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

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

This certainly won’t be my first sleep experiment. I’ve previously written about becoming an early riser, and I did polyphasic sleep for 5-1/2 months in 2005-2006.

Polyphasic sleep was an amazing — but immensely strange — experience. This involved sleeping 20 minutes at a time, every 4 hours, around the clock, so that’s only 2 hours of sleep out of every 24 hours. The first week involved some hellish sleep deprivation, but it became much easier once I adapted.

What I disliked about polyphasic sleep was the rigidity of it. Naps had to be taken on a fairly rigid schedule, so activities had to be slotted into 3 hour and 40 minute periods of wakefulness. I could shift the naps around a little from time to time, but missing even one nap could mean feeling worn out for several more cycles. Another factor I disliked was the strange disconnection I felt with other human beings who had to hibernate every night while I was awake. Looking back, I’m a bit amazed that I kept it up for so long, but after the first month, it had become a habit, so even though it was challenging, I was somewhat used to it by then.

My Biphasic Sleep Trial

Biphasic sleep has many variations. The version I’m trying will probably look something like this:

12:30-5:00 am – core sleep (4.5 hours)

6:00-7:30 pm – nap (1.5 hours)

I feel good about the core sleep period. I might try reducing the amount of time later, but I’ll stick with 4.5 hours at least during the adaptation. I normally get up at 5am every day, so I think it gives me an advantage to keep the same wake up time with biphasic sleep. And it doesn’t seem that difficult in principle to stay up a couple hours later than usual.

I’m not sure about the best time to schedule the nap, however. I chose this time partly based on what I learned from other successful biphasic sleepers and partly based on what fits well into my schedule. I’m willing to shift it earlier or later based on how I feel though. I suspect it may take some experimentation to learn what works best for me.

Based on the logs of biphasic sleep trials, it appears that adapting to biphasic sleep is very mild compared to adapting to polyphasic sleep. One person described it as feeling like having jetlag for a week. I think I can handle that. I’ve kept my schedule fairly light this week in terms of scheduled obligations, so it’s a good week to make the attempt.

Why Biphasic Sleep?

My motivation is pretty simple. I want to see if I can have the best of both worlds — to remain an early riser while also being able to stay up later at night.

If I have to choose one or the other, I’d prefer to remain an early riser. I LOVE getting up before dawn every morning. I enjoy going to the gym when it’s not so crowded and driving home afterwards while it’s still dark. I like having my breakfast smoothie while the sun is rising. It feels great to get an early start to my day.

If I sleep in past sunrise, I feel lazy and unproductive, and my motivation drops. If I roll out of bed at 7am, I feel like I’m starting my day way behind.

But I also live in Las Vegas, and people who come to town usually want to hang out later than 10pm each night. There are many interesting social opportunities that would require staying up past my bedtime.

In the past I would sometimes switch to being a night owl for a bit, and then I’d adapt back to being an early riser afterwards. I don’t like doing that so much though. Sometimes I’d decline late night social opportunities because I didn’t want to throw off my sleep schedule. I know that I feel much better when I get up early, and I don’t want to be sleep deprived the next day.

There are also some things I’d like to do that aren’t practical for an early riser, such as going out dancing. Rachelle and I had a wonderful time dancing in New Orleans earlier this year, and we’d love to do more of that… maybe take some lessons and learn different styles too. But the Vegas clubs don’t open till 10pm, so in order to make this happen, I have to throw off my sleep schedule.

So I would love it if I had a sleep schedule that allowed me to enjoy being an early riser while also allowing me to stay up late at night — and without messing up the routine and/or leaving me feeling sleep deprived.

Biphasic sleep looks like a promising candidate for a solution, so I’m excited to try it out and see how it goes. Taking a nap in the early evening doesn’t seem like too big a sacrifice, and I may have some flexibility in when I take it. I could even do a full-day workshop during the day and then nap afterwards. Also, I can probably skip the nap if it’s too inconvenient and just sleep monophasically the next night. And I always have the option of going off schedule and dealing with the consequences later.

Another benefit to biphasic sleep is that you can get by with a bit less sleep, and some people report feeling a lot better on biphasic sleep than on monophasic. I’m not overly concerned with the extra waking time, but I am curious to see if I feel more energetic than usual on biphasic sleep. If it feels good, I’ll be more inclined to stick with it.

Biphasic sleep is another tool I want to add to my personal growth toolbox. There may be some times in my life when it works well and other times when it’s not needed. I feel like I’m currently in one of those times where it could be very useful.

Self-Discipline vs. Spontaneity

It can be tricky to achieve a healthy balance between self-discipline and spontaneity. If you’re too disciplined, you can become overly rigid and miss some wonderful growth opportunities. But if you’re too spontaneous, then your life may become messy and unfocused, struggling to get ahead. Disciplined, focused efforts can create some wonderful long-term payoffs, such as multiple streams of passive income that render a time-sucking job completely unnecessary. It takes a careful balance between these two factors to create a life of freedom and fulfillment.

If my biphasic sleep schedule works and I like it, then I can enjoy the best of both worlds — maintaining a regular, disciplined sleep schedule while also being able to enjoy the spontaneity of staying out late with friends, going dancing, etc. I know that for some people, staying up just past midnight isn’t late, and I’ve had my share of nights out that didn’t end till after dawn, but it wouldn’t make me happy to do that on a regular basis. I did enough of that to last a lifetime during my teens and 20s. In my 30s I fell in love with self-discipline.

Self-discipline pays off with the opportunity to be more spontaneous. It’s much easier for me to be spontaneous when you have full control of your schedule and don’t need a job. So if you like spontaneity, you’d better fall in love with self-discipline, or you’ll probably end up stuck working hard to fulfill someone else’s desire for more spontaneity.

Being spontaneous also makes it easier to be disciplined. If all you see before you is work, work, and more work, that isn’t very motivating. But if you make an effort to have fun, take unplanned trips, and live by the seat of your pants on occasion, you’ll burn off a lot of stress, and your motivation will increase. Happiness is a lot more motivating than tension.

Already Underway

I started doing biphasic sleep yesterday, so I’m presently on Day 2. Yesterday I took a nap in the afternoon and then went to bed at 12:30am as planned. I got up at 5am and felt a bit more groggy than usual, but it wasn’t too bad. I went about my usual morning routine and didn’t have any problems. It’s almost 1pm now, and I’m still feeling pretty good.

To make the adaptation easier, I’m sticking with a mostly raw diet (and all vegan of course, as I’ve been doing for 14+ years), heavy on the fresh juice, and caffeine-free. I made 2 quarts of juice this morning (carrot-apple-celery-romaine-dandelion-ginger-lime), so that will be about 50% of my calories for the day from juice. The benefit of juice is that it takes very little energy to digest, so it’s less of a drain on the body. I know from experience with polyphasic sleep and various dietary experiments that when I eat mostly fresh fruits and veggies and fresh juices, I don’t need as much sleep, and I feel more energetic during the day. My heart rate is also lower when I exercise. So I want to give myself every advantage to minimize the feeling of sleep deprivation. I still want to get a lot done this week, so I’d rather not be a zombie if I can avoid it.

I’m not planning to blog each day of this as I go along, but I may post an update now and then if I have something interesting to share.

I’m not committing to sleeping biphasically for any particular number of days just yet. My first goal is to make it through the adaptation period and see what it feels like once my body is used to it. Once I see what it’s like, I’ll decide if I want to stick with it for a while. If I don’t like it, I won’t continue with it.

Wish me luck!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Here are some realizations I’ve had as a result of leaving Facebook after 2+ years as an active user. I’m sure some of these realizations can be generalized to social networking as a whole, but I’m going to focus mainly on my personal experience with Facebook. I can’t guarantee you’ll find much overlap between my realizations and your experiences, but I’m sure some people will see similar patterns.

Facebook communication is mostly low-priority noise.

When I dropped Facebook, I noticed that the communication volume in my life dropped significantly. However, I felt no drop in the level of significant and meaningful communication. What I seemed to lose was mostly a lot of noise.

Generally speaking, communicating via Facebook is a shallow experience. You read streams of brief messages from a variety of people, but the messages don’t contain much depth. Most are trivial and mundane. Some are clever or witty. Very little of the information you’ll digest on Facebook is memorable and life-changing. Using Facebook can still give you a feeling of connectedness, but the long-term benefits are negligible.

Facebook essentially gives you the emotional sense that you’re doing something worthwhile (i.e. connecting with people), but when you step back and look at your actions and results from a more objective perspective, it becomes clear that you’re really just spinning your wheels.

Consequently, when I dropped Facebook, I let go of a lot of trivial communication, but I don’t have the sense that anything truly valuable has been lost.

Impulse sharing comes with a price.

In the weeks after quitting Facebook, I still felt the urge to share certain things with my online “friends”. I’d have a clever thought and feel, I should post this. Or I’d take a really cool photo and think, I ought to share this.

In the past I’d have shared those tidbits out of habit. Then I’d check back in later and read through a few dozen comments people left. And there would be a little emotional reward in having that sense of connection.

But without the option to impulse-share during the past 30 days, I allowed those feelings to come and go without acting on them. I noticed that there was a consequence to sharing in real-time. I wasn’t being very present in the moment. While things were happening around me, I was off thinking about my online posse and what I might wish to share with them.

When I stopped acting on the desire to impulse-share, I become more present to what I was doing in the moment. Instead of being distracted by thoughts of connecting with people at a distance, I did a better job of connecting with the people right in front of me. I felt more immersed in my experiences. That was a subtle change at first, but it feels good.

During the past two years, I’d often feel obligated to share frequent updates with my online “friends”, most of whom I’d never met in person. If I didn’t post an update for a while, some would complain. If I shared something cool, people would thank me for it.

Now that I’ve been rolling back this conditioning, I can see what a dead end it’s been. I allowed social media to condition me to behave a certain way, but it’s not a conscious choice I would have made otherwise. So it’s nice to regain conscious control over this part of my life.

Even after 30 days, the desire to impulse-share is still there, but it’s growing fainter, replaced by a growing desire to “be here now,” fully present in what’s going on in front of me. I still like sharing, but it’s better to do so thoughtfully instead of impulsively.

Friends lose their individuality and become part of a collective.

Facebook compacts so much communication into a single stream, and this can have a depersonalizing effect. As I continued to use the service to interact with people en masse, I gradually began thinking of my online friends as a network, stream, or blob, as opposed to valuing each person as a unique individual.

When I’d post a status update, who was the intended recipient? Which friend was I updating? In truth I wasn’t sharing with anyone in particular. I was simply sharing with the collective.

If I posted something on a friend’s wall, I wasn’t just communicating with that friend. I was communicating with their posse too. If I used the private messaging feature, it was just one message among dozens. Friends were becoming like interchangeable drones.

One thing that surprised me was just how few of my Facebook friends I actually missed when I left the service. It was difficult to think of my old Facebook friends as individuals. They were all just part of the collective whole. When I unplugged from the collective, it wasn’t like I’d lost any individual friends. I can barely remember the names of all the people I used to connect with there. I’d already lost the ability to distinguish Third of Five from Seven of Nine.

Dropping Facebook wasn’t at all like disconnecting from hundreds of individual friends. I didn’t miss anyone in particular because my Facebook experience was like connecting with a collective. I noticed the absence of the collective when I left, but I didn’t miss it per se.

The exception is that if I knew specific Facebook friends from real life, meaning that we’d met in person and had at least one good conversation together, then I could still see them as individuals. But I don’t need Facebook to stay in touch with those people anyway, so I didn’t feel like I was losing any of these connections by dropping Facebook.

I realize this might sound rather strange, but it’s the best I can explain it. My Facebook page was maxed out at 5K friends and was very active. If I’d only had 50-100 friends, then it might not have felt like I was interacting with a collective.

The feeling that I was interacting with a collective began to feel rather creepy, as you might imagine. I’m glad to be off of Facebook, since I really don’t wish to be assimilated. It’s nice not to feel like there’s an endless stream of other people’s thoughts flowing through my mind all the time. I can hear my own thoughts once again, and they’re a lot more relaxed and coherent.

Facebook creates a false and unsatisfying sense of socializing.

I’m somewhere between an introvert and an extrovert. As a child I was very introverted. In kindergarten I was the kid who played in the sandbox all by himself. I don’t think I was lonely. I just found sand toys more interesting than people.

As I aged, however, I gradually became more extroverted. Partly this was by choice. I pushed myself to develop my social skills and to embrace what I once avoided.

It’s said that you’re an introvert if you recharge your batteries while being alone, and you’re an extrovert if you recharge in the company of others. That metaphor doesn’t seem to work for me though. I prefer balance, usually by taking turns. If I spend a lot of time alone, I feel a strong desire to go out and be social. But after a very social week, I feel the desire to retreat back to my cave and enjoy more solitary time.

Being active on Facebook had the effect of filling my social bucket. But it was essentially a false fill, like drinking salt water instead of fresh water. Instead of providing a real sense of connection that satisfies, it made me think I was out there being social, but I’d still be “hungry” afterwards. Facebook activity could never recharge my batteries in the way that face to face interaction could.

When I dropped Facebook, I began feeling genuinely more social when I’d go out. Even when running errands, I’d notice myself chatting and joking around with people more often. When I was active on Facebook, I wouldn’t do that as much because I had the false sense that I was being social by interacting with my online posse.

Facebook is computer interaction, not human interaction.

The reality of using Facebook is that you’re just typing and viewing insignificant bits of information on a digital device (computer, cell phone, iStuff, etc).

The next time you use such a service, pause for a moment and do a reality check. What are you actually doing? Who’s with you? How is this advancing your life? What if you do this for 20 more years? What do you expect to gain from it?

You can call it social networking, but it’s not really a social experience if you’re actually alone sitting at a computer. Real socialization is face to face.

There’s a tremendous richness to in-person socialization that just doesn’t translate over the Internet, at least not yet.

A ***hug*** isn’t a real hug. A smiley isn’t a real smile. All you’re doing is pushing buttons.

I’ll go so far as to say that Facebook isn’t social networking. It’s anti-social retreating.

If you want to disagree with me about this, you’ll have say it to my face. If you try to tell me off by typing something on a digital device, you’re only proving me right. Evil, I know.

A friend isn’t necessarily a “friend”.

I can be friendly with people from all walks of life, but when it comes to which people are most compatible as my long-term friends, the Facebook pool isn’t a good fit for the kinds of lasting friendships I really wish to cultivate.

The main issue is the age difference. Most of my Facebook friends were in their 20s. I’m sure that’s a big part of the service’s demographic. It’s also a big part of my blog’s readership, and many of my articles are targeted to the needs of that age group. I already have many friends in their 20s, but if I draw too many of my friends from this pool, it comes with a price.

I can relate to what it’s like to be a 20-something these days, so I’m able to be a friend to someone in that age group, but it’s rare that such people are able to be a good friend to me. They simply don’t have the life experience to give the kind of value I gain from a good friendship.

In your 20s it’s common to do a lot of soul-searching and experimenting to figure out what to do with your life. To get the career part of your life going well, you basically have to figure out 4 things: (1) what you can do to earn a good income, (2) what skills and talents you can develop to a high degree, (3) what you enjoy doing, (4) what you can contribute. It takes some effort to figure these out. Then it takes more effort to massage yourself into the area of intersection, such that you can earn a good income doing what you love and what you’re good at, and thereby make a meaningful contribution too. Most of the 20-somethings I know are still struggling to figure this out, so they can’t be of much help to me in working on what lies beyond this.

I like having younger friends. They help me stay young at heart, and they help me keep my thinking from becoming stale. Their needs and concerns provide me with an endless supply of ideas. But I also need older, more experienced friends, especially people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond. I gain so much from their wisdom and knowledge. Having the right balance is key. Otherwise you become socially stagnant, and the sparkle drains from your social life. Instead of appreciating your friends, you start taking them for granted. I noticed I was beginning to fall into this trap last year, so I knew it was time to shuffle the deck and rebalance this part of my life.

The problem with Facebook is that it greatly unbalanced the social part of my life, skewing it in the direction of spending lots of time with people nearly half my age. This dragged my thinking backwards in terms of maturity. When I dropped Facebook, my social life began to rebalance itself automatically. This is causing other positive ripples as well. Many problems are easier to solve when you approach them with a 40-something’s discipline or a 50-something’s patience as opposed to a 20-something’s youthful energy.

Ask yourself what your life would be like if 80-90% of your social interactions were with people roughly half your age. Can you see how that might unbalance your social life?

For many years this has been a challenging part of my life to balance. It took a while to recognize and accept that my online “friends” and my best in-person friends come from different pools and move in different circles.

Most of my Facebook “friends” wouldn’t have been very compatible as in-person friends. We wouldn’t have had enough in common to develop a particularly deep friendship, and the interactions would have been too unbalanced. So it seems odd to refer to them as friends in the same way I’d refer to my in-person friends.

I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t just fill up my social bucket with an endless supply of 20-something friends and expect good results, even if they’re very intelligent, growth-oriented, open-hearted 20-somethings. This kind of imbalance happens by default when I leave too many doors and windows open since the bulk of my online readership is in their 20s. If I allow too many of my typical readers to become my friends, my social life becomes unbalanced and stagnant, even as it maintains the illusion of freshness. It took a long time to recognize that this was happening.

In order to rebalance this part of my life, I’ve had to deliberately close some of those accessible avenues, such that I can spend more time connecting with people who can add serious value to my life and help me keep growing (peers, mentors, etc). I like having some 20-something friends, but I can’t have hundreds of them. So that’s one reason Facebook really had to go — using Facebook was a lame attempt on my part to expect that my peers would come from the same pool as my readers.

Facebook is ruled by addicts.

This is probably obvious, but the Facebook “friends” that you’ll interact with most frequently will tend to be those who are the most addicted. They post more status updates and comments because they spend a lot of time on the service. So you end up giving the most attention to those who are the greatest addicts.

In short, you end up spending the most time interacting with the people who are the worst influences — highly unproductive people who don’t value their time. This can have many adverse effects, such as causing you to become more addicted to the service and to feel the urge to post more often just for the sake of posting.

If your strongest connections on Facebook are the most addicted, how is that going to influence you over time? The closer you become with those people, the more you’ll get sucked into spending more time on the service.

After I left Facebook, I asked myself, Should I really be giving so much attention to the greatest social networking addicts?

While even the biggest addicts can be very intelligent, helpful, and growth-oriented, their addiction tends to sap their ambition, causing them to make little forward progress in life. It should come as no surprise that many of these people are financially stagnant. It’s hard to improve your finances when you devote so much time to non-income generating activities each day.

When I dropped Facebook, I also dropped off the radar of some of the biggest social networking addicts. I’m no longer subject to their influence, which was probably stronger than I’d care to admit. Breaking free of this cycle was a wise choice. I should have done it sooner.

Facebook is lazy socialization.

Social networking makes it easy to become socially lazy. With a few clicks, you can delude yourself into thinking you have an active social life.

But is that the real story? Are you enjoying some intelligent face time with these friends? Or are you merely exchanging witty banter? Do you deeply value these friendships? Are you having the social experiences you desire? Or are you just wasting time clicking and typing and telling yourself you’re being social?

What else could you be doing instead of social networking?

You could go dancing or see a show with your boyfriend or girlfriend. No one special in your life? Wonder why… A person with halfway decent social skills can change that in a day. Has the Internet become your social hiding place? Does the thought of going outside and socializing with strangers make you anxious? If so, you can overcome that weakness with practice.

You could have a nice chat with a wealthy mentor about how to improve your finances. No wealthy friends? Think you’re going to meet them on Facebook?

It’s a good idea to pause and take a look at your social results. Has social networking transformed your life for the better? Has it helped bring empowering relationships, valuable contacts, and intelligent mentors into your life? Or does it leave you drifting in a sea of social drifters?

I found that spending more time on Facebook didn’t produce much value for me socially. I did make some interesting contacts now and then, but it wasn’t worth the time spent.

It’s true that in-person networking is more challenging. If your social skills are weak, you can pretend to be a social butterfly online just by throwing a lot of time at it. But you’re still going to be limited in the long run by your ability to connect with people face to face. Make sure you don’t let your social skills atrophy to the point where you end up spending more and more time alone, vainly trying to feed the illusion that you have a real social life.

Be sure to keep challenging yourself socially. If you only do what’s easy, you’ll grow weaker with each passing year.

Facebook is an expensive way to increase visibility.

I know there’s a great deal of hype about the business value of social networking. Much of that hype is circulated by those who are trying to make money from it. Be wary of taking advice about gold from those who make a living selling picks and shovels.

From a business standpoint, one supposed benefit of social networking is that it can raise your visibility. Raising your visibility is great. If you’re more visible (among the right people), you can attract more business. That part is all good.

But not all visibility-raising methods are the same. If you use Facebook to raise your visibility, it comes with a hefty price. As you raise your visibility, you also increase your accessibility.

For example, if you have a Facebook page, then you also have an inbox. At this time Facebook makes it impossible to disable the inbox. People can email you there. People I’d never met would email me on Facebook each day. Why? Because they could. Facebook made it easy for them to do so. They didn’t need my permission. Facebook would even let non-friends email me whenever they felt like it. Maybe that’s a bug, but that’s how it worked from my perspective.

If you have a Facebook page with a wall on it, then people can post comments on your wall. If you have a fan page, someone can “like” your fan page, spam your wall, and then “unlike” your fan page, and it’s impossible to ban them from repeated abuse. You just have to deal with it.

At low numbers, more accessibility isn’t so bad. Maybe you’d like the chance to communicate with more people. That’s all fine.

At higher numbers, the visibility-accessibility linkage becomes untenable. The more visible you are on Facebook, the more people have access to interact with you in some way, whether it’s by sending you private messages, posting messages on your wall, or inviting you to events and groups. Beyond a certain point, this kind of contact becomes impractical to deal with in any meaningful way.

I like that Facebook may have helped to increase my visibility by introducing people to my work who might otherwise never have learned about it. However, the price tag for that gain in visibility is a corresponding increase in accessibility. That price turned out to be way too high for me. I like helping people, but I can’t serve as a personal friend and therapist to thousands of individuals. That isn’t a sustainable way for me to contribute.

When I dropped Facebook, I breathed a major sigh of relief. In a way I’m still sighing 30 days later. It really is a great relief not to be so accessible anymore. I finally feel like I have the space to think about what I desire to contribute of my own accord instead of feeling overwhelmed with an endless flood of requests from others. The visibility gains that Facebook provides just aren’t worth the price. There are much easier and more effective ways to build visibility that don’t yield an accessibility penalty, such as doing interviews.

What About Twitter?

As for my Twitter account, the jury’s still out, but for now I’m still using it.

Twitter doesn’t create the same accessibility problem because by following zero people there, I’m not forced to have an inbox on the service. Even if I did have an inbox, it wouldn’t be bad because people could only send 140-character messages. But I find it best not to have an inbox there at all, so I never need to worry about people expecting me to reply to their direct messages. A few people apparently consider it poor Twitter etiquette to have thousands of followers and not follow anyone back. I don’t lose any sleep over it.

Occasionally I’ll skim through the public messages that people address to me, especially if I posted a question for feedback purposes, but I normally don’t pay much attention to the @stevepavlina replies since they’re mostly re-tweets of my own stuff. So if you tried to get my attention by publicly posting a message to me on Twitter, there’s a good chance I never saw it.

For now I’m okay using Twitter for posting broadcast-style messages because Twitter doesn’t force upon me the scaling headaches that Facebook does. If I double my Twitter followers, the service doesn’t require me to spend any more time there to keep my account tidy.

I nuked my Linkedin account at the same time I left Facebook. Linkedin is supposed to be a business networking service, and I had about 350 contacts there, but I always found that service utterly useless, so it was a no-brainer to dump it.

Try a 30-Day Facebook Fast

If you have any doubts about your own Facebook usage, I highly recommend you to try a 30-day Facebook fast.

It’s easy to do this because Facebook lets you (temporarily or permanently) deactivate your account without deleting your data. So if you decide you want to go back to using it later, you can always log back in again, and everything can be restored with a few clicks, including your wall, photos, etc.

As for the how-to, all you do is login to your Facebook account, and click Account -> Account Settings. Then at the bottom of that page, click “deactivate.” Follow the instructions from there. This won’t delete your data, but it will take your profile offline. You’ll become invisible on the service. To restore it later, just login again and click a similar link to bring it back.

If you really want to stay in touch with certain people from Facebook who don’t already have an alternate means of contacting you, you can send them a private message before you deactivate your account to let them know how to reach you during your hiatus.

I’m a big advocate of testing. If you’re an active Facebook user, and you go 30 days without it, you’ll gain a much clearer understanding of its role in your life. In my case it was obvious within a few days that the benefits I got from using it weren’t worth the effort, but there were other subtleties I didn’t notice until weeks later.

This is your life. It’s up to you to ensure that you’re getting good value from your online activities. Don’t just go through the motions because you’ve been conditioned by some service to behave a certain way.

As for myself, I’m sure it’s obvious that I have no plans to return to Facebook. Resistance is NOT futile.

*** hugs ***

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

I’ve been pretty active on Facebook in the past, and I have many friends who use the service. My personal page was maxed out at 5K friends for more than a year, and my fan page had just over 3300 fans. So it may seem a little surprising that I’d up and drop the service altogether.

There are a number of reasons I decided to do this, so let me ‘splain.

The main reason is that I dislike the way certain features on Facebook are designed and implemented. They may work okay for most users, but they aren’t a good match for someone in my shoes. Over time I felt like the system was becoming increasingly abusive in the way it treats me as a user, largely due to what I consider to be serious design flaws.

Obviously my situation isn’t like that of the typical Facebook user since I already had a substantial online following before I started using Facebook. It didn’t take long for my personal account to max out on friends. Once I got close to that limit, I lost the ability to send out new friend requests. So that feature hasn’t been available to me for more than a year. Facebook kept adding new incoming friend requests to a waiting list. It just left those requests in limbo, but I couldn’t do anything about that.

I thought that a solution would be to add a fan page, which I did in September, but then I ended up with two pages. That’s been awkward to maintain, especially since each type of page is administered differently. Also, Facebook’s latest update really broke the way fan pages can be administered, making it more trouble than it’s worth. I can either spend extra time on the admin side, let the page quality go down the drain, or drop it altogether. I choose the latter.

The biggest overall issue is that Facebook’s admin tools absolutely suck when you have a very well-known profile there. I think all of these problems are fixable from a design and programming perspective, but instead of fixing them, Facebook seems to break more things as time goes on.

My Facebook message inbox would receive daily spam, even from people I’ve unfriended and blocked, and there’s no way to prevent it. I disabled every possible email notification that Facebook might send me, but it’s still very lame to visit my Facebook page, see notification that I have several new messages, and all of them are spam from people I don’t know. This problem was minimal when I started using Facebook, but the longer I’ve been a member, the worse it became. Having another spammed inbox degrades the quality of the service a lot. When it got to the point where most of my Facebook messages were spam, I began to think, “Why bother with this?”

And of course you can’t disable their private messaging feature, which would have been my preference from the get-go. I don’t need another email inbox anyway. If you have a personal account on Facebook, then people can message you there, and you have to go to Facebook to reply. Even if I set it so that only friends can message me (the most restrictive setting they offer), it doesn’t work. For whatever reason, people could still spam me on Facebook whether we were friends or not.

I’d also receive countless event invitations from people I don’t know, in cities where I don’t reside, and there’s no way to block them. This is really lame. If given the choice, I’d disable event invites altogether, but of course they don’t provide such a setting. Event spam is apparently mandatory.

People tag me in random photos as a way of spamming my wall. If I don’t manually delete those, my photo section will eventually fill up with spammed photos. No way to prevent this.

People add me to groups without my permission, and I can’t prevent it. I can only manually unsubscribe after the fact.

There are numerous other forms of abuse employed by Internet marketers, spammers, born again nutters, and people who simply want to game the system. In my opinion, all of these problems could be solved with some moderately skilled programming.

And that’s just on the personal page side.

The best word I can use to describe Facebook’s fan page administration is “broken.” There are so many complaints about it from other fan page admins, but it seems like Facebook is ignoring these problems and perhaps even making things worse on purpose. Due to their business model, Facebook can actually make more money if they break things a certain way.

For example, in their latest “update”, Facebook removed the ability for fan page admins to block certain users from posting comments on their walls. So a spammer or troll can post comment spam on your wall, and for all practical purposes, you can’t prevent it. You can manually delete their posts after the fact, but they can just come back and post more.

A common trick used by spammers is to “like” your fan page, spam it, and then “unlike” your page. It appears that they can do this as much as they want, and you can’t prevent it. There’s no way to block them.

As a programmer myself, I can’t fathom that it would take much technical and design effort to address these issues, and Facebook is flooded with complaints from users begging them to fix these headaches. From my perspective as a Facebook user with a very active personal page and fan page, I can’t help but get the impression that Facebook deliberately wants to make some basic admin tasks (like blocking spammers) difficult or impossible in order to compel you to spend more time on the site. There doesn’t seem to be any other logical reason for these glaring design flaws that I can comprehend, other than pure incompetence, and based on their success in other areas, it seems more likely that these choices are deliberate.

I imagine that most Facebook users won’t encounter these problems, at least not to the degree that I did. They’re partly a problem of scale. The more people who know you on Facebook, the worse these problems become.

Given that Facebook’s business model is based on getting you to spend more time on their site, effectively addicting you to it, and given what I’ve seen from maintaining very active pages on their site, it looks to me like these “bugs” are intentional. For most users they’ll create only very minor headaches, probably not enough to motivate someone to leave the service but enough to produce a little extra gain for Facebook. An occasional spam message from a non-friend looks like a glitch or an accident if it only happens once or twice a year, but it brings you back to their site to deal with it, where you’ll be exposed to more ad impressions that generate revenue for Facebook. Multiply these seemingly infrequent problems by 500 million users, and something looks very fishy.

Either that, or they have some really incompetent interface designers and/or programmers, and I have a harder time believing that to be the case. Surely someone on their team is aware of all the complaints and requests to fix the broken elements. So why do they seem to ignore what appear to be such glaring (and fixable) problems?

I thought that Facebook would be an interesting place to share inspirational messages and build more community around growth-oriented people. But the current implementation of Facebook can’t handle the way I’ve been trying to use it without creating more headaches than it’s worth, and their momentum appears to be headed in the wrong direction for me to expect that these problems would be fixed anytime soon.

So I’ve crossed the threshold where Facebook’s value isn’t worth the hassle to use it. I concluded that the best choice was to simply drop the service altogether and invest my time elsewhere.

If you were one of the people who actively connected with me on Facebook and you’re disappointed by this decision, I’m sorry about that. Perhaps it’s for the best though.

From a subjective perspective, I’m not particularly disappointed. I’ve been wanting to spend less time online and more time connecting with people in person, so these problems may simply be part of the way that desire manifested.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Now it’s time for the advanced version: The 30-Day Supertrial.

[cue trumpets]

A Quick Review

When conducting a 30-day trial, you pick one habit or behavior you’d like to change, and you commit yourself to sticking with it for 30 days straight. If you miss even one day, you start back at Day 1.

It can be very difficult to change a habit for life, but if you use the psychological trick of telling yourself that it’s only for 30 days, your odds of success increase substantially. And of course once you reach Day 30, the new habit is already installed, and it’s much easier to continue it on Day 31 and beyond.

Some examples: Get up at 5am every morning. Eat a vegan or vegetarian diet. Avoid watching TV. Say “You are loved” to someone each day.

A 30-day trial is partly an experiment and partly an exercise in self-discipline. It’s an experiment in that you see for yourself how your life would be different if you made a certain change and stuck with it. A good 30-day trial will also push you to build your self-discipline, helping you grow stronger mentally and emotionally. It’s a workout for your willpower.

The more 30-day trials you successfully complete, the stronger your self-discipline muscle becomes. This will benefit you tremendously in all areas of life. On top of that, you get the benefits of the new habits you’ve installed, such as the educational value of reading lots of new books, the metabolic boost that comes from regular exercise, or the financial benefits of working on your Internet business every day.

When most of us reach adulthood, we have lots of crappy habits that don’t serve us, and our self-discipline tends to be very weak. For example, about 50 million Americans smoke, yet most of them would prefer not to. That’s a behavioral conditioning nightmare. What habitual actions are you succumbing to that you’d prefer not to?

Your level of self-discipline will have a strong impact on your self-esteem. The more disciplined you are, the more you can adopt positive habits and shed negative ones. Positive habits yield positive results, and positive results feel good. Feeling good gives you more energy, and that feeds into more positive actions, which in turn become positive habits.

30-day trials can be very challenging, but they’re also very effective. This is my #1 favorite tool for habit change.

Now in the past, I’ve cautioned people not to overdo it. Many people who are new to the concept of 30-day trials go kittywompus and try to install 5-10 new habits simultaneously. And almost without exception, they crash and burn. Usually they don’t even make it past Day 3.

It’s like trying to juggle too many balls at once. You end up dropping all of them. Zero results.

So I’ve advised people to stick with one 30-day trial at a time. One trial will be plenty challenging. And you can do 12 of these per year if you’d like. Even if you only succeed at half of them, that’s still a tremendous amount of improvement within a year.

Now I’m going to explain how to actually do the opposite.

Yes, Dr. Venkman, under certain conditions we can cross the streams. There’s definitely a very slim chance you’ll survive.

I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it! Let’s do it!

What Is a 30-Day Supertrial?

A 30-day Supertrial is when you attempt to make several significant behavioral changes in one 30-day period.

For example, you might attempt to install the following habits all at the same time:

1. Check email only once per day, and completely empty your inbox each time
2. Exercise every morning for 30 minutes minimum, alternating weight training and yoga workouts
3. Read positive, inspirational material for an hour before bed
4. Go to bed by 10pm every night
5. Spend 10-20 minutes per day visualizing your goals/intentions as already accomplished
6. Avoid consuming dairy products
7. Work on your screenplay for 2 hours per day

For 30 days you commit yourself to doing all of these things without exception.

If you’re like most people, then you’re going to fail. You probably won’t even make it through the first day, and the odds of making it through the first week successfully are more than 100-1 against you.

So if you want to have a chance in Sto’Vo’Kor of succeeding at this, you can’t be like most people.

You probably won’t heed my advice, but let me succumb to the delusion anyway and share some practical tips on how to increase your odds of success.

It’s Possible But Almost Not

First of all, it is possible to succeed at a Supertrial. It’s just extremely difficult. But like the Siren’s song, many of us can’t resist the seductive lure of instant behavioral nirvana.

Yes, it’s possible. It’s possible to flop a boat with 7-2 offsuit too, but the odds are against you.

Knowing how difficult this is, however, gives you a slight advantage. If you maintain a healthy respect for the challenge, you’re less likely to underestimate how tough it is, so you’ll be better prepared when you begin.

A Supertrial does make some sense because our behaviors are intricately linked. One behavior triggers another, which links to another, and so on.

Oversleeping in the morning leads to skipping exercise, which leads to a crappy breakfast and a late start on your day, which leads to feeling unproductive and lazy, which leads to low performance at work and a feeling of being drained at the end of the day.

On the flip side, getting up early gives you extra time to exercise, which boosts your metabolism and energizes you. You’ll also be more attracted to healthier foods after exercise, and this positive start can kick you into a productive workday, which leaves you with a delicious feeling of accomplishment in the evening, where you’ll still have plenty of energy to work on your personal goals.

Habits reinforce each other. They overlap. So the main idea behind a Supertrial is to collapse a whole chain of negative habits and replace them with a new chain of positive ones. In some ways this can actually be easier than trying to change habits one at a time since a Supertrial gives you the opportunity to cut out an entire chain of unhelpful behaviors.

Prepare Well

Read the article Habit Change Is Like Chess to understand the 3 phases of habit change. A 30-day trial occurs in the third and last phase. Make sure you devote sufficient effort to putting the right scaffolding in place and preparing for the trial as best you can.

For example, if you’re doing a dietary change, stock your kitchen with healthy foods and make sure the off-limit foods are out of the house before you even begin your trial.

Whatever you can set up, take down, or prepare in advance to make your life easier during the Supertrial, do that first. Give yourself a few days to get everything in place before you begin. You may be itching to start Day 1 as soon as you can, but that inspiration is only going to fizzle into disappointment if you don’t take enough prep time.

The more prepared you are when you kick off your Supertrial, the better your odds of success.

Train Up First

Supertrials are like triathlons. You don’t just show up for one with no advance training. You won’t even make it through the swimming portion if you do that.

This is a level you must build up to. Once you have at least 5-10 successful 30-day trials under your belt, then you might consider a Supertrial. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.

Supertrials are the advanced version of 30-day trials. Even a regular 30-day trial is well beyond the beginner level. The beginner version is a 5-day or 10-day trial.

You must learn to walk before you can run. Training up your self-discipline is a lifelong process. Start with what you can achieve, and keep upping the challenge level as you grow stronger. But don’t keep attempting to lift weights that you’re always dropping. Go lighter until you see what your capabilities are.

There’s no shame in being a beginner who accepts that s/he is a beginner. For the unwilling and impatient, there are humility lessons.

Eliminate Social Drag

If there are people in your life who will resist the changes you’re making, distance yourself from them as much as possible. Otherwise the social drag they create can decrease your motivation and hold you back.

For example, if part of your Supertrial includes working on your new Internet business for 2 hours per day, and you have a friend who thinks that the only people who make money online are scammers, that isn’t a good person to be connecting with during your trial.

Make yourself scarce to anyone who would drag you down. You’re going to have enough of a challenge without the unnecessary social resistance.

Don’t Announce It

With a normal 30-day trial, telling people about your commitment in advance can increase your chance of success because they’ll help hold you accountable.

But with a Supertrial, I’d advise you to do the opposite and keep it to yourself.

One reason is that you’re going to be attempting so much change at once, that most people won’t believe you can do it. So when you tell others about it, you’ll probably add more negative social drag. People will be watching for you to fail. That isn’t going to help you succeed.

The exception is that it’s okay to share this with people you genuinely expect will be encouraging and supportive. If you can secure more social support, then go for it. It can definitely help.

By the time you’ve built your self-discipline to the level where a Supertrial becomes potentially achievable, you’ll be so far beyond the average level of performance in society that most people will be turned off if you talk about it. You’ll just upset them, and they may secretly wish to see you fail. So my feeling is that you’re better off keeping them in the dark.

Many years ago I set a goal of going through a 4-year university in only 3 semesters by taking about triple the normal course load (as explained in Do It Now). I shared this goal with several people in advance. Most of them laughed or said I was deluded. Not a single person was encouraging. So I learned to keep a low profile, and I kept other people out of the loop. Further into this experience, one of my professors became curious about what I was doing, so I shared the details with him. He was able to relate because he had a very high-performance daughter. It was nice to gain that little bit of social support.

It takes more than discipline to get through a Supertrial. There may be unforeseen interactions between your habits that you didn’t account for. You may realize you didn’t set it up right after the first day or two, and you need to go back and revise your plan. So much can go wrong. With a Supertrial you really don’t need the added social pressure of accountability to others.

A Supertrial is more of an inner journey anyway. It’s about digging deep within yourself and giving birth to a whole new you. You need the space to focus on doing what needs to be done without worrying about other people’s reactions.

By the time you’re ready to attempt a Supertrial, you’ll have already trained your self-discipline to a high degree. And you’ll have a clearer understanding of what kinds of weights you can lift and which are too heavy for you. At this point you’re going to rely more on your inner resolve; social accountability won’t be as important. If you can’t hold yourself accountable, you aren’t ready to attempt a Supertrial anyway.

Don’t Wear Yourself Out

One of the most common mistakes people make when stacking multiple 30-day trials is that they include something in there that’s going to wear them out during the first week.

The craziest example is when people attempt polyphasic sleep, which is insanely difficult by itself, and then they stack a bunch of other trials on top of that. I’ve never seen anyone succeed this way. It’s like going to the gym for the first time ever and trying to bench press 300 pounds. Nice try, grasshopper… but no.

Only slightly less deluded is including something in your trial that’s going to make your energy levels wonky during the first several days. For example, if you currently drag yourself out of bed at 8am each morning, and getting up at 5am is part of your Supertrial, you can expect to be a bit sleep deprived during that first week until your body adapts to the new rhythm. Being tired will make it VERY difficult to succeed at the other parts of your trial.

Another example would be trying to switch from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to an all raw vegan diet. You’re probably going to deal with some intense detox (cold-like symptoms) during that first week or two. To stack even more on top of this is going to be too tough.

Any yet another example would be diving into a new weight training regimen, one that leaves you very sore during that first week.

If you’re going to attempt a Supertrial, do your best to avoid including a new habit that may wear you out during that first week. Do a separate 30-day trial for that item first, get it locked in, and then conduct a Supertrial afterwards. So go raw first, or become an early riser first, or start weight training first. Get the sleepiness, detox, and soreness out of the way. Then you can stack more on top with a Supertrial later. This will make your Supertrial much less stressful and a lot more achievable.

Guard your sleep during your Supertrial. Don’t push yourself to stay up later and later trying to squeeze everything in. If you can’t complete all your actions by your desired bedtime, then cut out some actions. Don’t deprive yourself of sleep. Sleep deprivation will increase your stress levels and your risk of illness. You don’t want to be fighting your own fatigue while you’re trying to complete a Supertrial. Supertrials are tough even when you maintain stellar energy levels.

Stagger Your Starting Days

Instead of launching every new habit on Day 1, you can stagger your starting days a bit. This gives you the opportunity to focus on adding one new habit every day or two, so Day 1 isn’t so overwhelming.

It’s a judgment call if you want to do this. It isn’t necessary, but it may help if your intended Day 1 looks a bit daunting.

Count Day 1 of your 30 days as the day you add on the final habit, so you’re still doing the full 30 days with every habit.

Have a Fallback Position

Prioritize the habits in your Supertrial, so if the going gets too tough, you can drop one or more of them and fall back to a smaller number that you’re committed to installing.

I suggest splitting your Supertrial habits into 3 lists:

1. A-list = definitely want these installed, would make a huge difference if I succeed
2. B-list = great to have, would certainly enhance my life, but not worth sacrificing my A-list items for them
3. C-list = nice to have but it’s the icing on the cake, but not worth sacrificing A-list or B-list items for them

If you feel too overwhelmed or stressed, and you’re at serious risk of failing your Supertrial, first cut out the C-list items. If you’re still overwhelmed, then cut out the B-list too. And worst case, fall back to your single most important A-list item.

Knowing in advance which items to cut in an emergency will at least allow you to fall back to a regular 30-day trial and still get something installed. That’s a lot better than dropping every single ball and achieving nothing.

Do the best you can, but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t get everything installed at once.

Design for Balance

Perhaps the best use of a Supertrial is to conduct a holistic rebalancing of your life across all key areas.

A well-balanced Supertrial will increase your chances of success. An imbalanced trial will generate inner resistance and make you want to quit.

Pay particular attention to the following:

Body – Include something to boost your energy and sense of well-being. Exercising in the morning is great because it will boost your metabolism, making you feel more alert and energetic during the day. It’s much easier to conduct a Supertrial when your energy is high.

Mind – Develop your mind during your Supertrial. Daily nonfiction reading is a nice practice. Then you’ll gain some educational value during your trial. Reading in the area of your career can be especially beneficial.

Career – Add a habit to benefit your career or your general work productivity, such as checking email only once a day, or saying something encouraging to each of your coworkers each day.

Finances – Add habits to improve your finances, such as updating your accounting records each day or working on a new Internet business for 2 hours per day.

Relationships – Add a habit to improve your social courage or relationship skills. Attempt to initiate a conversation with one new person per day. Or share lunchtime with a different coworker each day to improve your networking.

Emotions – Include habits that help you maintain a positive, action-oriented attitude. I listened to inspirational and educational audio programs for about 2 hours per day in college, mostly while walking to and from classes, and it kept my motivation levels very high.

Order – Add a habit to reduce chaos and increase the order and organization of your life, such as devoting 30 minutes per day to sorting and purging clutter in your home or office.

Spiritual Development – Include a habit like daily meditation or journaling, so you can enrich your inner life to keep pace with your outer enrichment.

Fun – Including at least one fun daily activity in your trial, such as playing a game with your family. This gives you a daily reward and something to look forward to. It also helps condition your mind to believe that self-discipline is fun. The more disciplined you are, the more time you’ll have to enjoy your life, and the less stressful your life will be.

This may sound like a tall order, but such a blend of habits will help to mutually reinforce each other, thereby increasing your chances of success. For example, improving your finances means you can afford to buy healthier foods, pay for yoga classes, etc. A holistic approach will help you make advances across the board, so no area of your life drags down the other areas.

Use Crisp Parameters

Define your habits crisply by spelling them out with nouns, verbs, and prepositions. Avoid the use of adjectives like more and better, since that’s a sign of wishful thinking (and it’s also dumb).

These are delusional goals: Exercise more. Eat healthier. Read faster. Complain less. Be nicer. Work harder.

You can’t succeed if you set delusional goals. Plus your cheek will be hurting after I smack you upside the head.

This is a crisp goal: Exercise on the treadmill at 60-80% max heart rate for 30 minutes per day.

With crisp goals you can’t delude yourself. It’s obvious if you’ve done it or not. An objective observer would give you the same thumbs up or thumbs down that you give yourself. There’s no room for debate.

To the maximum extent possible, define each habit in binary terms. Either you did it or you didn’t. Eliminate the middle gray area, unless you just want to do a make-believe trial with make-believe results.

Focus on Actions

The point of doing a Supertrial is to lock in some serious gains that will put you on a path for a major long-term boost in your results. However, during the Supertrial itself, it’s usually counter-productive to be too outcome-focused. Keep the end results in mind, but put your attention on the daily actions you need to take, and do them one at a time as they come up.

For example, “Write for 2 hours per day” is a better choice for a habit goal than “Write every day so as to complete the first draft of a book in 30 days.” The first one is more directly under your control, and it’s clear whether you’ve done it or not.

Supertrials are all about action. What are the daily actions you want to condition into habits, such that if you passively maintain beyond the initial trial, they’re likely to serve you well for many years to come?

How would your life be different if every day you… Did yoga for 45 minutes? Limited web surfing to 30 minutes max? Initiated a conversation with someone new? Read nonfiction for 30 minutes? Worked on an Internet business for 1-2 hours? Cuddled and caressed your significant other for 20 minutes? Took a shower? Organized your home for 20 minutes? Planned your next day for 10 minutes? Made travel plans for 30 minutes?

Schedule It

If you’re going to perform some action each day, decide in advance what time you’re going to do it.

If you have a lot of items to schedule, write out a schedule for a typical day, so you can see how everything fits together.

Give yourself some breathing room between activities. Don’t assume you can stop exercising and start showering in the very same minute, for instance.

If you don’t set aside a time for it, you haven’t yet committed to doing it.

Compensate for What’s Missing

Bad habits are sticky for a reason. They provide you with some benefits.

Before you drop a bad habit, consider what the benefit is. Then be sure to add something to your Supertrial to compensate for the benefits you may be losing when you cut out those bad habits.

Suppose you’re spending way too much time checking Facebook and other online forums during your workday. This kills your productivity, which in turn drags down your self-esteem and energy levels, preventing you from feeling the motivational boost that only a truly productive day can provide. Deep down you know this bad habit has to go.

But each time you attempt to drop it, you feel isolated and disconnected. You miss those frequent social connections, and pretty soon you’re back at it again.

Recognize that even though this habit is destroying your productivity, it’s actually helping you in a different way. It helps you periodically renew the feeling of being connected to others. That isn’t a bad thing at all.

What else can give you this feeling of connection without destroying your workday? There are many possible solutions.

One solution would be to timebox your online socializing by assigning it a time slot in the evening, so it doesn’t interfere with your workday. You can give yourself a liberal amount of time to socialize all you want, but not when you’re supposed to be working. If you want more frequent socializing, you can chop it up and schedule it during the natural breaks in your day, such as during lunchtime or with your afternoon snack.

Another solution is to reduce or eliminate the online socializing, and add a stronger habit that gives you even more of these benefits. Spend 30-60 minutes talking with friends on the phone each day. Arrange a social event at your house every day for 30 days, like a 2-3 hour game night. Or invite a different friend or coworker over for dinner each night. Communicating online can be fun, but nothing beats face-to-face connecting, especially when it comes to sharing laughs.

Still another option, which may be outside the scope of a Supertrial, would be to switch to a career that has you interacting with people a lot more, so you don’t feel disconnected during your workday.

Replace smoking with meditation and massage. Replace junk food with cuddle time. Replace masturbation with sex (or vice versa, depending on your priorities).

Notice the hidden benefit behind your bad habits. Instead of dropping those habits completely, look to replace them with new habits that provide even stronger benefits but without the drawbacks. This may take some trial and error experimenting to discover what works best for you, but it can certainly be done.

Include Downtime

Supertrials can be energizing, but they can also be physically and emotionally taxing, especially in the beginning when it takes a lot of conscious thought.

I recommend that you include at least 2 hours per day of downtime for rest and relaxation. Give your body and mind a complete break from the potential stress of your Supertrial.

You can use this time to lie down, take a nap, connect with friends and family, enjoy a relaxing bath, play video games, cuddle a loved one, or anything else that helps refresh you. Unplug and relax.

Putting this near the end of the day, such as right after dinner time, gives you something to look forward to. You may not always need it, but some days you’ll be glad to know it’s there.

Stick With Daily Habits

For a Supertrial it’s best to stick with habits you’ll do every day, including weekends. Maintaining a consistent daily rhythm with no days off is important for creating a sense of flow.

So if you’re going to get up at 5am or write for 2 hours per day, then do that 7 days a week.

It may seem harder and less flexible this way (that’s what she said), but it’s actually easier. A major point of failure is when people slack off on the weekends and then try to get everything working again on Monday. It’s almost like starting the Supertrial all over again each week.

A habit is a memorized solution. This memorization will occur faster if you maintain daily consistency with no breaks. Once your brain has the solution memorized (your 30 days are up, and the habit is installed), then you can cut back on the frequency, such as by skipping weekends, with less risk of complete slippage. But it’s better to stick with daily actions while you’re getting these habits installed. Remember — it’s only 30 days!

If you still wish to include non-daily habits in your Supertrial, read How to Maintain Not-Quite-Daily Habits to educate yourself on how to do it.

Define Your Baseline Performance

To reduce the difficultly level, define each habit in baseline terms. What’s the minimum level of performance that will still give you some worthwhile positive results?

For example, instead of reading for an hour per day, you might set a baseline goal of reading for 15 minutes per day. If you’re running late and can’t squeeze in your hour of reading without losing sleep, you can just do it for 15 minutes those days. Some days you may go longer, but 15 minutes is your minimum.

Once you complete a trial at your baseline level, now you have some success under your belt. You also have a basic version of the habit installed. Now you can push beyond the baseline level to a more optimal level for the long term, such as by doing another 30-day trial focused on improving or expanding that one habit.

It’s better to install a baseline level of performance in each area of your Supertrial than to try to go for the full monty and fail to make any habits stick. The results may not be as good as you’d hoped, but at least there will be some results to speak of.

It’s much less difficult to exercise for 45 minutes per day when you’ve already conditioned the habit of exercising for 20 minutes per day… as opposed to installing the 45-minute habit from a cold start.

Adding 5-10 new baseline habits (15-20 minutes per day here and there) can be a terrific use of a Supertrial. Afterwards you can maintain these new baselines and then try to increase them, either with a new Supertrial or with individual 30-day trials that focus on one habit at a time.

***

If you do attempt a Supertrial, I wish you the best of luck. You must be really disciplined, really crazy, or really naive — or some combination of those.

Today is actually my Day 1 of a new Supertrial that involves a major rebalancing of how I invest my time each day. I’m not going to share the details or blog about it along the way (as explained in the “Don’t Announce It” section above), but if you follow this blog for the next 30 days, you may be able to guess at one or two of them…

… unless every molecule in my body explodes at the speed of light, that is.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Attention Worthiness

How do you decide what’s worthy of your attention and what isn’t?

Let’s consider some potential concerns.

On a scale of 1-3, make a quick rating of how attention-worthy each concern is for you (see list below).

1 = unworthy of your attention
2 = somewhat worthy of your attention
3 = very worthy of your attention

Here’s the list. These are in no particular order, and it’s not a complete list. It’s just a list to get you thinking.

“It depends” is a perfectly reasonable answer if you feel your rating would depend on the situation or circumstances. If that’s your answer, see if you can gain clarity about how the situation would affect your answer.

• your favorite TV show(s)
• astrophysics
• government
• national/global news
• local news
• your neighborhood
• your home
• your job
• your income
• your best friend
• your boss
• your parents
• your family
• the economy
• Facebook
• productivity
• your nighttime dreams
• your goals
• literature
• poetry
• movies
• porn
• gossip about people you know
• email
• Twitter
• the latest software
• income taxes
• your net worth
• your weight
• your physical appearance
• your wardrobe
• your primary relationship partner
• meditation
• physical exercise
• reading non-fiction
• reading fiction
• music
• art
• travel
• fine dining
• cooking
• smoking
• doing drugs
• pharmaceuticals
• conspiracy theories
• healthy eating
• forming positive habits
• overcoming addictions
• making money
• protecting the environment
• cleaning
• being organized
• personal hygiene
• dating
• going to bars or night clubs
• theater
• dancing
• sex
• marriage
• having kids
• parenting
• law
• mathematics
• medicine
• biology
• science
• chemistry
• physics
• manufacturing
• mining
• stocks
• real estate
• investing
• farming
• coffee
• geography
• learning other languages
• writing
• Internet marketing
• philosophy
• metaphysics
• video games
• gambling
• technology
• computer programming
• entertainment
• education
• national debt
• the military
• personal growth
• psychic development
• your emotions
• being in nature
• developing new skills
• science fiction
• your next promotion
• public speaking
• attending conferences

You can print out this list and jot down a numerical rating for each item, or you can simply say each rating aloud as you read it online.

Feel free to add your own items too — anything you’d like to include is fair game.

Take your time as you do this. Don’t necessarily go with your initial impulse rating for each item. Pause for a moment and think. How do you know if an item is worthy of your attention or not? What makes one item worthy and another unworthy? Push yourself to come up with a reason to justify each rating. This is a learning exercise to help you discover what matters most to you and why.

Precious Attention

Notice that if you want to, you can choose to give your attention to anything you desire. If you want to focus on your income, you can do that. If you want to give some attention to the environment, a fiction book, or your girlfriend, you can do those things too.

Notice that in the absence of such choices, your attention will be pulled towards something by default. If you don’t make a conscious choice here, someone else will decide for you. It may be your boss, a family member, an advertiser, a collective social influence, or someone or something else, but it won’t be something of your deliberate choosing.

When you don’t make these choices yourself, you fall back into unconscious living, and generally speaking, your results will suffer for it. Such unconscious results are usually quite poor compared to the results you can get from living consciously.

And lastly, notice that attention is a very limited resource. You don’t have an infinite attention capacity. You can only give your attention to one item — or at most, a few items — at a time. Attention should be viewed as a precious resource, something you invest carefully and thoughtfully. You don’t have much of it to spread around, so don’t let it go to waste.

Where Is Your Attention Going?

Now that you’ve given some thought to what’s worthy of your attention, it’s a good idea to make a list of what’s actually capturing your attention.

I suggest that you set aside a full day or two for attention capture. You can do this very easily. Get a blank piece of paper, and each time something new catches your attention that isn’t already written down, add it to your paper.

Don’t worry about tracking how much time you attend to each item. Just make a complete list that reflects the variety of thoughts and activities that captured your attention throughout the day.

At the end of the day, your list may look something like this:

• feeling I should get out of bed earlier
• wanting to lose weight
• wanting to eat healthier
• figuring out what to eat
• web surfing
• email
• working on Project A
• worrying about money
• thinking about the weekend
• talking with my partner about something trivial
• feeling stressed
• driving to work, thinking about bills
• attending a meeting, mostly zoning out
• reading work-related items
• watching TV
• …
• etc.

When you feel you have a pretty good representation of your attention-grabbing concerns, whether it takes you a few hours or a few days to complete the list, go ahead and give each item on your list a 1-3 rating like you did earlier. Of all the items that captured some of your attention, which ones were truly worthy of it?

What do you notice about this? Are you giving your attention to items that are worthy of you? Or is your attention being drained away by trivialities? Which items weren’t on your list that should have been?

Determining Attention Worthiness

How do you know if an item is worthy or your attention or not? How can you separate the important from the irrelevant?

Here are some key criteria to consider:

Consequences

What are the consequences of giving an item your attention vs. withholding your attention?

If there’s little difference either way or if the overall consequences are unimportant, it’s fair to say that the item isn’t worthy of your attention.

When it comes to understanding consequences, you must make your own assessment in this area. Don’t blindly subscribe to someone else’s assessment of the importance of a particular concern.

For example, I have never voted in any political election. I have never registered to vote. Certain social pressures may try to get me to believe that voting is my civic duty and that I’d be a bad person not to vote, but I say B.S. to all of that. Ultimately I have to make my own assessment of the importance of this action, and my personal determination is that in the grand scheme of things, my individual vote is irrelevant and statistically meaningless. Calling it a “right” or a “privilege” seems more like marketing than truth to me. So I do not vote… ever. Voting is a waste of time.

Not voting doesn’t mean I don’t care about world affairs. Of course I care. However, there are more intelligent options available to create change than the wasted effort of filling out a ballot.

Whether I vote or don’t vote, the consequences are negligible either way. As an activity, voting is unworthy of my attention.

You’re free to disagree with me of course. If you think voting is a good use of your time, by all means continue the practice. My point is that you cannot blindly accept social programming when it comes to determining what is or isn’t important to you. You have to make that determination for yourself.

Attention-worthy tasks show a pattern of having impactful consequences if you focus on them. Giving them your attention makes a very noticeable difference. If, however, you squander your attention on unworthy items, your results will be either negligible or negative.

Control

In addition to consequences, also consider the degree of control you have over a particular concern.

If by giving your attention to a certain item, you have the ability to influence it in a meaningful way, then it’s more attention-worthy than an item that you cannot influence much.

For example, through my writing, I’m able to exert a lot of influence over people’s results when it comes to personal growth. This is an area where I have a lot of control. I can decide which topics to write about and how to express key points. Since I’ve been doing this for many years, I can see that my efforts have a positive impact. I can nudge people towards making more conscious choices. Every time I post a new article, it creates many ripples.

On the other hand, I don’t seem to have much control over the local politics in Las Vegas. I could give that subject a lot of attention, but I’m not currently in a position to have much impact there. So keeping up with local politics isn’t a good use of my time, relatively speaking. Consequently, I largely ignore local politics, so I can focus on other areas where I can make a more positive difference with less effort. This choice helps me be more efficient.

If you give your attention to items you can’t control, you’re essentially wasting your time. It’s more intelligent to focus on what you can control and influence. Then your influence will expand over time, and your power will increase.

Opportunity Cost

The attention-worthiness of any particular concern is relative to other items you could be choosing instead.

Will you watch TV or read a book? Will you go on a date or work on your Internet business? Will you get up early and exercise or sleep in late?

Whenever you give your attention to one concern, it means you’re withholding your attention from all other possible concerns. This entails a hidden cost of the potential value of the items you’ve declined to pursue.

If you had used your time differently during the past 5 years, you could have an extra million dollars in the bank. Another path might have led you to travel through dozens of different countries. And still another path might have you looking at a very fit and sculpted body in the mirror right now.

Are you happy with the path you’re currently following? Do you feel you’ve been giving your attention to thoughts and activities that are truly worthy of you? Are the opportunities that you’ve declined to pursue of lesser value than the ones you did pursue? Have you been turning down the good in order to pursue the best?

Or are you feeling disappointed with yourself right now?

Attention = Investment

Think of your attention as an investment. For each unit of time you invest, you’re generating certain results.

Some investments yield positive returns. Others yield zero or negative returns.

Don’t expect to be perfect right off the bat. This is a growth process that plays out over many years. To live more consciously, keep withdrawing your attention from trivial concerns, and redirect it towards those areas where you can have a stronger and more positive impact.

For example, I spent a lot of time during my 20s creating and publishing video games. Eventually I pulled my attention away from that field and redirected it to personal development. Shifting my attention thusly has allowed me to have a stronger and more positive impact, and I also reap greater rewards from creating and delivering more value to others.

Making these kinds of shifts can be a real challenge. Don’t expect the journey to be easy. Many people remain addicted to trivialities all the way to their graves. Often they can’t get past the social conditioning that tells them they should care about things that simply don’t matter. Don’t fall into that trap.

Conscious Attention

To live consciously, you must be the one to clarify and decide what matters most to you, and then you must discipline yourself to focus your attention on those items by deliberately withdrawing your attention from lesser concerns. Don’t expect life to do this for you. Don’t expect others to help you much. And never, ever whine that you don’t know what to do. It’s your job to figure it out — the task sits squarely on your shoulders. To complain that it’s too burdensome will only make it seem harder.

It’s okay to make mistakes as you figure this out. You don’t need to concoct a grand plan in advance, so don’t use the lack of one as an excuse for procrastination. Simply do the best you can in each moment, and you can continue to upgrade your choices as you go along. Keep pushing yourself to drop low-value activities, and replace them with higher value ones. Drop TV and read non-fiction instead. Dump the gossip-addicted friend who does nothing for you intellectually, and replace her with a more intelligent and resourceful friend. Quit the cigarettes, and shift that slice of your attention — and your budget — to becoming a fitness maven. If you still insist on using the “I don’t know what to do” excuse, then drop to the floor and do push-ups until you think of something that’s a better use of your time than doing push-ups. I suspect your brain will come up with a few ideas very shortly.

Very often when you reduce the time wasters by dropping low-value relationships and activities from your life, your understanding about what really matters to you will skyrocket. Time wasters will invariably fog your vision. Get rid of them as quickly as you can, and clarity will return. You will not miss the time wasters, even if you feel you’re addicted to them now.

Don’t let the difficulty of the task become an excuse for laziness. Keep pushing yourself to upgrade to more attention-worthy activities while dropping trivialities from your life, and you’ll find that your life becomes something quite special — rich in meaning and purpose. The alternative is a life of increasing disappointment and regret.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina