Tag: Time

35 Days left – Why you should start now to make 2018 your best year yet and 10 ways to get started

“Now is the time to start living the life you’ve always imagined for yourself.”

We’re in the last quarter of 2017 and 26 days of November have already passed. A lot of people get up on the 1st of January with the enthusiasm that they’ll start new good habits or break old bad habits, start something, change themselves: The New Year’s Resolutions.

Sadly though, for a lot of people the enthusiasm soon wears off. They don’t follow through on their goals and give up too early. By the middle of the year, most people don’t even remember their New Year’s Resolutions let alone progressing on them.

Part I: Why you should start now?

1. Enough time to choose and plan:

Lot of people have in their back of the head some ideas on which they want to work on. Like to lose/gain weight, to have a skill, be better in relationships, start a habit and break another one. In the last week of this year they’ll make a choice and formalize it buy buying gym membership, web hosting, camera, a rose, some guide book or whatever is appropriate for their task. And then start on 1st January. And then fail, because of lack of proper, step by step planning, not thinking of obstacles or later on realizing the task to not be so important.

Some of these situations may occur even with well thought choices and detailed plans. But the chances are really reduced.

Choose and plan now: Right now, you have sufficient time to look back over the year, find out the areas where you really need to change yourself, prioritize them, plan on how to work towards achieving them, step by step, think of possible odds and their solutions. So when you really get down to do it, potential obstacles don’t deter you.

2. Enough time to get started now:

It takes more than 60 days to create a habit. This may seem straightforward but we should keep in mind we may not be consistent. In anything new, after the initial excitement wears off we are faced with the challenges that truly test our commitment. We feel the “dredge” as we slowly shift out of our comfort zone into war zone where most people give up.

One should give themselves at least 75 days for a habit they really want to instill. And though we don’t have 65 days, we’ve 35 days. When you get up on the 1st of January, you’d already be experienced and accustomed in that habit by 1 month. You’d less likely to give up and more likely to follow through.

Part II: 10 Ways to Get Started

1. Look back at the year so far, reflect and list out what you want to change/improve/add in your life. what could be improved?

You’ve 11 months (and a whole lifetime actually) to look back on what worked and what didn’t this year (and so far in your life).
Here are some helpful questions, think and make a note of the answers: What are the areas where you lack and where you can improve? What are your bad habits and behavior patterns that have hold you off from being your best and achieving your goals? What have been your lifelong ambitions? What’s the number one thing that if you achieved would have the greatest impact on your life?

2 (a) Based on #1, write down your 5 most important 2018 goals
These goals are the mot important goal that you think would take from few months to a year to achieve but would essentially improve your life significantly.
If you can’t come up with 5, come up with as many as you can. More than 5 is also fine but don’t exceed 10, otherwise they become too much to properly focus.  You can make another list of goals less important than these top 5, as secondary priority. And don’t worry, we’ll be refining them throughout this post and the next two posts on Thursday and next Sunday.

2 (b) Do not forget to include the most important aspects of your life in your 2018 goals
Our Health, Relationships, Self-Improvement and Career are 4 aspects we should work on every year. So include goals and habits around these 4 area. If you set out only four habits, one related to each of the four areas, in a year you’ll get 3 months to work solely on a single habit. Which is more than enough time to develop a habit. And by the end of the year you’d have 4 good habits that improve your health, relationships, your career and yourself too. Similarly you can have one goal for each month.

3. Break your yearly goals into quarterly and monthly goals
“The gym is more crowded on first of January than it is on first of June. ”

The reason being most people are hardly still following through their yearly goals and resolutions. Most people’s goals are vague and too big and never broken into smaller steps.
Ideally, if something’s so important to you that you’d include in list of things that would change your life then you should definitely work on it every week or at least every month if not everyday.

How?
I’ll take the example of reducing weight since it’s easily measurable and thus easy to divide. e.g. if your current weight is 90 kg and your goal weight is 75 kg with muscular build then you’ve to reduce 15-20 kg and gain 5kg equivalent of muscles.
If you’ve never worked out, you should spend first 3 months developing the habit of working out daily [see 2 (b) above], starting out in smallest step possible [point 5 below]. So first month, say 3 push ups, or 100 meter jog. As well as mindfully reducing junk in diet and incorporating healthy foods. Then gradually increasing and including more exercises. In the second quarter, as you’re regular in workout, you’d want to reduce 3-5 kg weight, and update yourself more on nutritious foods and better exercises. The third quarter as you should become very regular in workout and restraint in workout, you should aim the highest here, say 7 kg weight loss and very less to no junk food with harder workouts. In last quarter you’d want to focus more on muscle gain and attain your goal weight.

4. Start acting now, in November itself, on the most impactful goal among all goals
“Start now. Start where you are. Start with fear. Start with pain. Start with doubt. Start with hands shaking. Start with voice trembling, but start.”

This is the most important point this post is trying to make. Don’t wait till January 1st, start now, right now. Regardless of how your past year has been, how your life has been. ACT! Taking action and getting into habit is the single most important thing to attain your big goals. And it doesn’t have a perfect time or the right time or the right feeling and it will never come. Life is short. Start now.

5. Start with the smallest steps, get over the initial bump
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” -Confucius.

Dream big but start small, very small. Start so small that you can’t procrastinate or make excuses. If the goal is to be in prime health, start with 1 push up for 1 week. If it’s to wake up at 5 AM when you wake at 11 AM, than start with goal of waking 5 minutes earlier for a week. If it’s to buy a house, then start with putting away 5 cents everyday for a week. If it’s to run a marathon, begin with 10 meter jogs for a week.

Set such ridiculously small goals that your comfort seeking, fear mongering, self sabotaging mind can simply not convince you to not do that.

Then, when you’re comfortable with it, increase. 1 to 3 pushups, 5 to 15 minutes, 5 cents to 50 cents, 10 meter to 50 meter. Week by week, keep improving.

6. Build consistency by creating a system or habit around your goal
“We first make our habits, then our habits make us.” – Frederick Langbridge

In the really good book, The Power of Habit, the author Charles Duhigg describes each habit is made up of 3 parts: 1. Cue (Trigger) 2. Routine and 3. Reward. i.e. There is a trigger or cue which gets us into the routine or action and afterwards we get some reward. Depending on how positive or negative it is, we’re more or less likely to do it again.

We can utilize this information to form our habits around our goal. For trigger, we can utilize existing daily habits like waking up, bathing, brushing teeth, having lunch etc. So e.g. if you are finding hard to find time for your 1 push up, do it daily after brushing your teeth, this is the routine or action part of the habit. Bind your new habits to existing habits. Workout after brushing teeth, go for a jog after waking up, make three call after dinner etc. This is good when starting, slowly you want to build a system around this habit itself that ensures and helps you to finish this task.

So keep your running shoes and clothes on bedside to go just after you run. Add a “Do X pushups” on your bathroom mirror. Your phone on the kitchen marble to call once done with dinner. And reward yourself. See below.

7. Reward yourself

I wanted to cover the reward part separately. Each time we do something pleasurous, the brain as a response releases certain neurotransmitters like dopamine, seretonin and a few others and a circuit in our brain, called the reward circuit, gets activated. The more we do that task and reward ourselves, the more neurotransmitters are released, the more reward circuit is activated, the more it’s activated the more likely, easily and intuitively we are to do it next time. In laymen terms, reward circuit is also responsible for drug addiction but we can use it here to our advantage, we’ve discussed dilemma of good and pleasant earlier.

So after you’re done with the action (routine) part of your habit, do something that makes you feel good, something pleasurous, reward yourself this way. Overtime your brain would begin to associate that reward with the activity and you’d feel less resistance in doing it. But don’t give self defeating rewards. A cupcake after workout is wasteful.

8. Rely on discipline rather than motivation
Discipline is doing what needs to be done, even if you don’t want to do it.

Despite being so detailed, despite remaking on importance of your goals, despite breaking them into ridiculously small steps, despite setting up habits and utilizing rewards for your goals, there would be days you’d still not do that little task and you’d fail in taking any action.

That’s where discipline comes in. We’ve talked about how to be more self-disciplined earlier.  Overtime, you’d want to mentally rely on your self-discipline developed around your habit. So that you go do your task even when you don’t feel like it, or are in a bad mood, or ‘tired’, over all these excuses you finish your work. That said, be mindful of progression and your health and don’t push yourself mindlessly. Begin small and slowly progress. Be disciplined in small steps.

9. Create a list of books to read
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” – Joseph Addison

Learning is essential for our growth and reading is one of the simplest ways to do that. Each year on should create a list of books to read. It doesn’t matter how many. 6 books for reading once every 2 months to 12 books for monthly read or 52 books for each week. Decided on some great books. Read books that help you grow. This was our 2017 reading list.

10. Do the sign ups and shopping for your goals now

This may not apply to everyone and to all goals. But some of your goals may have some pre-requisites. So if it’s gym membership, or website sign up, or domain buying, or books to buy, or shoes to buy or enrollment in the coaching. Do it now. Not in the last week of December, not in the first week of January. Do it now and get started.

All the best for your 2018 goals. Get started and keep going.

In the next two posts I’ll be sharing how I use 5 free apps to keep a track of my yearly goals down to hourly progress and 2018’s public goals to give an idea of how to set these goals.

If this post was helpful, please share it. Please tell us how do you set and achieve your your yearly goals?

You can also connect with Man of Wisdom on faccebook  and twitter. New blog posts every Thursday and Sunday.

Till the next time, keep improving yourself, stay positive, stay emotionally resilient, take care and keep trailing on your Untrailed Path.

In Praise of Empty Space – A Rapid Poem for World Poetry Day

Image result for empty outer space

I was inspired to write this not serious, rapid poem (took about 20 minutes) after seeing the true map of solar system. I highly recommend you to go and see it and consider how vast our own Solar System is and how it’s mostly empty space. Then consider how small the solar system is, there are stars bigger than our whole solar system!

The Universe is unimaginably big, beyond comprehension. Consider how small are our problems, complaints, mindless fighting are in the grand scheme of things. We live on a minor planet orbiting an average star in the corner of a small, galaxy. We really should be humble about ourselves. The differences in the color of our skin, cultures, countries, content of our languages – doesn’t matter. Because each other is all we humans have got in the big empty Universe.

I had written this on Monday and wasn’t written with World Poetry Day in mind. I was not well yesterday and was occupied in something else. So posting a day late. The second last verse is inspired from the creation verse of Rigveda (see below in notes). Happy World Poetry Day!

In Praise of Empty Space or Nothingness:

“What’s the biggest thing in the Universe?”, they ask.
Answers pour: “The Sun” “The Galaxy” “The Supercluster”,
“Great Void”, “Great wall”, “Radiations in which all Cosmos bask?”
They’re all wrong, truth they tend to ignore.
The greatest thing that ever was and will be:
Is Nothingness, Empty Space, what you can’t see.

Everything that will come to be,
And everything that is gone
Comes from the Void,
And to the Void it is gone.
The cradle and cremation pyre of all the Cosmos,
The great empty space is what make everything possible.

“All the world’s a stage”,
And that stage is set in nothingness.
All beings that have come, there are and that will come,
All beings on distant planets we know nothing of.
From their childhood to their death,
from their first smile to their last breath,
All took place and all was took away, gone in the empty space.

Like to any great entity, here too the disbelievers yell,
“There’s no true vacuum, there’s no empty space”
And the naysayers gather and yelp:
“Nothingness can’t be quantified or compared”
Then all their words and all their selves,
Are swallowed whole in the great nothingness

Atoms are 99.99..% empty space,
So isn’t matter too mostly empty, in this case?
See that ocean, the planet, the stars?
You, me, this device, everything near and far;
Not only it’s encompassed by emptiness,
But from within too it’s mostly empty space.

Who knows where it ends and where it begins?
Or if this even has boundaries?
How it was started and how it will end?
Had it any beginning and does it even end?
No one knows, no one can tell,
We’d be forever ignorant of Emptiness’s tale. [1]

The whole Cosmos will once be gone,
Frozen, or in fire, shattered or condensed, to us unknown.
There’d  be nothing left, just empty space,
No matter but all pervading emptiness.
Eons later a new light will shine,
A new Cosmos would breath life’s first sign,
Over and over again repeats the same story,
Oh Great Emptiness, praise on thee!

Next blog post on Health and Fitness, part 2 of self-care series would be published on Sunday.

I love space and Cosmos and would publish an app related to space soon.

Till the next time, connect with Man of Wisdom on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for more frequent updates.

Be kind. Stay positive. Radiate happiness. Goodbye. Take care. Keep Trailing on your Untrailed Path.

Note:
1. Creation verse or Nasadiya Sukta:
“Who truly knows, who can honestly say where.
This universe came from
And where it will vanish to at the End?
Those godlike wise men who claim they know were born long
After the birth of Creation.
Who then could know where our universe really came from?
And whoever knows or does not know where Creation came from,
Only one gazing at its vastness from the very roof of the final Heaven
Only such a one could possibly know,
But does even He know?” -Rigveda, creation verse.

Self Discipline is Self Caring – 10 Ways to Be More Disciplined and Love it


“No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.”
-Seneca

I am trying to be more disciplined myself as I write this post (this was supposed to be published on Sunday not Tuesday!), so do not treat this as something coming from an authority but from an experimenter and a fellow companion in the journey to be more self-disciplined.

(This is part one of 3 part series on Self Caring – Healthy Body, Heart and Lifestyle. This focuses on being self-disciplined as a lifestyle trait. The rest 2 would be published next Thursdays and Sundays.)

What is Self Discipline?
Merriam-Webster defines self-discipline or self-control as “correction or regulation of oneself for the sake of improvement“. They also provide a simpler and more helpful definition for English language learners: “the ability to make yourself do things that should be done”.

Apt. Self-discipline is about doing things you do not want to do but you know you need to do and going ahead and doing them despite the inherent discomfort and reluctance. Some examples would be studying for the impending test when you want to watch TV, having that important but uncomfortable conversation with your partner when you’d rather browse internet, working out when you want to eat an ice cream and so on.

Our brains are wired for comfort and pleasure and discipline feels inherently difficult, bad and repulsive. So why is it needed?

The Importance of Self Discipline
In his book, The Road Less Traveled, Psychologist M. Scott Peck offers the following perspective on the importance of self-discipline:

Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.

Discipline is essential for utilizing our full potential, realizing our possibilities and becoming the person we are meant to be. In all aspects of life – be it physical, mental or emotional health, personal or professional relationships, all goals and living a happier, peaceful life – discipline is essential and perhaps the most important quality. A few points to help you realize this:

Self Disciplined People are Happier
“It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life that those who work the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest men.” – Brutus Hamilton.
According to a study by psychologist Wilhelm Hofman and his team at University of Chicago, people who are disciplined and are able to refrain from impulses are happier. This seems counter-intuitive, because if I can eat a cake now and everyday, am I not lot happier than someone who is disciplined in diet and eats boiled vegetables? The answer is sure, I am having more pleasure but in long-term it’s more likely I’d be prone to diseases like diabetes and heart diseases and would live a far stressful life versus someone in more control of their diet, who would likely be healthier, thinner, less susceptible to diseases and would avoid stress.

Corollary: Pleasure vs Happiness
A lot of people confuse instant gratification, which is release of pleasure chemicals like dopamine, with happiness which is wrong. Happiness is an abundance of positive emotions like joy, interest, pride, gratitude, an inner satisfaction and appreciation of life. Pleasure is just one small aspect which depends on external factors. You may not experience the pleasure without the cake but you can be happy – cake is not needed. Also gratification in this instant often leads to stress, sadness, disappointments and other overwhelming negative emotions later in life.

Self Discipline means Less Stress, Pain and Disappointments
“The more disciplined you become the easier life gets.” – Steve Pavlina
I think this is easier to understand. If you submit your homework on time, you escape from late submission punishment. If you put work and heart in your relationship everyday, you skip later disappointments. If you find time for your physical, mental and emotional health, you’re less likely to suffer from diseases, mental deterioration and would be more resilient and prudent in unfavorable circumstances. If you follow your work deadlines, you’re more likely to be promoted and less likely to be fired.
The key thing in all of these instances is attempting the necessary thing now for future rewards. But in doing so, you face your greatest enemy: the current you.

We hate ourselves (Please read this carefully)
A lot of us hate ourselves. Don’t believe me? How else can you justify the pain, disappointment, suffering and torture that our current self inflicts on our future self for momentary pleasure? We consider ourselves excluded of suffering our future self would go through. We believe it’s some different person who would be dying in a hospital, who would be going through a divorce, who would be fired from her job, who would be failing in his exam. Despite knowing such catastrophic outcomes that our future version would go through, we still indulge in petty pleasures that we know would ruin us and our lives.

Loving the “Future-You”
“Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.” -Abraham Joshua Heschel
How do we address and overcome this self-hatred? One easily overlooked fact we need to realize is that just as our future self suffers from our current self’s indulgence, irresponsibility and debauchery. Our future self and therefore we, also reap the rewards like happiness, achievements, fulfillment, joy, peacefulness, loving environment and so on – if we exhibit more self-control and discipline now. It’s us who would be happier, healthier, have a great married life, richer, calmer, stress free and successful. As you’d see in the later section attuning ourselves with reality and our responsibility also helps us being kinder to ourselves. Begin to love yourself. Do not live a life where the present self is indifferent to the future self and lives in the regret of things past self did. It’s just you. Do not inflict such pain on yourself.

Corollary: Accept There’s No Different Person in Future.
Again, the person who experiences gratification now and suffers later are same people – you. Visualize and imagine yourself as reaping the results of your actions before indulging in pleasure. It’s you who suffers or succeeds. Be more connected with your future version through visualization, long-term plans, goals, letters/emails to future self, being mindful in this instant and consistent evaluation of where you’re heading in life.

The Structured Life
Discipline is formed through habits, over long period of time. More organized, structured and timely you’re in your daily, seemingly insignificant activities like sleeping, eating, bathing etc. the more disciplined you’d be in other, more significant aspects of your life such as health, relationship, career etc. and more time you’ll find for them.

Discipline is a Journey
And a slow one at that. It doesn’t happen that you’re in-disciplined and suddenly decide to be more disciplined and poof! -are now in complete control of all aspects of life. Sorry but you’d crash and burn. Discipline is like a muscle, the more you practice the better you become. Just like weight lifting, in the beginning you start small. Slowly, daily challenge yourself to larger goals i.e. more uncomfortable tasks and become stronger.

10 Ways to Become More Self Disciplined
I’ll discuss only 5 (6-10) here in detail and simply mention the rest (1-5) that are better explained in the post on Overcoming Instant Gratification. Let’s jump into them:

6. Shipping is Better than Perfecting
Pursuing Perfection is one of the most common excuse and most overlooked mistake. It’s deeply intertwined with self-discipline. Whether you’re trying to be more self disciplined or applying it in a task, know that it’s better to just do something than to delay it. It’s better to get something done than to avoid and delay any progress.
I used the word Shipping instead of Doing. Shipping means you’re open to criticism, feedback, any measurement of your activity. Writing this blog post and saving it in my drafts is doing, publishing it – putting it out in the world and getting feedback from real people is shipping.

7. Rituals are Better than Habits
Self discipline is a process and is built through good habits/routines. You don’t wake up early, workout, make your bed, study, talk to your partner once a year, you’ve to do it regularly. As I interpret Rituals are habits that are performed with attention, devotion, mindfulness and a sort of celebration. You don’t skip it. Rituals have the automaticity & self-initiation of habits but are performed with more attentiveness and more involvement. Habits can be bad but since you really think through and involve in rituals, they’re always good. Discipline cultivated through rituals is more effective than one built through habits.

8. You’d Never “Feel Right”
‘Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.’ – Pablo Picasso
Another powerful and somewhat rational excuse we give ourselves is “I don’t feel like doing it”. True. When there’s a pile of pizza a call away, you won’t feel like sticking to your diet or working out, ever. Motivation is extremely overrated and comes after the task is done or at least begun. Doing anything requires a touch of madness, just jumping into it, regardless of how we’re feeling.

9 . Prioritizing Tasks & Time Management (Einsenhower Decision Box)
The 34th President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower was one of the greatest leaders in history. He proposed division of all tasks into Important and Urgent and then acting on them. From a brilliant, must read post from Art of Manliness:
Eisenhower Decision Matrix urgent important

Urgent means that a task requires immediate attention. These are the to-do’s that shout “Now!” Urgent tasks put us in a reactive mode, one marked by a defensive, negative, hurried, and narrowly-focused mindset.

Important tasks are things that contribute to our long-term mission, values, and goals. Sometimes important tasks are also urgent, but typically they’re not. When we focus on important activities we operate in a responsive mode, which helps us remain calm, rational, and open to new opportunities.

The key is to focus more on important tasks than urgent tasks.

10. Keep a Track of Your Progress
You’d be better self disciplined and in more control of life if you know where you’re heading and how you’ve progressed. Maintaining this in a journal, app or digital document may really help you becoming more self disciplined, identifying and correcting the mistakes you make and the obstacles or circumstances that lure you away.

1. Start Small (so small it seems ridiculously easy).
2. Minimize Temptations (remove them!) and use Meaningful Distractions to your advantage.
3. Know that Willpower can be replenished and increased. Increase it.
4. Start Accountability and/or Support System
5. Be Consistent (Build the Momentum and Be Committed). Be Persistent (It’s ok to fail but it’s important to try again tomorrow)

4 Tools for Self Discipline (optional but highly recommended read)
The post was already long, so I put this separately. The Road Less Traveled is divided in 4 sub-parts, the first part is discipline. The author recommends 4 tools to be more disciplined in life:
1. Delaying gratification
“Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell.”
“Serving one’s own passions is the greatest slavery.” – Thomas Fuller
This is the single most important tool in becoming more disciplined. I won’t cover this here, because I’ve covered in far more detail drawing insights from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and practical examples in a previous post here: Overcoming Instant Gratification

2. Acceptance of Responsibility
“We can’t solve a problem by saying “it’s not my problem”. We must accept the responsibility for a problem before we can solve it. The difficulty we have in accepting the responsibility for our behavior lies in desire to avoid pain in the consequences of that behavior.”
You can’t escape from freedom of responsibility you have for your life. You can’t attribute your problems to society, system, parents, children, race and so on. Sure they may have some partial contribution to your current situation but you cannot be disciplined in life unless you accept where you are and determine where you want to be, in spite of the external factors that hinder you.

3. Dedication to Truth (Reality)
“Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.”
Continuously Revise Your Map – For our map i.e. our view of reality to be accurate we need to consistently revise it. This is painful and so a lot people avoid it. Their outdated maps make them think the reality is same in adulthood as it was in childhood, same in college as was in school, same when being single and married and so on.
Be Open To Challenge: The only way to ascertain that our view of reality is accurate is by being willing to be challenged from other people’s view of reality. Else we form a view and stick to it, a closed system. Consistently seek feedback and correct yourself.
A lot of people never confront reality/truth and live in a dreamland. You cannot be disciplined without accepting you are not. Be dedicated to reality and strive to have it more accurate.
Do not withhold Truth: Do not white lie i.e. withhold part of truth at least from self. Don’t indulge in black lying i.e. accept something as true despite knowing it to be false.  Wake up from dreamland.

4. Balancing
“To be organized and efficient, to live wisely, we must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future; yet to live joyously we must also possess the capacity, when it is not destructive, to live in the present and act spontaneously. In other words, discipline itself must be disciplined. ”
It’s neither possible nor necessary to be disciplined all the time. When acting spontaneously and immediate gratification is not destructive, we should act on it. This balancing comes with time and should be practiced with our best judgement.

Did you like the post? Where can we improve? Please give your valuable feedback. Thanks a lot!

Connect with Man of Wisdom on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for more frequent updates. New blog posts every Thursday and Sunday.

Be kind. Stay positive. Radiate happiness. Goodbye. Take care. Keep Trailing on your Untrailed Path. 🙂

 

A Message for a Better New Year 2017 – Key Ideas, Books and Habits to Follow

Image result for happy new year 2017

As we wrap the year 2016 and collectively begin a new revolution around the sun, I wanted to share a few thoughts to you that may help you have a better year.

I want to discuss a few ideas to meditate over & imbibe, a few books to read and a few habits to instill. Every idea, habit and book deserve their own post, which I think they’ll get. This is just a short collection.

  1. Key Ideas to Learn:
    Following are the best and most important ideas I learned this year and tried to apply in my life. I highly recommend you to try them out:
  • Learn to beat negative self-talk by focusing on the solution to problems. Worrying and negative self-talk only intensify the pain and take you away from solutions and relief from pain. Instead of letting the emotional vehemence originating from a problem dominate your conscience, pause and focus on solution, on ways of getting out of the problem.
  • Learn to recognize signs of Resistance & procrastination in your behavior and learn to overcome them as they try to stop you from doing any creative work. Resistance is our reptilian brain trying to control our behavior through fear & doubt and trying to keep us in our comfort zone, hindering our growth and progress. See War of Art in Books below.
  • Focus on shipping vs polishing i.e. delivering vs. delaying things. After making the decision to do a work, just start it and deliver it. Don’t indefinitely delay it and worry how people would receive it. Ship.
  • Increase self-awareness/mindfulness: This is probably the single most important key I learned for a better life. If you can fix your awareness, you can fix your thought process, actions, how you manage your time, energy, emotions and productivity. The easiest approach is clear your head of thoughts and steer towards what you want to do/think. Focus on this moment.
  • Be a survivalist: Life is precious. We should strive to be healthy and live longer through our daily habits. Eating well, working out, meditating, all are a form of self-respect that you show towards yourself, towards your life.
  • Shortness of Life: Life is Short. The things to pursue are too many. We should realize the importance of time and try to utilize it in the best manner and avoid wasting it in temptations, mindless & unending entertainment, impulses and instead use it in productive pursuits.
  • Learn to minimize distractions and work in distraction free environment.
  1. Books to read:
    This year I read relatively lesser number of books (about 24) because I am focusing on a field and studying from a lot of books related to that field. But I still got a chance to read some really great books. I’m selecting the following 5 books & 1 essay, I highly recommend you read them:
  • Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
    One of the greatest books on virtues, more resilient life and other pearls of stoicism. As relevant and helpful and it was about 2000 years ago. I read some of my favorite meditations quite frequently.
  • War of Art – Steven Pressfield
    This is a controversial book. However, if you can ignore the exaggeration at some places, it’s definitely one of the best books to overcome procrastination. He defines Resistance as “Most of us have 2 lives: The life we live and the unlived life within us, between the two stands Resistance.”  When do we face Resistance? “Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity will elicit Resistance.” I’ve read it more than 4 times this year and I benefited immensely.
  • Elon Musk – Ashlee Vance
    Elon Musk is perhaps the most workaholic, ambitious and magnanimous entrepreneur. In this sort of official biography you get a great insight in this incredibly inspiring person’s life, his mind-set and how he kept going despite insurmountable obstacles.
  • Deep Work by Cal Newport
    In this book Cal guides us to do cognitive demanding, creative work in distraction free environment to learn faster, better and deliver higher quality work.
  • Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
    Daniel has won a Nobel Prize in economics. In this book you’ll learn about the two types of thinking we have, how we think and how we make decisions. It’s a really great book on psychology and behavior and is a surprisingly fun read.
  • On the Shortness of Life (Essay) – Seneca
    I’ve been reading parts of this life changing essay every week for over a year. The essay really makes you realize how short life is if we’re distracted and pursuing hollow passions. However, if whole of it is well utilized, life is long enough for some of the greatest achievements.
  1. Tiny Habits to Form:
    My yearly habits revolved around consolidating the key ideas I mentioned above, some of which I learned last year and some I learned this year. Apart from them, some other tiny habits:
  • Whole Body Stretching: I’ve been working out for about 3 years but didn’t stretch whole body. I recently started daily whole-body stretching after waking up and it has helped me get rid of lot of sprains, pain and muscle pulls. Also lessens fatigue and tiredness. Highly recommended.
  • Before Sleep Meditation: Before going to sleep, meditate for 5 minutes, you’d fall asleep faster and get deeper sleep.
  • Improving Vocabulary Daily: Learn a few words every day. We think in words. More number of words we know, more appropriate words we know, the clearer we can think. More descriptive we can be.
  • Saying No: Earlier I used to say to a lot of people and activities on the cost of saying no to what was important to me. I still haven’t overcome completely but slowly I’m learning how to politely say no to people and activities.

From tomorrow to the next December 31st, you’re going to get brand new 12 months or 365 days or 8766 hours or 5,25,960 minutes or 3,15,57,600 seconds. Remember we live our life and make our decisions in moments and that’s a lot of seconds you have. Spend them wisely.

A year is a long-long time. Visualize daily where you want to be by the end of the year. In the next post I’ll share how to form goals and take steps to make proper progress on them.

Finally, don’t spend your last day of 2016 or first day of 2017 drunk, wasted, in intolerable noise, with blinking lights. You don’t begin an important journey distracted and being out of your mind. No. Start the year better by being focused on what you want to achieve, learn and improve in 2017. Set Quarterly and Yearly goals and chart your course along them. Be committed to make this the best year yet. All the best.

May you have best of health, happiness, inner peace, prosperity and achievements you’re proud of throughout the year 2017.

Have a great year.

Life is Short: 10 Ways to Stop Giving Your Life Away and Make The Best of It

Every moment we spend with someone or on something is part of our life that we’ll never get back. Our time is limited. No amount of power, force, pleading, intellect or effort can bring back even a single moment of our life. Time is like a river, you can never wet your toes twice with the same water. Lost money one can re-earn but lost time is lost forever.

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.” -Bruce Lee

How much time do we really have?
Global average life expectancy at birth is about 71 years. In other words you get about 25915 days, 621,960 hours, 2,239,056,000 or about 2 billion seconds to live. This is average, you may live more or may be unfortunately you may live even less. Of these 2 billion moments we spend about one-third (33%) in sleeping and about 6.25% in eating. That’s 40% non-negotiable, essential investment of time. If we consider 1 hour everyday for bathing, peeing, pooping and getting ready, that makes up about 4% of our life. Since we aren’t 100% efficient that we leave the lunch plate and a second later we start working i.e. context switching is costly. So our total reaches to about 45% of our life spent on eating, sleeping and bathing. That leaves about 55% of our time to us or 39 years. At least the first 10 years are spent in speaking, walking, eating properly, elementary education & so on. And hardly anyone realizes what they want to do in life or develops concrete action plans or goals in order to achieve them. Thus we can subtract at least 10 more years from our total to arrive at final time in our hands: 29 years.

Think about it. That’s 29 years you have. So even if you live for 71 years, you actually have 29 years to do whatever you want to do in life: to fulfill your dreams, to stand up for a cause, to realize your destiny, to reach your goal. Though the question is how much of it we actually utilize for our goals?

Do we even have this much time?
My most favorite essay of all time is “On the Shortness of Life” by Roman stoic philosopher Seneca, written about 2000 years ago and still as relevant. I used to read it every week at least once in the past. Now I read parts of it every day and carry it around with me everywhere. It’s a life changing, soul-shaking piece of marvelous writing that really makes you realize the shortness -or length of- life and how to make the best of it. In the essay Seneca asks a 100 year old man the following:

“I see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life, you are pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it; come now, recall your life and make a reckoning. Consider how much of your time was taken up with a moneylender, with a mistress, with a patron, with a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in punishing your slaves, how much in rushing about the city on social duties. Add the diseases which we have caused by our own acts, add, too, the time that has lain idle and unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count. Look back in memory and consider what work you have achieved in so long a life, how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you; you will perceive that you are dying before your season!”

None of the things he’s mentioned are from the essential activities I’d counted. And they didn’t even have internet back then! If we consider these, we have even far less time to live, not even 39 years. Life is really, really short.

So is life really *that* short?
Seneca answers that too:
“It is not that we have short time to live but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough and it’s been given to us in generous measure to accomplish the greatest of things if whole of it is well invested. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so life is amply long for him who orders it properly. ” -Seneca

How to live and not merely exist?
Each point here deserves its own post but for now, in brief, here are 10 ways to help you live for most of your life:

1.  Before doing any task, ask “Is it worth exchanging my life for?”
Everything we do, we exchange a part of our life that we will never get back. Ask yourself, is it worth it? The mindless gossiping, the useless chit chatting, the passive entertainment, that task you’ve to attend to be formal? If you had only one day/one week/one month to live, would you do it? No? Then don’t.

2. Delay Gratification
The ability to delay gratification is one of the most important predictors for success. So much of our life is spent on just instant gratification of our senses or desires that are harmful to our health, our time and thus our lives. Sometimes the inability to avoid or delay gratification is also responsible for degrading morals, weakening of character, destroyed relationships and wrecked reputation.
Learn to delay gratification by rewarding yourself, keeping in mind your goals, by staying focused in the present moment and on your goal.

3. Stop Passive Entertainment
This is closely related to gratification. One of the most common form of avoiding pain that people indulge in is passive entertainment. There’s a deadline, there’s a higher priority task, nothing in your to-do list has been finished and instead of attending to any of these, you binge watch a bad tv series that you may have already watched, mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or Twitter feed, idly checking emails or refreshing it. This is passive entertainment.
You don’t mindlessly enter a mall and give away your money to buy things you don’t need, right? So don’t mindlessly squander away your time in things you actually need to avoid.

4. Build Daily Rituals Instead of Habits
We have limited will power and a lot of it is consumed in starting something as we try to get out of our comfort zone. The key is to build systems or rituals, doing similar things same time everyday without distractions or any noise. Overtime it takes no or very less will power to get started and get things done.

5. Manage Your Thoughts
“You are today where your thoughts have brought you, you will be tomorrow where your thoughts will take you. -James Allen, As a Man Thinketh
Focus on thought management instead of time management. Because your actions originate in your head. You are nothing but what you think. If you can steer your thinking towards the things you need to accomplish, towards utilizing your time well and not merely planning; you can accomplish anything with un-parallel focus. I firmly believe that a better life begins with better thoughts. We can change our lives by changing what and how we think.

6. Find Time for Health
“Those who don’t find time for health will sooner or later have to find time for illness”
While we are striving to make the most of our time and our life, it also makes sense to prolong it and preserve it. Else we spend our lives indulged in habits we know are harmful such as smoking, drinking, not exercising, sleeping too much or too less, overeating or eating unhealthy food and then in old age with weak bodies we fight the diseases caused by our own actions. Healthy eating, sleeping, working out and meditation should be a part of your daily life style. Consider this time as an investment – a retirement plan – which would increase the time you have on earth and keep you healthy in old age.

7. Prioritize
“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”  ― Peter F. Drucker
So much of our time is spent in doing things that we must avoid. For deciding life priorities, Warren Buffet suggests to write 20 things you really want to do in your life, from most important to least important then draw a line after the first five goals and never even touch the next 15.
For everyday activities, maintain a not-to-do list. List out all the things you do not want to do, so you can focus on things you want to do. Life is too short to do unimportant things.

8. Learn to Say “No”
Every time you say “yes” to someone or to things you do not really want to do, you say “no” to things really-really want in your life. How many people take away our life because we are too nice to say no. Because we think we may be hurting them. How many social outings you went to where you enjoy neither the conversation nor the company? It’s great to be selfless and help people, but not at the cost of your own happiness.

9. Instead of Past, Focus on the Present-
Regretting wasted time is even more wasted time!
A lot of our time is spent on thinking about past, regretting, reminiscing it, ruminating on it. May be your past was really great or it was really bad. May be you made some decisions you shouldn’t have had or mistakes you could have avoided. That’s all okay. It’s a part of being human. We’re work in progress and we continue to improve. That’s really the key. Learn from the past, live in the present while regularly checking your course towards your destined future.

10. Keep a Track of Your Time
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us” -J.R.R. tokien
Lastly, keep a track of your time: Which activities take up most of your daily time? Can you reinvest your time in something more important?
To keep track of my time I use the app aTimeLogger where you can create activities and measure the time spent. To keep a track of daily habits, I use the app Loop -Habit Tracker. Here are screenshots of my usage:
habits atimelogger1 atimelogger2

Bonus: Visualize Your Life with a Life Calendar
On the blog Wait But Why, the author Tim Urban compiled a whole human lifespan in one page, each box represents a week, each row a year. Being able to look at whole life at one glance can have a profound impact. You begin to look at life with a different perspective: Your life in weeks.

We have one life and many goals, time is fleeting, distractions are too many; so learn to make the most of your life.

This was our first blog post, please give your valuable feedback so we can improve. If you like it, then share it with others. Thanks!
Till the next time, keep smiling, keep manifesting the best of humanity, keep spreading positivity. Keep Trailing on Your Untrailed Path. Take care.