed. A website can be updated after it’s online.

I’ve done well as a blogger because I publish articles, not because I write them. I never feel that any article I post is perfect. But I push myself to publish what I write, even though the result is always less than perfect. This gets value into people’s hands, and it generates web traffic and income for me. My website is far from perfect as well, but it’s functional enough to deliver value to people. This is a better result than the perfect website with the perfect content with the launch delayed indefinitely.

Standards for Completion

While it’s great to have high standards for quality, how do those standards affect your ability to complete projects?

Are your standards for quality so unrealistic that they prevent you from being able to do the work necessary for completion?

If you claim to have high standards, but you aren’t producing much deliverable output, then I would suggest that your standards are lame. What good is a standard if it doesn’t produce results?

Make sure that your standards serve your drive for completion. When are you going to deliver something finished? How are you going to bring your project to a close and get it released?

Fantasy Standards

A fantasy standard is one that allows you to delude yourself into believing that you’re creating something of incredibly high quality or value, but you aren’t actually delivering the final work product within a reasonable period of time.

One reason people adopt fantasy standards is that they fear delivering their final work product.

It can be scary to deliver something that’s imperfect. As long as you’re still “working” on a project that hasn’t shipped, you can succumb to the delusion that when it finally does ship, everything will be rosy.

The truth is that whenever you do deliver your final work product into someone else’s hands, it will virtually never be received with 100% appreciation and gratitude. Someone will always find fault with it. This comes with the territory.

If you release a movie, people will give it negative reviews. If you publish a book, people will criticize it. If you launch a website, some people won’t like it.

Accepting the Consequences of Completion

If you expect that when you complete a project, the consequences will all be perfectly positive, this will fuel your sense of perfectionism, and you’ll suffer endless delays.

The truth is that completing a project will usually result in a mix of positive and negative consequences.

If your project is a good one, however, the best you can hope for is that the positive consequences will outweigh the negative consequences. But don’t be so naive as to presume that you’ll be able to avoid all the negative consequences.

I recently read a biography of Depeche Mode, which is my favorite music group. Given their immense popularity and their tens of millions of sales, they’ve been one of the most successful bands of all time. But whenever they release new material, some members of the music press always trash them. No matter what they do, some well-known reviewer will give them a rating like 1/5 or 2/5. The band constantly received scathing reviews.

Of course they received many positive reviews too, but there’s always someone willing to criticize their work. Some of their most popular songs like “Master and Servant” and “Blasphemous Rumours” were even banned in certain places due to being too controversial or racy, so they lost out on a lot of potential radio play.

And yet despite these and many other difficulties, they continued to publish more music, and they’ve been incredibly successful, and countless bands have said that DM has been a major influence on them.

The band has certainly had its ups and downs over the years (drug addiction, attempted suicide, divorces, depression, personality clashes, etc.), but despite all of those problems, they’ve been able to pull together and complete songs and get them released to the public. Their songs aren’t perfect (except for “Perfect” I suppose), but they’ve been very good at getting songs and albums finished. Sometimes it was very difficult for them, but they kept on publishing, as opposing to creating half-finished songs and setting them aside.

Many of of DM’s songs are only so-so, but by continuing to publish again and again, they’ve managed to create many solid hits along the way, such as “Enjoy the Silence”. And still for every hit, there’s some reviewer who’s willing to say, “That song is lame and here’s why…”

A More Realistic View of Success

Success in any venture is never 100% Smurfy. The roses always come with thorns.

When you do complete some great projects and you enjoy the success that comes as a result, you’ll invariably have to deal with some negative consequences that come along for the ride. Ultimately you’ll have to devote some time to thorn management.

This isn’t an untenable problem. Thorns can be managed. However, it’s important to accept that these thorns exist and that occasionally you’ll have to deal with them.

Perfectionism can be regarded as an unwillingness to deal with the thorns of success. But since the thorns are largely unavoidable, the only way you can realistically save yourself from having to deal with thorns is by preventing success itself. When you don’t consciously realize that you’re resisting success in this manner, it shows up as perfectionism. This gives you the impression that you’re working towards the results you desire, but in reality your projects always get sidetracked. Of course, you’re the one who’s subconsciously derailing them.

I have many friends who could be considered highly successful, and they all have thorns to deal with. Some are international bestselling authors. They’ve been on Oprah, and they enjoy a high standard of living. However, they also have to deal with the stress of busy travel schedules and lots of people wanting something from them. If you got to know them, you’d never say that their lives are perfect. But they do tend to be happier when they’re achieving new goals and getting projects completed. Most authors I know are quite radiant when they’ve just finished a new book.

Playfully Engaging With the Negative Aspects of Success

When you adopt a more realistic view of success, it becomes easier to complete projects. Perfectionism is less of a problem when you’re willing to accept the negative consequences that tag along with the positive ones.

Whenever I publish a new article, I know that some people won’t like it. Even when I feel I’ve shared some great insights, I know from experience that some people will think it sucks. Some people will criticize my article on their own blogs. Every now and then, someone actually launches a whole new blog just for the purpose of criticizing what I write. I accept all of that because it’s a side effect of success. These thorns come with the roses I receive. If I was failing, these thorns wouldn’t be arising.

What works for me is having a playful attitude towards the negative aspects of success. I think it’s unwise to take ourselves too seriously. If we fully and completely accept that success naturally includes some downsides, then we can relax and enjoy the creative process without undue stress or delay. It’s like accepting that if you win the lottery, you’ll lose a significant percentage of your winnings to taxes, and your old friends may start acting weird around you. If you accept that this is okay, then you can enjoy the win without stressing over the consequences.

Perfectionists fear the negative aspects of success, such as turning in a completed work project and having their boss criticize it, or releasing a book and seeing it get negative reviews. But if you turn towards this fear of negative results and engage with it playfully, the fear will greatly diminish. It’s easier to complete projects when you aren’t resisting completion due to fear of negative consequences.

One of the ways I’ve played with this in the past was to intentionally write some articles that I expected would generate mostly negative feedback. I still thought the articles were interesting and worthwhile, but at the time of publishing, I figured that most people wouldn’t like them very much. I wrote them partly as an act of courage for myself, so I could get past any lingering fears regarding negative feedback. I thought this would make me a better writer in the long run since I’d be more willing to take risks instead of playing it safe. As I expected, those pieces did generate plenty of critical feedback. But then again, some people loved them, and ironically one of those articles (10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job) became my most popular article ever. By playfully embracing the negative aspects of success, I actually invited more of the positive aspects into my life as well.

In retrospect this was a healthy exercise because it helped me develop the willingness to publicly explore a broader range of topics.

Think of this process as immunizing yourself with respect to the negative aspects of success. If you playfully engage with the negative aspects, you probably won’t see them as such a big deal. Your reaction will become less resistant and more neutral. You might even come to enjoy what you once felt was negative. For example, you may learn to appreciate the extra publicity, links, and traffic your critics send you.

Loving the Finish Line

Whenever you cross the finish line, the result is never perfect. You’ll always look back at the days behind you and feel you could have done better. Celebrate and enjoy your finishes anyway.

Ten years ago I ran the L.A. Marathon. My performance sucked because I ran with a knee injury (which wasn’t such a good idea in retrospect), and I was in pain for most of the race. It also rained for the first two hours of the race, so I ran wearing a plastic bag, and my shoes got wet. But I still crossed the finish line and picked up my finisher’s medal. I couldn’t run for many weeks afterwards, but I’m glad to have actually completed a marathon.

It’s helpful to accept and embrace the negative aspects of success, so don’t resist success. But at the same time, we can still focus most of our attention on the positive aspects. Accept the presence of thorns, but let the rose inspire you.

Your results will never be perfect, but a pretty good result is better than no result.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina