I remember when I was 20 years old, I was a very difficult character. I was audacious,
sometimes arrogant, and sometimes annoying. I had trouble getting along with my peers and I was
constantly getting into trouble trying to prove other people wrong. To be honest with you, I can’t
blame my behavior only on me and my character. I need to also blame the people who were
my biggest influencers at the time. Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, and
Charles Bukowski, all played their part in the emergence of this peculiar persona of mine.
I can’t really explain what was wrong with me. I was studying electrical engineering and instead
of looking up to people like Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein I was trying to follow advice
promoted by lonely Czech novelists, radical German philosophers, and American pulp-fiction writers.
Many years later, although audacity turned into respect, arrogance into understanding,
and annoyance into proactive listening, I still find myself reading and being highly influenced
by those people. I guess you can change your actions, your behavior, and your goals,
but you can’t change who you really are. Our choices in life do not align completely
with our needs and beliefs. Usually, we make choices based on necessity,
advice from elders, or social norms. Especially at the fragile age of 20, unless you have been
immersed in a specific lifestyle defined by concrete goals and actions at a younger age,
you will rarely find yourself doing what you really want. Or at least what you think you want.
And that’s probably the main reason behind most people’s confusion at this stage. They find
themselves in a situation where they do something that they don’t want but, at the same time,
they don’t really know what they want. They have some vague ideas and thoughts that
could lead them somewhere but they don’t really know which idea is the best and
most importantly how to put it into practice. And this frustrating reality can empower the
emergence of peculiar personalities or personas. In our instant gratification culture, it’s easy
to forget that most personal achievements do not occur as a single static event in time, but
rather as long, gradual events that we’re hardly aware of as they are happening.
It’s like a game. You get accustomed to the main principles and you develop more skills as you get
immersed in the mechanics of the game. At some point you develop unconscious competence and
everything makes sense. Life, oftentimes, feels the same.
And just like every other game, life needs its own strategy guide and its own stages.
Character and personality development is a topic people don’t learn at school.
It is a gradually evolving process that occurs while we experience different events in life.
I would like to divide these events into two categories – static events and dynamic events.
We can easily understand the difference between the two
if we focus on their origin and also on how they relate to each other. Generally speaking,
static events are considered events that occur almost conventionally. Their lifespan is quite
lengthy and they usually lead to a low-growth mental state. Characteristic examples include:
School. A tedious job.
A stagnant romantic relationship. A toxic friendship.
Dynamic events, on the other hand, are events that result after our own personal will and pursuit.
Their lifespan varies depending on how well we can evaluate their benefit in our lives
and they usually play an important role in our character development. Typical examples include:
An adventurous trip. The development of a creative idea.
Cultivating deep connections. Activism.
The process of learning a new skill. Reading and writing, to name a few.
Understanding the difference between static and dynamic events
is a process that will eventually lead to a mentality shift and consequently to
a reality shift. You will start experiencing new events and new ideas that will ultimately
lead to a strong and congruent personality. Realizing the existence of this personality is
probably the most important step towards understanding what you really want.
Apparently, the most challenging headache for people who have defined their personality, or
are in the process of defining their personality, is that they find themselves facing difficulties
deciding upon their preferred skills and options. They might be good at many things and can’t
necessarily focus on just one pursuit. And that’s probably the reality for most people nowadays.
Consequently, another challenging question arises. How do you decide what’s best for you?
A great way to tackle this abstraction is to adhere to a concept known as Systems Thinking.
The main idea behind it is that, in order to manage a system effectively,
you need to focus on the interactions of its parts rather than their behavior taken separately.
See yourself as a whole that exists of different parts. These parts are your skills. In order
for the whole to work effectively, all the parts need to work synergistically.
Let’s take the example of an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur isn’t good at one skill
called entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a mixture of skills. It is a combination of
knowledge in areas like marketing, business, persuasion, sales, copywriting, and many more.
Obviously, an entrepreneur cannot master all these skills. He can, however,
achieve a great level of ability in each one of them so he can successfully manage their system.
By pursuing a certain skill, we can discover synergies with
other skills we were oblivious to before. Defining what you really want is a process that
manifests itself in a systematic way. Thinking in systems can actually resolve
many unsolved problems or events that we considered problems in the first place.
A mental model is a way of looking at the world. Put simply, mental models are the set of tools
that you use to think creatively. Each mental model offers a different framework that you can
use to look at life or an individual life problem. In order to exhibit the value of mental models,
I am going to investigate an area where mental models usually shine – The area of productivity.
The models are many. For the purposes of this video, I will present my favorite mental models,
which I consider my most powerful allies in my attempt to become more productive.
The 2–Minute Rule was suggested by author James Clear and aims to inspire action taking.
There are two parts to the 2–Minute Rule:
Part 1 — If It Takes Less than Two Minutes, Then Do It Now.
This piece of advice is suggested by David Allen in his bestselling book, “Getting Things Done.” If
you take a minute to consider how many things we put off that could be done in two minutes or less,
you will be amazed. Typical examples include: Taking out the garbage.
Washing your dishes after you eat. Cleaning up clutter.
Creating your task list. Cleaning your email box.
Part 2 — When You Start a New Habit, It Should Take Less than Two Minutes to Begin with It.
When it comes to habit-performing tasks, the most difficult part is the take-off.
That small time frame in the beginning of the task until you get immersed in it and enter flow state.
The idea behind this rule is to force yourself to stay in the task for at least two minutes,
even if you find it extremely difficult to do so. For example:
Want to become a better writer? Start writing for two minutes and you will
often find yourself writing for an hour. Want to become a better programmer?
Start coding for two minutes and you will often find yourself coding for hours.
Want to start working out more? Do a warm-up
with push-ups for two minutes and you will get fired up for the rest of the training session.
You get the idea. These two minutes are enough to get your mind from a passive state
to an active state. Once it gets into that state, immersion ensues.
President Dwight Eisenhower was famous for his productivity skills. Inspired by him,
Steven Covey, in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” introduced the Eisenhower
Decision Matrix, which is a tool that can help one prioritize tasks based on four possibilities.
Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).
I find the Eisenhower Matrix extremely useful when it comes to your daily task list.
Once you have listed all the tasks for the day, you can add them in the matrix based on importance.
The matrix will give you a more concrete view of the tasks.
I am not a huge Warren Buffet fan, for ideological reasons, but I like the following story and
I find the rule quite important. One day, Mike Flint, Buffet’s personal
airplane pilot, was talking about his career priorities with him and Buffet asked him to
go through a 3-step exercise. STEP 1: Buffet asked Flint to
write down his top 25 career goals. STEP 2: Then, Buffett asked Flint to
review his list and highlight his top 5 goals. STEP 3: At this point, Flint had two lists. The
5 items he had highlighted were List A and the 20 items he had not highlighted were List B.
Flint confirmed that he would start working on his top 5 goals right away. And that’s
when Buffett asked him about the second list, “And what about the ones you didn’t circle?”
Flint replied, “Well, the top 5 are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in
a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see
fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”
To which Buffett replied, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t highlight
just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until
you’ve succeeded with your top 5.” This is a powerful idea.
Focus is the driver of excellence. We can’t overwhelm our reality with too many goals.
Narrowing down and focusing on things that really matter is the quintessence of productivity.
Back in 2010, after reading Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now” for the first time, I came face to face
with a very daunting challenge. Tolle suggests that negative emotions are creations of our mind
that, if understood and processed accurately, can be tamed and even eliminated. Looking back to my
early 20s, I remember that most of my unpleasant and also embarrassing moments were a result of my
inability to understand and manage my emotions. The challenge Tolle set about was probably the
most impactful moment in my life thus far. Through a lot of research and personal
experimentation, I came to understand that a healthy emotional state can be
sustained by investing in the following areas: I was about to use the term emotional resilience
to define the first area of importance, but I like the term Antifragility better.
The word Antifragility was coined by Nassim Taleb in his book “Antifragile – Things that gain
from disorder.” As Taleb suggests in his book: “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness.
The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
Antifragility gives you room to get something positive out of negative events in your life,
whereas resilience doesn’t. Where a resilient character just endures,
an antifragile character fights back. The best way to develop antifragility is
through exposure to uncomfortable situations and also psychotherapy in order to understand
yourself and your potential better. When you exercise, your body releases
chemicals called endorphins. Endorphins interact with the receptors in your brain that
reduce your perception of pain. Endorphins also trigger a positive
feeling in the body, similar to that of morphine. For example, the feeling that follows a run or
a workout is often described as “euphoric.” That feeling, known as a “runner’s high,” can be
accompanied by a positive and energizing outlook on life. As a result, exercising can:
Reduce stress. Ward off anxiety and feelings of depression.
Boost self-esteem. Improve sleep.
With regards to reading, deciding to go through the process of opening your mind to
another person’s thoughts and ideas can help you improve your emotional state in a couple of ways.
Firstly, you increase your knowledge in different areas and you become less prone to confusion
when facing questions concerning complex topics. Secondly, if you identify with the ideas promoted
by the writer, you somehow experience a feeling of self-validation. You understand that you are not
the only person having those thoughts or concerns and, if you come from a place of emotional
desperation, this process can help you eliminate it and also give you hope for a brighter future.
Serotonin is a powerful neurotransmitter that allows us to experience feelings of elation.
The main sources of serotonin can be divided into the following 3 categories:
Emotional and physical connection with other people is critical to serotonin release.
Self-confidence and self-validation are probably the main feelings that
indicate the impact of this release on our lives. We all know that a bad diet affects our health
negatively, and mental health suffers as a result. There is a “second brain” inside your gut. There
lies the enteric nervous system, which has neurons similar to the ones brain has. The enteric nervous
system uses more than 30 neurotransmitters, just like the brain, and, in fact,
95 percent of the body's serotonin is found in the bowels. What you eat affects this system.
Fun can be anything from partying, to extreme sports. When you decide to work on your
productivity levels, you will realize that burnout is inevitable. You need fun in order for the
required serotonin levels to be reached and also to help the mind recover from a
burnout state caused by too much work.
Despite our most gentle intentions,
the mere structure of society and the complexity of our emotional and social world
make our life conditions difficult to manage. In the midst of this battle, people can only
maintain emotional stability by managing their interactions with patience and empathy.
As Robert Greene very elegantly states in “The 33 Strategies of War”:
“Our successes and failures in life can be traced to how well or how badly we deal with the
inevitable conflicts that confront us in society. The common ways that people deal with them—trying
to avoid all conflict, getting emotional and lashing out, turning sly and manipulative—are
all counterproductive in the long run, because they are not under conscious and rational control
and often make the situation worse. Strategic warriors operate much differently. They think
ahead toward their long-term goals, decide which fights to avoid and which are inevitable,
know how to control and channel their emotions.” This mindset is the only way to help one bring
equilibrium to their emotional world and, most probably, the catalyst that can lead
to a proper way to deal with human nature. Each individual is an amalgamation of biological,
cultural, and social influences. This complicated mixture
suggests that it is almost impossible to find individuals whose opinions can align perfectly.
We are all humans trying to balance individuality with togetherness and that’s not an easy task.
Kant has said, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the
person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
What he actually means is that the way we treat each other impacts our understanding of morality.
A means to an end means a thing that is not valued or important in itself
but it is useful in achieving an aim. When you meet someone and instead of
identifying the humanity in them, you try to exploit them, benefit from them, or
just use them, then you treat them as means. Instead, he suggests that we should identify that
each human is a peculiar idiosyncratic figure and we should treat them always as ends in themselves.
See the humanity in your fellow humans and the world becomes a playground oozing
effervescence and synergy. After all we are all part
of the same playground called life. I guess it is important to learn how to play.