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Procrastination

How To Be Incredibly Consistent – Make Your Bad Days As Good As Possible

by Visko Matich · Jan 16, 2019

how to be consistent

I HAD a busy day planned. But here’s what actually happened instead:

I woke up at about 7:30 am. So far so good. Got up, did 30 minutes reading, then another 30 minutes of writing. Holy shit I am nailing it. Got another set of work done, hit the shower, threw some eggs in the pan (not at the same time), washed, had breakfast, and got back to my desk. This day was on fire. I wrote down a list of things I needed to get done. I took a client call. And then did a little more writing. It seemed like nothing could stop me.

But then it all fell apart. Something happened. And 2 hours later, I realized I’d fucked off for half the day.

How I ended up on youtube I have no idea. Roswell? JFK? This is another one of life’s great mysteries. It honestly baffles me, but there I was. What was I watching you ask? Well, despite not owning a console, and despite not playing video games, and despite not enjoying it when I did play, I for some reason decided to watch a guide on how to beat the zombies mode in Call of Duty Black Ops III.

(So apparently the way you do this is you sort out the spooky demon rituals as early as possible. Don’t worry about the zombies at this stage and you’ll be sweet. – Visko)

But I didn’t stop there. Oh no, after learning this useless information, I ventured out into the world of video game design. Yeah, give me a break it was in the sidebar. Not only is this worthless knowledge for me, but it’s something with literally nothing to do with my life. Despite these objections, I strapped myself in and watched a 40-minute critique on the game design in the new God of War.

(His essential point was that, although narratively compelling, the game sucked a big one when it came to combat and was basically a 10-hour walking simulator. What a wild ride. – Visko)

After that, I did a bunch of things. Louis CK’s new standup leaked online. I checked that out. Despite what Twitter says it was pretty funny. I read some news gossipy articles on Brexit. Then I realized I’d fucked my whole day up.

So I did -and this is the most important part- what you, me, and anyone else does in this situation:

I started feeling like crap.

THE SECRET TO BEING CONSISTENT

Everyone wants to be consistent with their work ethic. You set goals, you want to see them achieved. You have things you need to get done, you don’t want to see them pile up. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s going to the gym, getting work done, getting chores done, or working on something just for you… it just doesn’t seem to happen the way you want it to.

Consistency is the answer to this problem, but given it’s so simple an answer, why is it so hard to actually achieve?

First off, there are many ways to be consistent, but never having a bad day is not one of them. Here’s a maple-cured-bacon-wrapped secret for you:

You’re always going to have bad days.

You’re always going to have days where you goof off, jerk off, and fuck off your time till it’s all wasted, the day is over, and you’re going to bed way later than is a good idea.

And yeah, sure, I know I’m not the best person to say this. But take it from me, I know some seriously disciplined people, and even they suck at this. So if you feel like it’s just you… guess what, you’re not special. We all suck. Even Mark Wahlberg.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way. Here’s another super-secret:

Beating yourself up for having a “bad day” isn’t actually helpful and actually encourages you to have an even worse one.

When you get down on yourself for having a bad day, you only serve to make yourself feel more and more like shit. And when you feel like shit, the last thing you want to do is actually do anything effort related. It’s boring, why would you? Instead, you want to do something that makes you feel better. Like, y’know, watch that next YouTube video.

After all, it’s better than feeling like crap.

YOUR “BAD” DAYS AREN’T AS BAD AS YOU THINK

Having a bad day is normal, and ironically, given how I referred to them, bad days really aren’t bad days.

Family killed in a car crash the same day you’re diagnosed with herpes and go bankrupt? That’s a bad day. Procrastination and laziness? That’s a pretty normal day. It’s just not a good one.

Realizing that your bad days aren’t actually bad is a big step in reframing your negative “I’m worthless” state of mind. The same state of mind that’s only going to drag you more and more into the muck of procrastination.

Doing this is one of the basic skills of what I like to call Being A Better Friend To Yourself™. This isn’t positive thinking per se, more building a better, more realistic relationship with yourself and your emotions so that, no, you aren’t positive all the time, but you also aren’t unnecessarily negative to your own detriment.

It’s a big topic, and one I’m sure I’ll do an article on at some point, but the main idea here is that you put yourself on your own side, and reframe your own actions in a realistic light.

The other thing you have to do is actually recognize when your day has gone off-piste. You need to cultivate that voice that doesn’t say “you’re fucking it uuuup!!!” But instead says “come on, we need to do this instead…” and offers a soft, gentle, psychologically healthy helping hand.

Okay, so the day hasn’t gone according to plan. It’s not the end of the world. How can we make this day better?

This brings us to another secret. THE secret fo making yourself consistent:

Take your “bad” days, and make them as good as possible.

Let’s be honest, your good days take care of themselves. They’re not where your focus needs to be. You know when you’re having one, and what you need to do get takes care of itself. It isn’t about as having as many good days as possible. It’s that your bad days, or rather normal days, are as good as they can be. That’s what you want to focus on.

You do this in a few simple ways:

  1. What are the bare minimum things you need to achieve? Really think about this. No, restrain your ambitions for a second. What is the BARE MINIMUM you need to achieve?
  1. Do these things move your life forward? Don’t bullshit yourself. I mean actually move your life forward.
  1. What do you need to change right now in order to start doing them? I.e. if you’re buck ass nude, haven’t showered, and it’s 3 in the afternoon, maybe sort that out first.

This might sound simple, or even incredibly small, but there’s a reason for that. It’s incredibly easy to make a “bad” day a lot better. You just have to DO something. It just feels hard when you aren’t.

MAKE IT EASY ON YOURSELF

The way you get consistent in life is by managing your “bad” days so well that despite them, they don’t get you down, and you still get something done, you still produce something, and you still move your life forward.

Sure, they still suck. Sometimes. But you can still do something.

This is the heart of consistency. You’re not consistently leaping through rainbows, working like a dog, and have the discipline of Batman. You’re just consistently moving your life in the direction it needs to go.

Some days it will be big leaps. Other days it will be little steps.

As long as you aren’t stuck in the same spot, or worse, dragging yourself down. That’s all that matters.

And now that this is out of the way I have a Splinter Cell speed run to watch.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Goals, Hard work, Procrastination

The 3 Biggest Mistakes That Screw Up Your 20s

by Visko Matich · Jan 31, 2018

 

IT WOULD BE EASY for me to say that I wasn’t financially literate, I looked for confidence in all the wrong places, I really wanted to be liked (and loved) and this made me needy, I didn’t know how to have fun, I didn’t work hard enough and I didn’t treat my time like it was important.

But those mistakes, whilst irritating, are stuff we all go through. They’re obvious. And if I’ve learned anything about mistakes, it’s this:

Not all mistakes are made equal.

The shitty thing about growing up is that nobody teaches you how to become an adult. The truth is, you have to teach yourself. The mistakes that you make in life are the problems you have to solve because it’s in solving them that you become the adult nobody could ever teach you to become.

Looking back on my early twenties, it’s become apparent to me that past the detail of my life there were patterns of mistakes, each with specific underlying principles, that were directly getting in the way of my growth as a person. And far from being obvious at the time, these patterns were almost impossible to spot.

So they continued, and instead of growing up, I stood still.

Eventually, I slowly (read: far too slowly) figured out what was going on, and started to fix these mistakes. Some of them were easy, but other’s took years. And it was midway through all of this fixing that I realized something:

These mistakes weren’t unique to me.

Far from being a special snowflake – these were in fact patterns of mistakes I saw in everyone. Sometimes much older, sometimes much younger – it didn’t really matter.

The patterns just kept showing up.

Which got me thinking. If I could fix them, then everyone else could too.

YOU’RE HOLDING ON TO CHILDISH THINGS

When you leave school, university, and your parents behind, life suddenly becomes very different. Instead of being surrounded by people your own age, you’re working with people of all ages; instead of your parents paying for everything, you have to pay for everything; instead of everything being simple and uncomplicated, everything is complex, difficult and often threatening.

It’s a cliche, but the world is a scary place. It’s a constant – whether you like it not – competition, where you have to compete with other people and your own shortcomings in order to provide a life for yourself, and in many ways, in order to be happy. Life after childhood is a series of complex, mature problems that we have to take responsibility for, or they will dominate our lives and determine their direction.

If we don’t get financially smart, we get financially trapped. If we don’t get good at dating, we end up in dead end, unhappy relationships, or worse, alone. If we don’t develop a good work ethic, we hamstring our career or kill our dreams. And all of these, rather than being simple, are complex issues that require us to use a lot of emotional horsepower.

In other words, it’s incredibly easy to get in our own way.

This is why, when confronted with this new reality of adult life, we often sought a retreat into childhood.

It’s funny, looking back, to see how, frightened by the idea of what I needed to be in order to have the life I wanted, I instead prolonged my teenage life well into my early 20s in order to dull the constant feeling of anxiety the world gave me. I was well aware of what I needed to do, but instead of building myself up and educating myself, I retreated to video games and shallow escapism. Games where I could temporarily make myself feel like a winner, and shallow stories that fed my fantasies about a simpler, more black and white life; where I was special and important, instead of not.

This was comforting, and in the context of my youth, seemed harmless. After all, a lot of people my age were acting this way. Hell, most of western culture seemed to be acting this way. Geek culture had spread across all mediums and instead of our lives and hobbies and interests changing and growing to reflect the deepening challenge of our lives, culture seemed to be feeding a demand for the exact opposite; something that nourished the desire for the cocoon of childhood to return.

The complexities of a struggling adult life were replaced by power fantasies of superheroes or normal guys becoming drug kingpins – both under the guise of being ‘mature’, even though, at their core they were just more stories about a wish to not be powerless.

Dating, one of the most challenging things we can do emotionally, was reduced to what was essentially a slot machine. And reality TV fed us fantasies of being attractive and getting attention.

And finances? Well, they were just fucking boring. Savings? Investments? Pensions? Cashflow? What benefit was that to a life?

Like anyone else, I sought avoidance whenever I could. And it hurt my life.

My work ethic stunk, and I wasted years procrastinating. My dating life was shallow, stupid, and made me a vain, insecure, try hard. My finances were a mess and constantly ate away at me in the back of my mind.

And all of this, compounded on itself until a single voice echoed in my head:

“You can’t do this.”

When we turn our backs on reality and run for comfort, we are unconsciously telling ourselves that we’re not capable of taking responsibility for our own lives; that we don’t have what it takes to solve the actual problems we’re being confronted with.

When we drown ourselves in power fantasies, we’re telling ourselves life would be better if we were someone else. When we drown ourselves in fantasies of love, we’re telling ourselves life would be better if we felt like someone else. When we frivolously blow all our money and fail to secure a solid financial foundation for ourselves, we’re telling ourselves that consequences aren’t our problem. And all of this just makes us want to bury our heads in the sand even more.

The retreat from the responsibility of adulthood is nothing other than a retreat from the challenge of taking command of who we are.

And it’s a retreat that stunts our maturity and cripples our potential.

But if we took on the problems adult life puts in front of us – if we engaged with a world that was intellectually and emotionally challenging; if we developed a robust and consistent work ethic; if we built an exciting and rewarding dating life that stemmed from our interests and personality; if we took steps to develop a growing and secure financial situation for ourselves, we would be taking on the challenge of our lives in a way that made us leave every stage of our lives behind, and develop our abilities and personality into capable reflections of the world in which we existed. Reflections that thrived on the challenges presented.

And I guarantee, if you did that, you’d look at all that childish shit as it always was. A dream of being the person you are now.

YOU’RE WAITING FOR A FEELING THAT YOU CANNOT CONTROL

Early into my twenties, I was struck by an idea by for a movie that I felt was entirely original and needed to be written immediately. Seeking to coax more of it from my head, I plugged music into my ears and let the sounds take my small kernel of imagination and grow it into a vast world; one I could shape into a story.

Once home, I wrote a few notes, messaged my friends about it, then left it, touching it occasionally over the next few years.

To this day, it’s never been finished.

I imagine that you, like me, have often found yourself in a place where you’ve been seized by an idea, and felt such a strong feeling towards it (for instance happiness, aggression, passion) that you felt it was extremely important for you to pursue it. Yet, after starting, the initial feeling begins to dwindle, and so does your effort, until you cease pursuing it entirely, and your idea that was conceived with such a great strength of emotion ends up as just another scrap of paper in the trash – or worse, a reminder of how you don’t “finish things.”

You start things because of a feeling, and then stop them because the feeling goes away.

This same principle I see in countless people looking to change their lives or, often, just make small changes. They feel something strongly, they make a decision, they take action, the feeling dwindles, they stop. The shame they felt at their weight as they entered the new year fades away, and their resolution to go the gym fails; the energy they felt, when imagining their story, dissipates, and they cease to write it; the ambition they felt towards starting their business dwindles under the difficulties, and it becomes just another aborted startup.

Now, sometimes this is fine – we get older, and the way we feel about things change. I no longer chase girls like I used to, and I certainly spend less time in the gym. But more often than not – we give up on the things that are actually important to us (i.e our creative passions) because the feeling just isn’t there. We’re not in the mood, we lack motivation, we lack passion. So we stop.

That is, until we feel something again, start as we did before, only to stop, once the feeling fades away.

Repeat ad infinitum.

It would be easy to say that rather being in love with what it is we want to do, that instead we simply love the feeling associated – the heightened sense of being, of purpose – or perhaps we just love the fantasies that our imagination brings to life alongside them – of success and adulation.

This was largely the case for me.

I would start and stop, over and over, enjoying the idea of success rather than the effort required to bring it about. But even when through discipline I started to avoid that kind of thinking – the pattern of starting and stopping over and over didn’t cease. Because, as ever, I was relying on my feeling to keep me in the game.

When I felt good, the days were easy. When I felt bad, I didn’t bother. And the bad days came a lot more often than the good.

That’s the lesson I failed to learn: it doesn’t matter whether it’s a good day or bad; it doesn’t matter how you feel. All that matters is the consistency of effort.

The basic principle of anything difficult is that some days it’ll come easy, some days it won’t – and that’s fine. Your feelings are transient and fleeting and based on hundreds of other factors, many of which are difficult to control. In many instances, the feelings you’ll feel towards the work you need to do are beyond your control and take care of themselves.

That means the only thing that is in your control is whether you continue to keep being productive despite the feeling. This means doing what needs to be done.

In other words, discipline.

YOU’RE PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE YOU’RE NOT

The longer you fail to perceive who you actually are, the longer you prevent yourself from solving your real issues. The longer you spend pretending to be someone else, whether to yourself or others, the longer you will never develop confidence in who you are, and will always be plagued by insecurity.

When I was a teenager, I was socially anxious, insecure and sensitive to the opinions of others. When invited to social events, I told myself I wasn’t interested “in that sort of thing” and instead hid away in my room and played video-games. Later, when I was at university, I alternated between this same avoidance, or extreme overcompensation, where I drank heavily and acted like an idiot. This continued for some time, until, in my early twenties, it dawned on me that:

  1. I was socially anxious.
  2. I was avoiding confronting this.
  3. As a result of this avoidance, I was dealing with that anxiety by fleeing it or trying to smother it.

I realized that as long as I kept doing the same things I was doing, my social anxiety (the true problem) would never change, and I would be stuck being swept around by my various ways of trying to deal with it. I realized that because I had failed to perceive what my actual problem was, I incapable of ever actually solving it.

Now, you might say, well, if you were acting in that way, wasn’t it obvious you were suffering from anxiety?

No, it wasn’t.

Because the other way I dealt with this problem, was by trying to create an image of myself where none of this existed. Just as I did with myself, I didn’t want anyone to perceive me as I actually was.

And so, my focus was almost always external.

“Does this person like me?”

“Does this person find me funny?”

“Will those people reject me?”

In other words “will these people treat me like someone who is anxious and thus confirm what I am fleeing from?”

Eventually, I realized what was going on, and through honesty, therapy and effort, I was able to heal what was causing my anxiety. But this principle, of failing to perceive myself accurately, and thus pretending to others, is a principle I have spotted everywhere. And it always has the same implosive effect.

  • The guy who’s insecure about his self-worth compensates by going on about his intelligence, what he knows, how he’s right and builds an identity around this. As a result, he rarely recognizes what he doesn’t know, and thus leaves huge gaps in his thinking, hamstringing his intelligence. (This is actually called the Dunning Krueger effect).
  • The guy who’s scared of violence compensates by going to the gym and creating a large physique and carries himself around aggressively, only to watch the facade come crashing down around him when confronted with real violence. 
  • The guy who lacks self-esteem doesn’t respond well to feedback. As a result, when people accurately point out he’s not very hard working and easily distracted, he gets aggressive and rejects everything they’re saying – regardless of whether it’s actually true or not.

In each case – whether it be acknowledging what he doesn’t know, learning how to fight, or accepting that feedback is not a criticism of who he is, but what he does – the best solution is always to confront the source of the actual problem, as the solution the problem often creates of its own accord usually just sends you in a repetitive, self-destructive cycle.

This is, I believe, why people stay stuck in such repetitive cycles. Whether it be anxiety over their future, their safety, their parents, their relationships; whatever it is, as long as they fail to perceive it as it actually is, they’ll be constantly chained to its control over their behavior.

So how to fix it?

Honesty.

Take a long, hard, honest look at yourself. Be brutal. Take a look at your actions and choices and really question what they say about you? Take a look at your patterns of behavior and consider what might actually be motivating them. Ask yourself – what am I really accomplishing with this choice of behavior? What am I actually trying to achieve? And why?

9 times out of 10 you’ll be trying to protect yourself from something. That ‘something’ is your real issue.

Fear of failure, fear of intimacy, fear of rejection. Fear of anything, experienced in a way that’s unique to you.

Then, once you’ve found it and explored it, you’ve got to confront it.

Sometimes, this means making taking certain actions. If you’re socially anxious, this means leaving your comfort zone and going in the opposite direction your anxiety is trying to compel you to go. If you’re afraid of the opposite sex, this means gradually pushing yourself to approach them more and build a dating life. Whatever your issue is, taking actions that directly confront the issue are some of the most powerful ways to solve them.

But sometimes it just requires that you open up to someone else, anyone else, and let go of the shit that’s weighing you down and confining your life. This can be with friends, this can be with family, or it can be with a professional therapist.

In my own experience, all three work.

SHUT UP AND SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS

When I look back on my early twenties, the most staggeringly obvious learning is that I failed to take responsibility for my own life. I looked for retreats into childlike avoidance whenever I could; I waited for things to feel good before I took on any challenges, and I failed to perceive myself, and what my problems actually were.

And as long as I was acting in that way, I failed to grow.

The more we hang onto childishness, the less we focus on the problems we need to solve. The more we wait to feel ready to take on those problems, the longer we will go without ever solving them. The longer we attempt to be someone else, both to ourselves and others, the longer we will never work on our actual flaws and capitalize on our actual strengths.

That is in a nutshell what happens over and over again.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

When it comes to adult problems, there are generally three categories of stuff we need to keep in check, which when we do, result in the growth we desperately need.

Foundational problems

Essential, otherwise known as getting your shit together

  • Financial intelligence
  • Discipline and work ethic
  • Health
  • Career

Social problems

Has huge effects on your emotions

  • Social circle
  • Dating life
  • Family life

The Real Shit

By far the most important – the 80/20 rule of all of the above

  • Your ability to deal with your own emotions
  • Your understanding of yourself
  • The development of your self-confidence

When we keep these in check, we are actively solving the problems of our lives, and through that responsibility, are growing into a more capable version of ourselves.

At the beginning of this article, I said that nobody teaches you to be an adult. And I was telling the truth; nobody does. Becoming an adult is a by-product of making mistakes, creating problems, and solving those problems. Often that’s external things like finances or relationships; but in each of us, there are things we’ve carried over from childhood and our teenage years, that live within us and deeply affect who we are, what we want and what we will become. These are the problems that are unique to us, and that we owe it to ourselves to solve.

We cannot escape who we are. We’re stuck with ourselves for our entire lives. And because of this, we owe it to ourselves to take responsibility for what’s going on up there, to confront ourselves – in all our ugly, shitty, flawed ways – both externally and internally, and take care of our lives and how we feel about ourselves, and grow until everything that troubled us in the past is no longer an issue.

Because here’s the truth about getting older:

The problems never stop coming.

 

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Photo by Martin Reisch on Unsplash

 

 

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Archives, Best Articles, Life Advice & Personal Development, Uncategorised Tagged With: Achievement, Anxiety, Certainty, Comfort zone, Courage, Dating, Finding Our Passion, Game, Goals, Hard work, Identity, Life, Life Direction, Life Experience, Life Purpose, Neediness, Passion, Personal Development, Positive Beliefs, Process, Procrastination, Psychology, Purpose, Relationships, Self Help, Self Improvement, Social Skills, Success, Talking

How To Develop The Self-Trust That’ll Keep You Going No Matter What

by Visko Matich · Oct 21, 2017

WHEN I FIRST DECIDED I wanted to change my life, the most palpable objection I faced was not from anyone else, but instead from my own mind. Young and naive, I believed that I inherently had the ability to achieve what I wanted to do; I believed it so strongly that it didn’t seem like a question as to whether I could accomplish it or not. But just as I believed this, I also knew, with certainty, that I could never trust myself to do it. I knew that even though I could accomplish what I wanted to, I was almost guaranteed not to. As if in response to my self-belief, a voice would say:

“Yes you could do it, but you are going to piss your future away.”

This wasn’t self-loathing or lack of confidence in myself, it was instead a simple assessment of how I had behaved to date, and the actions I’d taken (or rather, failed to take) with any consistency.

As far as my life was concerned, I was someone who started things then abandoned them. I was someone who got periodically obsessed, burned myself out, procrastinated, doubted myself, then gave up.

I was a quitter.

And really, given the overwhelming evidence – a lackluster school performance, failure at not one but two university courses, and a tendency to fantasize about my future rather than actually finish any attempts to achieve it – why would I think otherwise? Why would I trust myself?

When the way we’ve lived results in a life we’re unsatisfied with, then more often than not it’s due to the bad habits we’ve accumulated on the way. When we’re young and stupid, we give no thought to the life we’re building for ourselves, and often let various unconscious inclinations lead us to develop patterns of behavior that create a life we would never have consciously chosen.

So we want it to change. But just as we unconsciously built a life we never wanted, in equal measure do we learn to lack trust in our ability to build a life we’d consider worthwhile. Even though we might believe we have the capability to achieve what we want, we have zero trust in our ability to actually do it.

The trick then is rebuilding that trust.

LESSONS FROM A SALESMAN

To start, I need to talk about selling. Why? Because that’s where I came up with this idea.

Sales jobs, if you haven’t had one, are what I’d describe as the worst-best jobs ever. The worst, because you’re constantly exposed to how much bad performance crushes your self-esteem, and the best, because they show you just how ruthlessly productive you have to be to get exceptional results.

In order to stay profitable in a sales business, you have to develop a work ethic that is reliable. Sales is an emotional process. The closer you get to a sale, the more heightened your emotions become; positive and negative. When things are going well, you get excited, energized and elated; when things are going bad you get anxious, stressed and irritable. And it is this exact heightened state of emotions that engineers the haphazard work ethic of sales employees.

When things are going well, their priories shift. When things are going bad their priorities shift. But in reality, it is rare that the actual nature of their effort should ever change. In any sale, the fundamental elements are almost always the same. In any sales pipeline*, the fundamental elements that go into building that pipeline are almost always the same. Therefore, it stands the reason that the same consistent actions should be carried out.

Outside of sales, the importance of a work-ethic can be harder to grasp. In activities that aren’t like sales (i.e directly tied to your income), it can be harder to emotionally connect with the importance of consistent actions. In fact, more often than not people confuse their lack of emotional connection to their work for an inability at it or a fear of failure. Often, it’s neither, it’s simply the perspective they’re viewing the work from. But if you’re building a business, writing a novel, or developing a saleable skill (like, for instance, coding), then the consistent actions you take determine the eventual success you will have in that field – no matter how far off or abstract they are.*

Whilst the eventual reward might seem far away, it’s eventual materialization exists in the here and now; in the choices and actions you are making day by day. In sales, we described this as “every action you take now pays off 3 months from now”, and it lies at the heart of what necessitates a solid work ethic.

And in my experience, this work ethic always boils down to three truths.

THE THREE TRUTHS OF AN EXCEPTIONAL WORK ETHIC

1) Focused work trumps ‘hard work’.

2) Consistent, targeted work trumps ‘hard work’.

3) Trust is built on consistency and predictability.

Truths 1 and 2 are simple. When talking about their work ethics, people often like to brag about how hard they work, how many hours they put in, and what time in the morning they like to wake up and so on and so forth. But in my experience, the amount of time worked isn’t the crucial factor, and in fact, isn’t always the best perspective.

And that’s for a simple reason.

Burnout.

The more aggressively you push your body, the quicker you will burn out in the long term (crashing, losing motivation), and the quicker you will burn out in the short term (procrastination, creative blocks).

This is not to say that you shouldn’t push yourself (you can and always should), but your metric of success for your work ethic should never, ever be the degree to which you’ve pushed yourself; but instead the caliber of the work ethic you’re engaging with.

When I say focused work trumps hard work, I mean to say that 1 hour of attentive, focused work trumps 3 hours of distracted, multitasked work. When I say that consistent, targeted work trumps hard work, I mean that 1 hour, repeated each day, of specific and productive work, trumps 3 hours of random, unpredictable working.

This means that your work should be judged not on how much time it required, but by…

THE THREE METRICS OF SELF TRUST

  1. How much undivided attention you give your work.
  1. Whether you do your work every day.
  1. Whether your work was specifically targeted in a way that has a strong influence on your desired outcome.

And the reason that all three of these metrics are important is that, when combined, they bring us to the 3rd truth:

Trust.

The easiest way to stay on top of an excellent work ethic is to have the trust in yourself that you are capable of achieving the work you need to achieve and that you are definitely going to do it. And this truth is built on nothing more than a reflection on your own consistent and predictable output, that in turn nets you constant and predictable results. The way we apply our energy informs the habits we build. The habits we build inform the person we become. The person we become not only informs the results we get but the trust in what we can continue to get.

When you’ve put in consistent effort towards your work, you’ve developed the trust that means you’ll never stop.

 

*A sales pipeline is a rolling forecast of prospective deals that are currently in process and may or may not occur.

*If they’re right actions, that is. For instance, writing a lot is a more efficient at making you a better writer than reading a lot is.

 

Photo by Anthony Intraversato on Unsplash

 

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Filed Under: Archives, Best Articles, Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Achievement, Goals, Hard work, Identity, Life, Life Direction, Life Experience, Life Purpose, Passion, Personal Development, Positive Beliefs, Process, Procrastination, Psychology, Purpose, Self Help, Self Improvement, Success

3 Unexpected Life Lessons From The Greatest Warrior of All Time

by Visko Matich · Sep 17, 2017

KOJIRŌ SASAKI stood on the beach waiting for his opponent. He looked out along the shore, and across the rolling waves, but there was no sign. He had waited for hours; they had all waited for hours.

The year was 1612 and the location was Ganryu island, located off the coast of the Bizen Province in Japan. Sasaki was a masterful swordsman, who eschewed the traditional katana in favor of a ‘No-Dachi’; a long and heavy two-handed sword considered by most to be too cumbersome to be effective. But despite its length and weight, Sasaki wielded the sword with incredible speed, accuracy, and grace; basing his strikes off of a swallows tail in flight.

He had fought many duals before, and he had never lost. That’s why they called him ‘The Demon of the Western Provinces.’

His opponent was a man named Musashi Miyamoto. A vagabond and Ronin, Musashi was known for his heavy drinking, his unkempt appearance, and his flagrant disregard for the conventions of the Samurai. Despite this, he, like Sasaki, was rumored to have fought many duels and never have lost.

For each man, the other was to be his greatest opponent. Yet Musashi was nowhere to be seen.

Stood on the beach, surrounded by officials and the noise of the ocean, Sasaki began to wonder. At the very least this was a sign of disrespect, at the worst it was a sign of cowardice and his opponent had fled.

As if to confirm his suspicion, the officials around him began to whisper to one another. “Perhaps he has fled.” “Yes, he has run away in fear!” They said.

Sasaki wondered. Perhaps he had fled.

———

A few miles south of the beach, in a small inlet, a fisherman sat in his dingy. The sun was hot but wasn’t a bother. He had been paid handsomely by his passenger; a strange, disheveled looking man who sat hunched over at the end of the boat. The man, who as was usual for him, was hungover, wiped the sweat from his brow stared up at the sun, then grinned at the fisherman. Almost in contrast to his unconventional appearance, he looked happy.

Reaching down into the belly of the dingy, the man picked up a spare oar, and drawing a knife from his belt began to carve strips of wood from it. After some time and many blade-strokes, the belly of the dingy had been filled with shavings and the oar was long and curved in a smooth angle like a katana. The man smiled at his work.

“Let’s go.” He said.

Musashi Miyamoto had woken up drunk that day, and spent most of his journey to the island passed out; but his strange appearance and lateness were not accidents or flaws of character, but rather his strategy itself. Having won his first duel at the age of 13, Musashi was no stranger to combat and was something of an expert at killing samurai. Over the course of his life, he had fought in wars, killed entire dojos, and traveled far, killing famous, notable warriors; all whilst being a masterless Ronin himself.

Killing samurai wasn’t just what he did, it was what he was. Not only did he know their techniques, but he also understood their code and culture. He knew how to get under their skin.

———

It was some hours into the afternoon when Sasaki spotted the boat on the horizon. Stepping forward and shading his eyes from the sun one of his officials shrieked “It’s him! It’s Miyamoto”, which sent all the officials running back and forth, flocking to and fro from Sasaki, unsure of what to do.

Grabbing the nearest man, Sasaki looked into his stunned eyes and said “My sword.” The man stared, mouth agape then fled up the shore to a small hut, shouted at a peasant woman, then hurried back carrying a large, sheathed weapon. Sasaki took it from him and securing the sheath and hilt in each palm strode down the beach towards the shoreline.

The boat was parked just offshore, in the shallow water. A small fisherman sat in the back, fixing a wide-brimmed straw hat to his head, and in the front, a ragged looking man cut the final touches on a large wooden carving, then sprang from the boat into the knee-high water.

The man waded to the shore, drenched from the knee down, and once free of the water stopped a few up the beach to brush the sand from his feet. Saski walked forward and took in his appearance. His clothes looked like they’d be worn for days. His face was pockmarked and unshaven. But it was his gaze that affronted Sasaki most. Behind his serious composure, the man’s eyes seemed to say “Oh, so this is Sasaki – Well, what of it?”

Sasaki’s face was a carved stone, and his eyes did not blink. The two men stared at each other for some time, until an official ran between the two, followed the flock. “Miyamoto,” he said, and Mushashi nodded. The officials all stared, and their heads turned between the two, back and forth, waiting for some kind of movement. Some were stunned, some were scared, and all of them standing on edge.

Striding forward, Sasaki gripped the hilt of his sword, adopted his footing (never too wide, never too short, with his feet loose and agile), and drawing the katana from its sheath, tossed the scabbard onto the sand.

Musashi looked at the sheath, then him, and with a new wildness in his eyes said: “if you have no use for your sheath, you are already dead.”

But Sasaki heard nothing. His hands did not tremble, his body did not move. His pulse was steady, his breathing was rhythmic. This, he had practiced. He was Sasaki Kojiro and he had never lost a duel. He knew this from experience, from what others told him, and from what he told himself in comfort, whenever he felt pangs of doubt or moral discomfort. He was Sasaki Kojiro, victory was as certain as it ever was, as it always was, not simply for the work and achievement he had so far accrued, but because of the being that he knew he was in relation to other men. The knowledge of his superiority to other men and his habitual expectation of their deference was why, despite his outward and internal physical calm, his mind blazed with fury. He was Sasaki Kojiro, and here was his opponent; a filthy, unkempt man who kept him waiting and arrived carrying a piece of wood. To any Samurai this would be a mark of dishonor, but to Sasaki, this was a disgrace.

Musashi stepped forward and their eyes met. He raised his weapon, an enormously long carved wooden oar, as long, if not longer than Sasaki’s own No-Dachi. His internal state was hidden, Sasaki detected that much, but his stance was fine, comfortable and confident; all the details of his body, his expression and the position of his sword spoke clearly; disgrace or no, Sasaki knew, as any master of a profession knows, that he was in the company of a man equal in his craft. Sasaki stepped forward, Musashi back; it seemed he too, had come to the same conclusion.

The officials gasped and sprang back. Many who were friends of Sasaki said nothing and simply stood horror-struck, tearing at their beards. A few seagulls had flown down to the shallow water, bobbing like boats, to watch the proceedings. All were silent, save for a young boy who at a slight movement from Sasaki burst into tears and fled towards the trees.

Sasaki felt calm now. His body was relaxed, but his grip was firm. His eyes, locked on Musashi, felt like dew drops. There was little sensation in him except for his breathing; but behind it, there was a disgust that was held for Musashi. He cared little for him and wanted to disgrace him by killing him on the beach.

A wave crashed and Sasaki struck a swift blow, Musashi moved and lashed out with his oar. “Ah ha!” Sasaki thought to himself, “that was the fatal strike!” Sasaki moved forward towards the sand. “He is defeated!” But there was a glare in his eyes, and he thought “What is this?” And could not recall where he was and what had occurred. “Yes, this is the beach.” He thought. Then, lying on his back in the sand, he grew tired, cared nothing for fighting, and forgot about that and everything else, and only wished for the sun to leave his sight.

— — —

Musashi Miyamoto stood above his opponent, watching him die. The officials were half-mad, some screaming and others stooping over to look at Sasaki.

Musashi, still trembling with nerves, felt great unease at how important the man had seemed only a few seconds earlier, only now to die peacefully on the sand, with a childlike smile on his face that was quite detached from the reality of everything that had occurred. He couldn’t help but think the man was quite beautiful, and he had destroyed something beautiful for no reason at all. He wished he could end all of this nonsense, wake the man up and talk to him. Instead, the man slowly stopped breathing, as the blood pooled around his chest.

Musashi felt a pang of sadness. Here was one of the greatest swordsman that ever lived, and now he was dead, and that was that. Musashi looked at him and bowed, then, leaving the officials with the body, he turned and marched down the beach, through the waves, and climbed back onto the boat. Some of the officials who loved Sasaki ran down the beach into the surf after him, swinging katanas and shouting, but it was too late, the tide had gone out and Musashi had gone.

— — —

Musashi Miyamoto* had fought in countless duels, but it would be this one that would change his life. Self-taught from a young age, Musashi had his first duel at the age of 13, where he struck down a Samurai. Continuing on to fight in wars and dueling, Mushashi came to know everything there was to know about combat, going so far as to develop his own style; which ignored most of the accepted teachings at the time, and was based largely on efficiency and practicality, removing all flowery movements.

Later in his life, he retired to a cave and would go on to write his treatise on life and strategy called “The Book of the Five Rings”, as well as his “Dokkodo”; his 21 rules for a disciplined life. Remembered mostly for his incredible fighting ability and for the wisdom of his later writings – Musashi has always struck me as a fascinating figure, not so much for what he accomplished, but because of the principles that allowed him to accomplish it. He’s a man who sought complete perfection in what he did, but at the same time completely spat in the face of the accepted culture of his time.

There are many lessons to learn from Musashi, but I believe it is these principles that serve to teach us the best lessons. Not just on achievement, but on living itself.

Here are the lessons of Musashi Miyamoto.

YOU’RE GOING ABOUT LEARNING IN ALL THE WRONG WAYS

It’s easy to think that in our desire to acquire mastery of a skill we have to rigorously adhere to the way of mastery that has gone before us. We ask “how do I write a book?”, “how do I start a business?”, “how do I have good relationships?” and we search and consume information that we believe will show us the way to master and achieve these various goals.

But in many cases, this is failing before we’ve even begun.

In many cases, there is no way, there’s only your way.

Musashi defeated every opponent he came across. No matter how much they trained, no matter which style they’d mastered, no matter how many people they’d beaten; they all lost.

Yet Musashi never had a master or even a formal style. He taught himself. In his own words:

“You can win with a long weapon, and yet you can also win with a short weapon. In short, the Way of the Ichi school is the spirit of winning, whatever the weapon and whatever its size.”

A Ronin from a young age, Musashi was forced (or rather, compelled) to wander through life figuring everything out for himself. His approach was unconventional from the outset, and in many ways seems to have been set in tone from his first duel, when, at the age of 13, he defeated a master samurai using the man’s own short sword and a wooden pole.

Because he taught himself, Musashi didn’t have a fighting style that was particular to anyone else; in fact, he invented his own. It’s a style that’s best captured in his own words: “I practice many arts and abilities — all things with no teacher”

Musashi approached the craft of fighting from a place of reality. Taught entirely through his own real-world experience and ruthless desire for perfection, Musashi was quick to disregard many of the accepted practices of other fighting styles – considering many of their movements unnecessary, impractical, and serving only to impress onlookers. Instead, his style was quick and efficient, utilizing both hands and simple, practical movements. The clearest embodiment of this was his choice to weird two swords, instead of one.

When we’re attempting something new we almost inevitably come to a head-on collision with our fear of failure. We feel constrained or withheld, we avoid and procrastinate, and we doubt and deny our ability. This is normal, hell I feel it every day, but it also causes us to look for ways to circumvent our fear and find a path towards our goal that will make us feel safe.

Like a guide, a teacher, or a master.

But if we stop for a moment, and really consider the skill we are trying to achieve, how often can the skill we desire not be learned with common sense? Is writing a book really that complicated? Is starting a business truly that confusing? Is having good relationships really a mystery?

Or are you just scared you’ll fail and not sitting down and using your own imagination and problem-solving abilities?

Musashi is an example I always return to when I think of self-trust. When I want to try something frightening and doubt myself, I always think:

  • How can I solve this problem?
  • What do I need to achieve in order to solve this?
  • What do I need to do in order to achieve that?
  • What do I need to learn in order to do that?
  • What is the best way to learn this?
  • Is there any reason I can’t learn this by action and reflection?
  • Will I learn more by teaching myself than by having anyone else teach me?

This is nothing new. Experience has long been touted as the best teacher, and I’m not here to say anything different. What I’m suggesting is that when fear strikes, and you begin to doubt your ability to do this on your own; fight doubt with doubt. Doubt your reasoning up until now and instead break down the problem you’re confronted with. Engage your brain and figure out solutions for yourself. Because it’s going to force you to come to the conclusion you’re desperately trying to avoid:

That you need to take action. You need to try.

Instead of reading how-to guides, your attempt to write a book becomes a process that evolves as you write the book. Instead of going to seminars and taking lessons on entrepreneurship, you start building a useful product that you can either pitch to investors or start selling. Instead of reading blogs on the internet on how to have good relationships, you go outside and start talking to girls, getting rejected and learning from it.

Because in doing so, you don’t learn someone else’s way, you learn your way. And that’s something nobody else knows and nobody else can teach, and the world has never seen before.

STOP LOOKING FOR SUCCESS IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

I imagine that after killing Sasaki, the greatest rival of his age, Musashi looked upon his dying opponent and wondered why it was that instead of feeling happiness, he felt only sadness. He was finally the greatest fighter of his age, but instead of feeling joy, he felt only the sadness that he had killed this warrior for no reason at all.

It’s been noted that this was the moment Musashi refused to kill in duels ever again but I would imagine it was also the genesis of what he came to express later in life:

“There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside yourself.”

Everything is within. Seek nothing outside yourself.

A product of his age and ambition, Musashi was a killer, but he was not a psychopath. He came to realize that despite achieving what he’d wanted to achieve, it did not bring him anything he wanted, it only came with the cost of a great man’s life. Something he ultimately did not want.

Although a dramatic example, it taught him the example he needed; we cannot find what we want outside of ourselves without first finding it inside. For him, this was satisfaction that came from dueling, but for yourself, it might be a sense of importance from fame, a sense a manliness from having a lot of sex, a sense of superiority through becoming successful – all of this isn’t going to work. You’ll just end up like Musashi, wondering where the feeling you thought you’d have has gone. If you don’t already have it internally, you’ll never find it.

You have to change how you feel inside. Nothing else will work.

I believe this is why a lot of guys I know continually find themselves chasing women. They believe that aside from the satisfaction of getting laid, they’ll feel a sense of internal fulfillment; but when they do finally get laid, they never feel this sense of fulfillment, and instead of questioning this, they simply chase the next girl hoping she will be the one do it for them. They crave more, thinking that will solve their problem rather than confronting the problem itself.

I see this with sex, money, success; any form of material ambition that once achieved doesn’t live up to what we think it would. We either reevaluate or we chase more.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same people who chase more, only to feel nothing, often end up spouting nihilistic beliefs. They looked for meaning outside of themselves. And as Musashi says “there is nothing outside yourself.” When you’ve lived a life finding nothing, you start beginning to believe life is meaningless.

This perspective is often the most challenging to take on because it directly confronts our ego. But ultimately that is the choice. We have to let it go, or let it win. We have to keep feeding it externally, or instead look internally, and find what we were always searching for in the first place.

THE COMPOUNDING OF SHITTY LIFE CHOICES ™

One of the most harmless ways to ruin your life is to waste your time on pointless crap. At the time, it might seem like you’re enjoying yourself, but as these small moments of waste pile up and compound on each other, suddenly it’s 5 years later, and you’ve spent nearly a quarter of your life staring at a smartphone. It’s moments like this that make people wonder where their youth went, and why they can’t seem to achieve their dreams, or even worse, never did at all.

Aristotle said that “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” The way we use our time then determines the person that we are. And when we use our time poorly, this poor use of time compounds and grows until years have passed and we are no longer a person we ever wanted to be.

Queue the panic attack and mid-life crisis.

I call this the Compounding of Shitty Life Choices™ and it’s acting on you every day. It’s acting on you right now. Each time you take an action which is poorly chosen, worthless or completely negative, this adds to the pile of shitty actions you’ve already taken, stored away in your life like a bank vault of fuckups. And like a bank, you get interested on this in the form of the resulting poor self-esteem.

And the more you add, the more it grows; and the more it grows, the more you hate yourself.

This brings me to two quotes I’ve always liked by Musashi:

“Do nothing which is of no use.” And “Today is a victory over yourself of yesterday.”

The first is probably my favorite, exceptionally brutal qualifier on how we spend our time. Once it’s in your brain, it sticks like a virus and questions “is this useful?”, and then if it isn’t “why are you doing this? What could you be doing instead?”

When we orientate our lives into useful activity, our choices compound into massive results that are massively useful; like a book, a business, or a good relationship. When we orientate our behavior into useful activity, we actively medicate ourselves against the ever building effects of the Compounding of Shitty Life Choices™.

When we get all stuffy and bogged down with crap, all it takes is one useful decision to start setting it right. And when we start building the habit of doing that every day, we’re not just setting our days right, we’re setting our lives right.

This is not to say that things like playing video games and watching youtube videos are something you should never do. Fun is useful after all, it just comes down to moderating excess, knowing whether your actions are truly making you happy,  and being conscious of how you are spending your time. If all of your actions are like water that spills into either one of two cups, a good choices cup, and a bad choices cup, make sure the majority of your actions flow into the former, so that at the end of the day, it’s as close to the brim as you could get it.

Try it and see if you aren’t satisfied.

Musashi’s second quote is a useful reminder and antidote to the ever-present and ever negative berating of self-esteem.

“Today is a victory over yourself of yesterday.”

It’s easy when we’ve consistently failed to develop ourselves to get caught in patterns of negative self-talk where we endlessly reinforce an idea of who we are (usually, that we suck), telling ourselves that we cannot achieve what we want to achieve because not only have we failed but that we are a failure.

Sometimes, the argument can seem pretty convincing.

But just because you’ve failed in the past doesn’t mean you are a failure, it just means you need to do something different today. You need to take a different action to the one that resulted in failure. You need to start the day anew and try something new. And then you need to do that tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that, until finally, you are that ‘something new.’

Don’t get hung up on the past. Defeat the past.

 

*In Japanese, the last name is typically said first, so the correct way to say his name would be Miyamoto Musashi, although, as I’m writing in English I felt it better to stick to English conventions. The same can be said for Sasaki Kojiro.

 

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Filed Under: Archives, Best Articles, Dating Advice For Men, Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Achievement, Anxiety, Approaching, Attraction, Certainty, Charisma, Comfort zone, Courage, Death, Emotions, Fear, Finding Our Passion, Game, Goals, Hard work, Identity, Life, Life Direction, Life Experience, Life Purpose, Neediness, Passion, Personal Development, Positive Beliefs, Process, Procrastination, Psychology, Relationships, Self Help, Self Improvement, Social Skills, Success, Women

The Simple Art of Not Wasting Your Morning, Day, Week, Youth, or Life

by Visko Matich · Aug 8, 2017

 

I’VE ALWAYS HATED the idea of a morning routine. Touted in podcasts, blogs, and self-help books, they’ve always come across as some kind of scam. I mean, if I want to be a successful lawyer, what use is it for me to wake up, perform dynamic stretching, eat quinoa and black beans (all within half an hour), and then recite my empowering, refined and impassioned mantra into the mirror. Wouldn’t all that practice make me better at all of those things? Wouldn’t, y’know, practicing lawyering make me a better lawyer?

The morning routine has always fallen into the category of: “Hey, if you’re too scared to actually pursue your dream, here’s some unrelated activity you can do to make you feel like you’re actually making progress!”

Rather than offering an actual solution, it just capitalizes on fear. And the beauty of it, if you’re an internet marketer, is that there are so many different things someone can do in the morning, that you’ve always got another solution to sell.

Yeah, It’s snake oil.

And I hate it.

But in the case of prolific and award winning author Salman Rushdie, I like to make an exception.

When asked about his writing process, Rushdie was quick to admit he didn’t engage in any bizarre rituals. What he did admit, however, is that he had a habit of getting up, and immediately getting to work.

He woke up, and he started working on what he needed to work on.

Using the first of the morning’s energy.

Rather than another shit-show of bizarre, impractical, unrelated and often useless tips; his own process was one that made obvious and perfect sense.

As the day goes on, our energy fades away. So it pays to start work as soon as you fly out of bed.

PRIORITISING EFFORT AND LEVERAGING ENERGY

If we accept that the first of the morning’s energy is the freshest then we accept that we are likely to be most effective during those first hours after waking. If this is true, then it stands to reason that stacking the most difficult, challenging tasks during these hours is the effective use of energy.

Every thing that you’re less likely to enjoy, more likely to put off, and more likely to find difficult, should be immediately attacked during this time – as there’s no point in the day that they’ll be easier and quicker to complete. The longer you leave them, the more their difficulty only magnifies.

Now, this is fairly useful, if obvious, advice on how to structure your day and maximize your energy with your work – but where it got me thinking was when I realized that more than just good advice for your day, it’s damn good advice for life.

DAMN GOOD LIFE ADVICE

When we’re young, we have more energy and more freedom than we will at any other point in our lives. As with our day, the longer our lives go on, the more our energy depletes and the more the options available to us are restricted by our responsibilities. And if there is no point that we’ll have more of these resources, we owe it to ourselves to stack the difficulty into the early years of our lives as much as we can.

Just as there’s an eastern proverb that says “the best time to plant a tree is right now”, there’s also a Life Uncivilized proverb that goes like this:

“It’ll never be easier than it is now. So get the hard parts done right the fuck now.”

Shave my head and dress me in orange.

Just take a look at any success:

The guy who builds his own business suffers through long start up working hours, limited time to socialize, takes huge risks with his future and often invests large amounts of his own money on ideas that will not pay off, and only returns him back to the starting line, where he starts all over again.

The guy who gets the better dating life spends years getting rejected, suffering through questioning his identity and staying up late in bars and clubs during his work week. He will often feel unattractive, unworthy and like a social reject.

The guy who writes the novel spends years devoting time before or after work to write down passages of writing that go nowhere, to multiple novels that fall flat and don’t work. His first finished work will likely be met with meek praise from his family and series of rejection notes from publishers.

Within any example of achievement, there are inherent demands of suffering that must be met. These demands, in each example of achievement, require huge feats of effort, persistent and emotional resilience. They also require time. There is no time than the present that we will have more energy to engage with these demands. There is no better time than right now. No matter what age we are – right now is always best.

I guess what I’m saying is this: we’re often told to enjoy our youth, but what we should really do is suffer through it. Because when we have more energy to tackle the suffering inherent to the goal we’re pursuing, we are more capable of taking on that suffering, and thus the difficulty of that challenge is in itself greatly diminished.

It’s never easier than it is in the early hours. This is true of the morning. This is true of your work week. This is true of your life.

When we front load our youth with suffering, our middle and later years are free to focus, hone and capitalize on the rewards our grunt work achieved us. This could be a better marriage due to understanding yourself, your emotional needs and women better. It could be a better understanding of novels through a mastery of plot, character, and revisions. It could be a better understanding of business through a honed instinct for buyer behavior, marketing, and lean business models.

It could be anything. But it will be learned by failure, and it will be learned by suffering and struggle.

Use your energy wisely. Get it out of the way early.

 

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Photo by Anthony Intraversato on Unsplash

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Filed Under: Archives, Best Articles, Dating Advice For Men, Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Achievement, Anxiety, Certainty, Comfort zone, Courage, Dating, Finding Our Passion, Hard work, Identity, Life, Life Direction, Life Experience, Life Purpose, Personal Development, Process, Procrastination, Psychology, Purpose, Self Help, Self Improvement

How to Become The Master of Your Motivation

by Visko Matich · Jul 16, 2017

THE LONGER YOU PURSUE or try to generate motivation within yourself, the longer you will fall prey to what is already motivating you, and consequently, never change the actions you take. Just as a sailor must harness the direction and force of the wind in order to get to his destination, so too must we learn to harness our own innate pre-existing motivations or we will be blown off course.

It seems like there is an enormous, never ending patch of internet real estate devoted entirely to useless advice on motivation. Ranging from “never give up” platitudes on persistence to echoed sentiments of “you choose your own destiny”; motivation is treated like something that we can learn; a skill that we can obtain.

This, of course, means that when we’re lacking in motivation, it’s due to our lack of will, ambition, drive or discipline. In short, when we’re lacking in motivation it means that we are lacking in strength of character. This position, the most commonly held by people, is the most persuasive. Chiefly because of how it allows us to self-aggrandise when we’re doing well, but also, more sinisterly, it allows us to indulge in our feelings of worthlessness when we’re lacking motivation. We agree with this reasoning of motivation because it agrees with how we feel about ourselves.

But consider your life. How often have you willed yourself into a state of motivation, and how often has motivation arrived on its own, generated from a place within you that you have entirely no say over? How often have you turned motivation into a skill, and how often have you simply been at the whims of varying motivations throughout your day, that arrive and depart of their own accord?

If you’re anything like me, then motivation shows up whenever it wants to and has little to do with your own determination. Motivation isn’t something we learn or generate but in fact, something that is already there, and already motivating us.

When we pursue and identify with a goal, and then lack the motivation to pursue it, we often fail to realize that our lack of motivation doesn’t stem from laziness or lack of discipline, but often because we are already motivated to pursue something else that is contrary to our goal. And the longer we fail to identify and understand this motivation, the longer we are susceptible to its influence, and condemn ourselves to move away from what we want.

I spend a lot of my time writing. I consider it my dream to become a novelist. To write well structured, emotionally engaging, dramatically memorable stories is something I’ve wanted for the last 6 years of my life. I would consider myself very motivated to write. I write on this blog, I read innumerable amounts of fiction, and have spent countless hours thinking about structure, plot, and character; yet I have scarcely taken any large strides towards my goal of becoming a novelist.

I have ideas, I have characters, plots, scenes, structures, acts, moments, images, descriptions; I have, at the point of writing this, at least three clearly outlined novels in my head. Yet still, they go unwritten. Despite my motivation to pursue writing, of which this blog is a testament, whenever I approach the craft of fiction, I shy away even though the pursuit of writing fiction is what I am so motivated to pursue.

So why don’t I write?

Because I believe that I don’t know what I’m doing, and because I’m scared that my stories, once written, will reveal me as someone who fundamentally isn’t a novelist. And for someone who is actively invested within his identity with the idea of being a writer; this would be intolerable. This would be painful.

And it’s a contradiction.

Just as I am motivated to change (through the act of becoming) the novelist that I believe I am, I am even more motivated to not pursue that change as it threatens the identity that I am possibly a novelist. My motivation lies more in enjoying my idea of myself than it does the reality of what I want my life to be.

But this contradiction doesn’t just stop at writing.

When I was younger and looking to improve my dating life, I decided I wanted to approach girls during the day and I considered myself extremely motivated and driven to do so. I would go out, I would dedicate time to figuring out what I wanted to say, wear, do, act, and where I would go about doing this. But strangely, once I’d arrived, I was never really motivated to do so. The tricks that I’d learned – getting myself in state, desensitising myself, and visualising my goal – never seemed to work, and instead, all I seemed to notice was how fucking weird it is to approach people during the day, and that everyone would see, and that I was a social reject.

Needless to say, I rarely approached. And far from just being during the day, this reluctance extended into meeting girls at night. It was something I didn’t want to be seen doing, and no amount of generated motivation could change that.

Because, as with the writing, I was already motivated. Rather than being motivated to change my dating life, what I was motivated by was something far different. And as soon as I realized that, everything changed.

When it started looking at my actions and how I went about pursuing my goal, it became apparent to me that I was more than willing to sort myself out and put myself in the necessary environment, and I was even willing to approach. I had no problem with motivating myself to change my life. But when it came to changing my life by approaching girls in front of other people in socially awkward ways, I would always back down. Always.

Changing my life, it turns out, wasn’t my real motivation. Preventing social embarrassment was. So, I began to dig.

And it only got worse.

Preventing social embarrassment wasn’t just my motivation, but changing my life was simply a channel through which I was attempting to prevent myself from being embarrassed, rejected and alone in future. I wanted to change myself into that ‘cool, confident, fearless’ guy I pictured in my head. The one who was the exact opposite of how I felt.

What led me to seek to change my life was exactly the same thing that was preventing me from approaching. I was both propelled and withheld by the same force.

Try that for a mind fuck.

That single motivation – to never feel like I didn’t measure up socially (whether that be with others, friends or romantically) motivated 90% of the decisions I made within my life.  Even if the motivations seemed to be contrary, and caused me to take actions against my best interests, the motivations for each were often exactly the same thing.

And it was only upon understanding this relationship, that I began to by extension, understand myself, and work on the factors that were affecting and nurturing my motivations.

Understanding that I wasn’t being motivated by a desire to have a better dating life, but instead to protect myself from being alone allowed me to address that fear of aloneness, and address the issues of inadequacy that were shaping my life, and affecting my motivations. And it was no surprise, that upon doing this, my motivations began to fall in line with my desires.

Likewise with writing, understanding that my motivation stemmed from my investment in my idea of who I was allowed me to realize how it was holding me back, and defining the actions I could and couldn’t take. When I was certain about who I was, anything that threatened that certainty was a threat to my very being, and by extension, a threat to my happiness. Letting go of that allowed me to view writing as it is – a craft and a way to enjoy my time.

This is why I look at motivation less as a series of techniques, and less a reflection of our ‘strength of character’ and more as a deeply personal relationship. When we lack motivation in our lives, it’s usually because something is fundamentally wrong, and is being left unaddressed. And rather than addressing it, we usually seek to pile things on top of it and crush it with will power and determination.

Instead, if we treat ourselves with empathy, if we pay attention to the actions we’re taking and ask ourselves ‘why’ our true motivations begin to come to light and we can begin to unearth the contradictions within our lives and our identities. And once we’ve discovered those contradictions, we can begin to work on them.

Because that’s the secret.

Motivation isn’t about forcing ourselves to become who we want to be, it’s about discovering who we actually are.

 

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It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

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Filed Under: Archives, Best Articles, Dating Advice For Men, Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Achievement, Anxiety, Approaching, Certainty, Comfort zone, Courage, Dating, Emotions, Finding Our Passion, Game, Goals, Hard work, Identity, Life, Life Direction, Life Experience, Life Purpose, Personal Development, Positive Beliefs, Process, Procrastination, Psychology, Self Help, Self Improvement, Uncertainty

The Art of Unbreakable Focus – The Last Guide on Focus You’ll Ever Need

by Visko Matich · Jul 1, 2017

YOU CAN ALMOST IMAGINE his wife’s dismay, when, upon hearing that her husband had lost his job as an oil executive, that he was now to embark on a career in writing. This is hard enough to stomach on its own, but in the Great Depression of 1933, this must have seemed like a stroke of madness.

Raymond Chandler was 44 years old when he came home with this announcement. Having nursed literary ambition at a young age, Chandler forsook his calling to instead amble through various careers, ranging from a stint in the admiralty, a venture stringing tennis rackets and even the military. Nothing stuck. His desire to be a writer never left him, but when hearing of the suicide of author Richard Barnham Middleton, he realized that if a man with ‘more talent than himself’ couldn’t make it, what chance did he have?

Finding his feet as an auditor, Chandler rose through the ranks of the Dabney Oil Syndicate to become Vice President, but his erratic behavior (heavy drinking, womanizing with female employees, and deciding not to show up) eventually became too much for his employees and they fired him.

So, left jobless and in the worst economic turmoil yet faced in history, Chandler decided to have a crack a writing.

Dying twenty-one years later, drunk and alone, Chandler left behind a long and impressive career as arguably the greatest writer of pulp stories that there ever was. Eschewing typical formulas that relied on the final twist, Chandler’s stories gripped from scene to scene and sent him from waiting in the bread line to selling movie scripts to Hollywood executives.

Although he’d lived a troubled life, Chandler had by all accounts achieved his dream. He had become a writer. What is usually considered a goal to be started early in life, Chandler started towards middle age, in a time of desperation.

When asked how he did it, his reply was a simple one. He sat himself down in a room and gave himself two choices.

“Write. Or do nothing.”

And in doing so, he mastered focus.

FOCUS

No matter how hard I try, I can never seem to focus. My mind, far more concerned with its own interests, can never be directed into a particular direction of my choosing. In the past, I would often mistake this for procrastination; and chastise myself for my lack of will, or challenge myself as to what it was I was afraid of that made me avoid my work. But the reality was often much simple.

I just couldn’t focus.

Where other people could knuckle down, I couldn’t.

I remember, when pressed to revise for an imminent exam on Ancient Greece, I instead gained a newfound interest in doing streaks of 3-pointers off the back of a trampoline. When in need of writing a CV for my first job, I instead decided it was more pressing that I teach myself HTML; and when I had coursework due that would fundamentally alter my options available to me moving forward, it just seemed more practical that I master the accuracy and finesse of my web-swinging on Spider-Man 2.

Although, I suppose all those examples indicate an element of choice. In reality, they just sort of happened. Rather than focus on what I needed to, my mind started focusing on something else.

A lot of the writing on focus would suggest that I was lacking in willpower, shy on discipline, and my work ethic wasn’t good enough. Other opinions might suggest I just didn’t want whatever I was supposed to be doing enough. But on close scrutiny, I was always applying a lot of willpower, discipline and work ethic to what I was doing, it may have been on the wrong thing, but to charge those diminished faculties as the cause seems to miss the mark.

And this always seems to be the case.

The people who find it extraordinarily difficult to focus on what they need to be doing, rather than being lazy, lacking in will, and ill-disciplined, are often willful, disciplined and hard working on whatever it is they’re doing instead.

But they still can’t focus on what the need to focus on.

In attempting to find some kind of solution to the problem of focus, it became apparent that a lot of the opinions on it stemmed from internal choice. That the individual, on some level, was choosing to not focus on their work, and instead choosing to fail. Alongside this, it was posited that focus was a deliberate, channeled used of energy and that people that lacked focus simply failed to channel that energy.

In every instance, the person who couldn’t focus came off as weak.

But if that was the case, then why the hell could so many of them demonstrate willfulness, discipline, and work ethic? Why was it these traits failed to evade them, but focus always did? What made focus so fucking hard to understand?

CHANNELS OF FOCUS

When looking at Chandler’s story, it becomes obvious that he was a bit of a mess. Lacking direction for most of his life, Chandler juggled a variety of careers and nursed dozens of bad habits. By any accounts, this was a man who was not gifted with direction, purpose or focus.

Yet when we look at the results of man’s life, it’s clear he was quite the opposite. He was focused.

When we look at focus it’s easy for us to overestimate the reasons for which focus occurs. It’s presumed that focus is the result of strength of will, and that inability to focus is down to a weakness in that will. But not only does this definition stink of macho dick measuring, it’s also not very practical. Minds wander, and when they’re given options, they wander into whatever channels there are available to them. Rather than being a product of willpower, focus is a product of environment. When we give ourselves channels for our focus to run down, we give ourselves less chance of focusing.

And when we do lose focus, we spend all our willpower trying to bend it back.

And we lose energy.

And we give up.

If you’ve been in this situation then I think you will, like me, recognize that this sucks. It’s a self-fulfilling pattern of procrastination and distraction – and rather than being a measure of our own weakness, is rather a measure of our poor planning.

Focus has less to say about us and more to say about what’s around us.

When Chandler sat in his room and gave himself the choice of “Write. Or do nothing” he gave himself the power to turn his focus to where it needed to go. He could sit there in silence, sure. He could twiddle his thumbs. He could stare at the wall, the roof, the floor. But he couldn’t leave, and he couldn’t do anything else. His focus only had one way to go. And it was writing or boredom.

His life’s work shows which one won out.

Chandler is a model for an effective understanding of focus. Rather than being bogged down in techniques and draining force of will, Chandler simplified focus down it’s basest element. 

Choice.

When asked about the definition of focus, Steve Jobs said it was “saying no” to everything else. Like Chandler, Jobs understood when that focus would go wherever it could, and that controlling those channels was more important than forcing your focus into one channel of many or spreading it too thinly between multiple.

When we, as Chandler did, utilize our choice to sit for an allotted time, and do our work, or do nothing at all, what we do is create an environment where focus is a natural by-product of our actions and our environment. Rather than chasing focus as a goal, we create focus as an outcome. Rather than forcing our focus towards our work, we give ourselves no option but to become focused on our work.

And that is the true nature of focus.

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact and share it on social media. Just click one of the icons at the bottom or top of the page. Thanks!

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If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

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Filed Under: Archives, Best Articles, Life Advice & Personal Development Tagged With: Achievement, Anxiety, Finding Our Passion, Focus, Goals, Hard work, Life Purpose, Personal Development, Process, Procrastination, Psychology, Purpose, Self Help, Self Improvement, Success

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