Category: Everything else

Your lost calories don’t show up when you look at your exercise scores at the end of the first week. They show up after 30 weeks of exercise. By then, of course, you’ve judged your progress as insignificant, stopped exercising altogether, and let the resistance win.

Scr*w the over-analysis of the results. Stop judging your progress.

The first step to making progress is just making progress.

Focus on putting in your best shift and getting work done. The rest will follow. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter… show up and get stuff done anyway. The world will be better for it.

Today’s post is courtesy of The ALearningaDay Challenge. We have 11 participants who are going all out on daily blogging, daily book reading, and daily exercise. I’m sure I’ll get down to putting together an index of all their blogs soon. But, for a taste, do check out The Book Bytes Project. With 14-15 book snippets every day, it’s an example of ‘inspiration guaranteed.’

Today’s blog post is a re-blog from Shweta, one of the regulars in the ALearningaDay community.

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Just Do It

I just spent an entire weekend with my one-year old nephew. The sweetheart is just learning to walk, and keeps waddling around the house, falling with a loud thump every few minutes. He is also beginning to say his first words and calls everyone ‘appa’ (or father).

Besides serving as an unhappy reminder that I’m growing old, the little tyke reminded me of how important it is to just believe. If babies ever pondered over how difficult learning a language is, they would never get around to mastering one (as they all do).

Sometimes, the walls around me are simply the ones I create. The most interesting people around me are those who have stretched the limits of what is considered possible. I find that most Americans around me grow up with this attitude—they do not let themselves be limited by their perceptions of their abilities, but keep moving towards their goals. It’s an attribute that inspires awe. For it is better to fail than to never have tried at all…

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My favorite quip here is “If babies ever pondered over how difficult learning a language is, they would never get around to mastering one (as they all do).”

A very nice reminder the next time I find excuses to weasel out of learning something new.

You are the biggest part of your life experience. You see the world through your eyes, process it with your thoughts, and act with your motives and ideas.

When you sign up to learning and changing yourself bit-by-bit every day, you see these thoughts, motives, and ideas change. So, in changing yourself, you do change the world.

It may just be the world you see and experience.. for now. That’s how it begins.

Gates, Allen, Jobs, and Wozniak wouldn’t have been able to help make the world become more productive if the world they saw didn’t have personal computers in it. The personal computer revolution that changed the world that began in their minds and at their desks.

Big changes have humble beginnings.

Big presentation today? Expect your computer to hang right in the middle of the presentation.

Big product demo today? Expect your phone to be agonizingly slow.

The bigger the stakes, the higher the chances that something will go wrong. It just does, doesn’t it? You’ve probably been in many situations where you’ve asked – why NOW?

You can of course blame it and make a joke about it. But, what you need in your toolkit for next time are 3 important things –

1. Prepare for the worst case. The very worst. Always. Back up everywhere.

2. If something untoward happens, remind yourself that this happens to everyone. Keep calm and work through one solution after another.

3. Find your sense of humor, crack a joke, and move on.

As this wonderful graphic says.. “Expect problems…. and eat them for breakfast.”

Attribution: Bitsofwisdom.org

This is my new wallpaper. What a great thought..

I’m interrupting normal “book learning” service today to bring in a special broadcast – the world’s first official LearnoGraphic on Willpower.

We’ve been thinking about a way to summarize books and concepts for over a year and we’ve been very inspired by the thought of creating “LearnoGraphics” – infographics for learning. Please find our first attempt attached. The full image is available on www.LearnoGraphics.com and the full graphic’s home will be here.

Hat tip to EB for all the amazing graphics and for being my partner-in-crime on this one and to Roy Baumeister and John Tierney for “Willpower” – the inspiration behind this LearnoGraphic.

Look forward your thoughts!

it’s unlikely you will be happy tomorrow.

The promotion, the new car, the vacation, and the exam result aren’t going to change much. Sure, they’ll give you that momentary burst of joy but not much more. If you’re waiting for happiness to “happen,” good luck.

Happiness isn’t too different from the exercise habit. It takes a bit of work, is a bit painful (imagine that), and requires you to make a commitment to being thankful for what you have. If you find yourself having difficulties with being thankful, spend a day at a home for the underprivileged and your issues will sort themselves out.

If you’re complaining about happiness sitting in your comfortable chair, staring into a computer screen, and scrolling down a facebook news feed – shame on you.

Go out there. Do something. Help someone. Play. Read. Run. Laugh. Love. And then repeat everyday.

There’s a reason they say “be” happy. “Be” is a verb.

We will encounter two forces today – the force and the resistance.

The force will support us every time we set about doing things that improve us – getting difficult work done, learning a new skill, improving ourselves, or just becoming better. The resistance, on the other hand, will only support activities that take us to a lower plane. The resistance hates getting work done, learning, and attempting to get better. It would rather have you procrastinate or just watch TV.

The resistance acts just before you get started. That’s when it is at it’s strongest. If you are planning on reading a self-help book, the resistance would say “But YOU don’t need this. this is for those other dorks. You are brilliant the way you are. You don’t need to change… change is bad.”

And then it will use it’s most powerful weapon – rationalization. “It’s good you don’t read this. You are tired today and need to relax a bit. Maybe you’ll get to this tomorrow.”

And of course, tomorrow never arrives as the resistance wards it away till you decide it’s hopeless.

The moment you get into action, however, everything changes. The force begins to take over. You begin to build action-momentum and suddenly you are deep in a state of flow. When you finish your first attempt at creating an exercise routine, you feel good.. really good. When you start your second attempt, the resistance still tries to thwart you but the force is stronger now. Act again and the resistance grows feebler.

Every day, we face a choice. Do we embrace the resistance and stay stagnant and happy in the short term or do we embrace the force and thus embrace painful growth and work for happiness in the long run?

It’s our choice.

PS: May the force be with you! :-)

You know the feeling when you’re having a great day. Everything feels within your grasp. The train shows up when you set foot into the train station. You are working on your strengths. The universe seems to conspire to make things work. You are in control and happy.

The crap day is a different experience. The train is late. You try working on a project using your strengths but you have to do something you don’t want on a day you don’t feel like doing much. A whole bunch of administrative tasks backfire and you are left calling your bank to follow up with this and calling up your travel agent to follow up with that. You’re not on your ‘A’ game and get told off a bit. By the end of the day, you are kicking yourself hard for not doing something well and you feel like the universe is conspiring against making things work. Cue feelings of stupidity and helplessness.

“How was your day?” – someone asked. “Crap” – I said.

I was wrong. It’s actually so very important that we feel stupid and helpless often. Strengths and happiness give us a feeling of invincibility which are great in short bursts. But, stupidity and helplessness are equally important (if not more..) because they make us stop, take stock, reflect, and learn. Crap days are not just crap days. They are days of great learning. And history has repeatedly shown that human beings only exercise ingenuity when we are feeling lazy, helpless, and fearful.

So, if you’re having a really bad day, remind yourself that this is the best thing that’s happened to you in a while because today will be a day of great learning. Go back home and write those learnings down! Use the strong emotions to make commitments to get better. It’s because of days like today that you will appreciate good things tomorrow and who knows – you might even exercise ingenuity and shape history.

Bad days.. greater purpose.. who knew?

One school of researchers studying the evolution of our brains attribute our large brain size to our tendency to gossip. Human relationships are complicated and the fact that we can hold 150 relationships at one time is testament to our brain power.

Gossip, however, is inherently judgmental. Most gossip is negative and involves us taking the moral high ground. “How could he do that? I would never dream of it.”

Before I go ahead, allow me to digress here. There is a big difference between exercising good judgment and being judgmental. We are all called upon to exercise good people judgment when we hire teammates, colleagues, new employees in our departments. We need good people judgment to pick the right friends, right spouse, etc. However, we become judgmental when we attempt to apply quick judgment to every possible situation or person. Being judgmental involves constantly making assumptions and rarely involves giving the other person the benefit of the doubt.

I’ve struggled with being judgmental. I still struggle with it. I think I’ve slowly learnt to draw the line between exercising judgment and being judgmental in the past few years. And I’ve observed this happen thanks to two changes.

– Less gossip. This has been a consequence of living far away from most people I know for the past 3 years. Unintended but appreciated.

– Less insecurity. I think insecurity is what drives us to gossip. This is not a quick fix though. And suggestions to solve this deserve another post.

I appreciate that both these solutions are not easy ones. The first will probably be impractical and the second sounds vague. But I felt it was important to help explain the rationale for my suggested solution – focus really hard on your own problems.

I’m not advocating being selfish or self centred but I am suggesting we think of our own problems every time we are faced with an opportunity to gossip. This is a guaranteed solution because our problems ALWAYS loom larger than those of others. Focusing on solving the problems in our life keeps the demons of insecurity away as an added bonus.

I had a choice today to mentally pass judgment on hearing a story. Just as I caught myself doing that, I quickly thought about 3 pressing issues in my head. The old judgment thought vanished.

So, when you have an opportunity to gossip or pass judgment about someone else in the next couple of days, think about where your life/career/health/relationships are heading. Then repeat again at the next opportunity.

This works.

PS: Tuning out a gossip habit like the the Facebook news feeds helps too.