In The Importance of Being Smart, I wrote how smart people can achieve much more – with much less effort – than those who just work hard. There’s a comment there by Frode that I’d like to discuss:

… lazy people seem to be smarter, as they use a lot of brain energy on finding an easier way to do stuff.

Interesting, isn’t it? Lazy people seem to be smarter. But I agree that thinking like lazy people is a good way to work smart. Here are two reasons:

1. Lazy people find ways to accomplish something with the least amount of effort. If you are lazy, you will diligently find ways not to work. Applied to finishing tasks, it means that you try to accomplish it with the least amount of work possible.
2. Lazy people ensure that when they work, they do things that have impact. Why? Because it allows them to gain more with less. They don’t bother doing something that won’t give them results.

Of course, what I mean here is thinking like lazy people, not actually being lazy. You still need to have strong work ethic. But you also need to do things the smart way.

Here are four things you will do if you think like a lazy person:

1. Question whether or not something is worth doing. Don’t do something just because everyone else does it. Ask yourself: is it really necessary? Is it really worth doing? If the answer is no then there is no reason to do it.

2. Do only things with the most impact. Your resources are limited so invest them only on things that give you the most return. Think ROI.

3. Take the shortest path. Don’t waste your time on unnecessary bells and whistles. Do only the things that are necessary to get the job done. Cut everything else.

4. Use as much leverage as possible. Before doing something, find the things you can leverage. Do you know someone in your network who can do it better or faster than you? Can you market it to your existing customers? Can you achieve more than one thing at once? Whatever you do, always use the power of leverage to your advantage.

Photo by Per Ola Wiberg

Note: This is a guest post from David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek

I live in the future. No, this isn’t a McFly-moment, it’s a always-have-my-thoughts-in-the-future moment. And it’s a problem.

Living with your mind focused on the future causes you to miss out on the now and our lives are made out of moments of now, not of moments of the future. By living in the future you don’t actually live at all.

Of course, it’d be nice to live so I’m trying to enjoy the journey – the present. Here are some ways to do that:

1. Focus

Pure focus is bliss. When your thoughts, actions and emotions are all directed towards a single function you are focusing and you are in the present. You should get lost in your work. Set a deadline for yourself to finish a task and see your level of focus skyrocket.

Right now I’m using e.ggtimer.com and have it set for 20 minutes to finish this article (which I’ve pre-outlined). Perhaps the deadline is too tight, but that’s great, because it’s a challenge that doesn’t allow for procrastinations or over thinking. Set a task and do it.

Go with the flow.

2. Mastermind

Two of my friends and I meet up every now and then to talk about business, ideas, and just random stuff really. It’s fairly flexible and unprofessional, but we still label it as a mastermind.

Although the very concept of a mastermind is focused on getting results in the future I feel there’s also a sense of living in the moment, because we all just sit around a table or outside on the grass and talk. There’s no fancy technology, very little note taking and it’s just pure discussion. And perhaps most importantly: it’s fun.

When we mastermind time flies. Just a couple of days ago we spent 6+ hours just talking about stuff and it was the most enjoyable 6 hours I’ve had in a while.

Find like-minded individuals and bump your heads together (figuratively – don’t get all Pachycephalosaurus on me).

3. Take it slow

Being in a rush doesn’t give you a chance to appreciate the present. I understand the various apparent urgencies you may feel in your life. For some time I was rushing to earn an income online and although a degree of hustle is required for any form of achievement, I find taking things slower and simply being patient more rewarding.

I’ve accepted that my writing career isn’t going to explode overnight and that any side businesses I build aren’t going to be insanely popular at launch. And with that comes a sense of calm. Yes, it may take years to reach goals I’ve set, but years I have, moments I need.

Slow down the speed of life. Urgency is rarely urgency.

4. Find balance

Or “The Middle Way” as it’s known in Buddhism. Anything in excess is dangerous. Practice the art of work-life separation and strive to do everything in moderation.

When you introduce balance into your life you become mindful of what you’re doing, giving you a chance to acknowledge moments for what they are: precious gifts of chronology. Don’t let anything consume your life.

Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Balance your life.

5. Be certain

Where are you going? Understand what you want the future to hold and set a plan to accommodate for that. This gives you perhaps the most powerful tool in achievement: certainty.

If you believe in something, are passionate about it and can visualise the end result so clearly that you can taste it, you feel certain that it’s inevitable. You’re no longer wondering if, but when. And this is powerful.

With this certainty you can stop stressing over what may or may not happen in the future because there’s simply no wondering – you’re going to achieve it and that’s final. Achievement simply becomes a matter of doing X to achieve Y.

This may seem like a cold way to approach life, but when the outcome Y is understood, each moment X can be fully appreciated as they aren’t bombarded by self doubt or uncertainty. You can live in the present because your future becomes a predetermined (but still open to spontaneity) mass of wonderment.

Set a direction for your life and enjoy the ride.

6. Unfocus

Productiveness isn’t always beneficial. It’s great to get stuff done, but at times it’s even better to sit back and lose yourself in something that has no tangible result, something that is simply fun.

Personally I love getting fish and chips with a friend and just watching the world go by, or playing some co-op video games if I’m in the mood for fighting hordes of aliens. You don’t need to dominate your life with getting things done.

Embrace unproductivity. Do things “just because”.

David Turnbull writes about peace of mind, simplicity and geekery at his blog, Adventures of a Barefoot Geek. He enjoys long walks and writing about himself in 3rd person.

Photo by lepiaf.geo

Persistence is important to achieve success, but giving up is also important. I’ve written about persistence before, so here I want to look at giving up.

Why is it essential? Why is it necessary to give up? Because it allows you to focus your energy on the few things that are truly important. By giving up, you:

1. Stop unfruitful effort. What’s the point of spending your time and energy on something that doesn’t work? The more you spend your time and energy there, the more you waste your resources.
2. Avoid spreading yourself too thin. There are probably many things that you want to achieve. But you can’t achieve everything you want. Your resources are limited so you need to choose and prioritize. If you try to do too many things at once you will end up achieving nothing.
3. Reduce your stress. Pursuing too many things means giving yourself unnecessary pressure. Don’t let your ambition stop you from enjoying your life.
4. Free up time for your loved ones. Don’t be so busy that you don’t have time for your loved ones. By giving up, you ease your burden and free up time to build meaningful relationships.

In essence, here is what you need to do:

Give up the less important things so that you can focus and persist on the few important ones.

Here are several tips to help you apply it:

1. Find what matters to you

You need a way to know whether or not something is important. That’s why you need to find what matters to you. What makes you feel fulfilled? What gives you inner satisfaction? Be persistent on things that matter to you and give up the others.

2. Assess your life every now and then

Even if you already find what matters to you, the busyness of life can obscure it. As a result, you might get distracted by superficial things. So find time to reflect on your life every now and then. Look at how your life is going. Are you staying true to what your heart is saying?

3. Learn to let go

You may know that you need to give up something, but it might not be easy to let it go. This is especially true if you already spend a lot of resources on it.

This is where the concept of sunk costs is helpful. Don’t get caught in sunk cost bias. The fact that you’ve spent your resources on the wrong thing doesn’t justify spending even more resources on it. Those resources are already spent. Now you need to find the best way to spend the resources that are left.

The concept of opportunity costs may also be helpful. Holding on the wrong thing means losing better opportunities. The more resources you spend on it, the more opportunities you lose.

4. Refocus your effort

Once you’ve given up the less important things, renew your focus and effort on the few important ones. Now that you are focused, you have a chance to make a real difference.

Photo by Japokskee

What is your favorite way to make money? Obviously, there are many ways to make money. You can work for a company or have your own business. You can earn money from salary, dividend, commission, bonus, and many others.

My favorite way is to earn passive income. I’m sure this is not new to you. I’ve heard about it for years but only recently did I begin to understand its nature. I’m not saying that this is the best way or that everyone should do this. This is just the way I like most.

The main reason I love passive income is freedom. With passive income, I don’t need to be actively involved to make money. I do need to work hard to build the system in the beginning, but once it works I can leave it alone and the system will continue earning me money. All I need to do is checking it every now and then to make sure that nothing goes wrong. I can improve the system if I want to, but that’s optional. I can spend my time on a hobby or a new project.

Differences Between Active and Passive Income

To better understand the nature of passive income, here are some differences between active income (income that requires your active participation) and passive income:

• With active income, you can quickly get full-time income. For example, if you receive monthly paycheck then you will get full-time income within one month. With passive income, it may take a long time before you get it.
• With active income, when you stop working your income drops to zero or near zero. When you work you maintain your income level or slightly increase it. With passive income, when you stop working your income stays at the same level. When you work, you increase your income level.

From these two differences, you can see that building passive income is long and difficult. But once you make it, you will get the big reward of financial freedom.

Steps to Build Passive Income

From the characteristics above, here are the steps you should follow to build passive income:

1. Build a side business. Since it takes a long time to reach full-time level with passive income, don’t leave your day job. The active income from your day job will cover your expenses. At the same time, you should start building your passive income through a side business. Start early because it will take time. These passive income resources might give you some ideas.

2. Focus. It’s important that you focus on just one business and make it successful. Don’t be all over the place. There’s a price to pay for something to be successful and only with focus can you pay the price before you burn out.

3. Leave your day job. Once your passive income reaches full-time level, you can leave your day job. This is where you start enjoying your financial freedom.

4. Diversify. Now that you have more time, you need to diversify your sources of passive income. Work on new income sources. This way when something goes wrong with one source you still have other sources to cover you. This also is a good way to increase your income over time.

Photo by schoschie

What do you think it takes to get good luck? There are many opinions on this. One popular one is to prepare yourself so that you will be in the right position to capitalize on opportunities when they come. This is summarized in a Louis Pasteur’s quote that says “Fortune favors the prepared mind.”

But there’s an interesting take on it that I found recently in The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. There the author gives a simple tip to get good luck: be generous. You should be generous if you want to be lucky. In other words, you should make other people feel lucky to be around you.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Here are three reasons why:

1. The quality of the people around you reflects your quality
   Twyla Tharp is a choreographer and this is what she writes: To be a great choreographer (or teacher), you have to invest everything you have in your dancer… Without that generosity, you’ll always hold something back. The finished work shows it, and your audience knows it.
2. People will reciprocate
   Reciprocation is one of the weapons of influence described in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. The law of reciprocation is wired into us. Whenever someone does something good for us, we feel obliged to give back to her. The more you are generous, the more people are willing to reciprocate and the more opportunities will come your way.
3. You will be known as a value provider
   Not only will the people whom you help feel obliged to reciprocate, but they may also tell their friends about you. They may tell their friends about how much value they get from you. That will attract these friends to come to you. They may then tell their friends and it becomes viral. All these people attracted to you means more opportunities for you.

Here are two things you should do to apply this principle:

1. Increase your value
   Before you can give to others, you need to have something you can give. You need to have something that make other people want to come to you. If you have nothing, how can people feel lucky to be around you? So work hard to increase your value. Build your expertise in the field you choose and expand your network. Coincidentally, it means that you are also preparing for opportunities. By wanting to be generous you build yourself a “prepared mind.”
2. Share without holding back
   Now that you have something worth sharing, what you need to do is sharing it without holding back. It may take practice to do that, but over time you will feel more and more comfortable to share what you know. Again, the key here is not just to give but to be generous.

Photo by wilhei55

Note: This is a guest post by Celestine Chua of The Personal Excellence Blog

When I was a kid, people would constantly speak in admiration of those who were excellent in whatever they were doing. These could be students who achieved academic excellence, successful business people, top athletes, celebrities, and so on. Envy aside, no one ever spent any time to think about why or how they were excellent. It was seemingly natural for most to just accept that certain people were meant for excellence while others weren’t.

As I grew up, I started to form personal goals which I pursued fervently. I would set different goals, generally anchored on academia and performance-related goals, since the country I lived in (Singapore) was a meritocratic society. In the process of my goal pursuit, I would experience the natural process of success and setbacks.

As I gained more experience and observed people who achieved excellence, I started to identify a certain pattern that linked up successes – a pattern of certain principles and beliefs. And when I acted in accordance to these, I would experience excellence in whatever I did – whether it was being on the dean’s list, graduating as the top marketing student in my Business School, nabbing a job offer in a Fortune 100 company against hundreds of applicants, delivering historical record-breaking results when I was working there, creating my personal excellence blog which has tens of thousands of readers after a short-span of months, getting overwhelming demand for my coaching services (which currently has a waiting list of 3 months), and so on. As long as I keep focusing on these key principles, results would be eminent.

If you have ever looked at the achievements of others and thought “Wow, if only I can do that!”, or if you have ever wished that you can perform better, earn more money, make more friends, have better health, achieve higher level of success, and so on, here’s the holler-out to you: You are capable of all of that. Everyone has all the potential in the world to do whatever it is they dream of or want. Following these key principles of personal excellence will go a long way in bringing you to excellence:

1. Have the hunger for excellence

You need to want to achieve excellence. The emphasis here is on what ‘you’ want, not what others want. Make sure the goal is something you set for yourself, because unless it is, chances are you don’t really want it. And if you don’t want the goal badly enough, it doesn’t matter what you try to do since the drive will not be there to keep you moving forward. It’s pointless to sign yourself up for something and put in a half-baked effort, because a) it’s not being true to yourself b) it’s just wasting your time at the end.This is why I always make sure I aim for the best in whatever I set myself to do.

2. Benchmark against the best

What is it you are working on? Who are the people who are the best in this area? What are the results they have achieved? Set your targets to the same level as their best results, or even higher if you are feeling up to it.

At the moment, I’m setting up my school of personal excellence for anyone who has a passion for personal excellence. My long-term vision for this school is to be as big as the Xavier’s School in X-Men. ;) (In fact, I have the picture of Xavier’s School up on my vision board since last year!) While this vision may seem far-fetched to many, it’s a vision which I’m working towards and one which I have absolutely no doubt will come to life given time and effort.

3. Believe that you can do it

Self-belief is paramount to every success. You need to first believe in yourself to get somewhere. If you don’t have self-confidence, who is going to believe in you? If you have often experience low self-belief, look back at the times when you achieved something, regardless of how big or small it was. From there, build up your confidence and leverage it as you pursue your goals. As you begin to see results, your confidence will increase over time, which will create an upward spiraling effect.

4. Build concrete strategy & plans

Every goal needs a proper strategy and plan for it to come to life. Setting a goal and not following through with proper planning is like getting into your car to drive to your destination without knowing how to get there or even having a driving license. Many people fail in their goals because they fail to follow-through with planning. The bigger your goals, the more important that you invest proper time in building your plan. I have written a 7-part Goal Achievement series on what it takes to successfully achieve goals, which includes how to devise your winning strategy, create a robust plan, execute it and review.

5. Learn from the best

Hook up with people who are the best in the field and learn from them. They have the best practices, insights and tips which will be extremely valuable in your pursuit of excellence. Rather than trying to learn everything from scratch, it’s easier to leverage on the learnings from others and build on from there. This will jumpstart your learning curve by a huge degree.

6. Do not limit yourself

Don’t be afraid to try every single thing that might take you to your goal. In fact, be more concerned about the potential opportunities you might be missing out on when you don’t try something. Opening yourself up to possibilities will enable you to pick up on things which might be fundamental to your success.

7. Go all out; Work really hard

With every success, comes hard work. Without hard work, you cannot achieve results. People who try to find the easy way out are kidding themselves if they think they can achieve excellence without putting in hard work. If you observe around you, the people who seek out ‘get-rich-quick’ methods are also the very people who don’t achieve much in their lives. Hard work is the universal quality that will pay off in the long-term. Once you invest the due time and effort, the results will start coming in.

8. Focus your efforts

Once you have finished trying out every single thing that you can see, now focus your efforts in the areas which bring you the most results. I subscribe to the 80-20 principle, where 20% of causes lead to 80% of effects you see in a situation. Focus your energy in the few key drivers of success which will lead you to the results you want. This way, you will utilize your efforts more effectively, which can be subsequently channeled into more value-added activities.

9. Be adaptable.

Adaptability is one of the essential pillars of excellence. As you may already know, change is inevitable – You can either cower in the face of change, learn to deal with it or even turn it into your favor. Be ready for change at all times and develop a friendly relationship with change.

This also applies to changing your plans. Don’t be overly attached to your plans and be prepared to alter them where needed. If there are certain things you are doing which are not very effective, be prepared to improvise them or drop them totally.

10. Never give up.

There is no failure except in no longer trying.
Elbert Hubbard

Don’t ever give up. Remember that defeat never occurs unless you accept it as defeat. If a certain problem is too big for you to handle, break it down into smaller pieces so it’s easier for you to tackle them. As long as you keep trying, you will eventually achieve your goal.

A favorite story of mine is Sylvester Stallone’s rags-to-riches story of how he overcame overwhelming odds in his life to be the international movie star we know him to be today. When he was a baby, he was born with a half-paralyzed face due to birth complications, which led to a slurred speech. This was the key reason why he was rejected thousands of times by casting agents. Because he never gave up, he finally got his big break as the star of Rocky one day – and this only came after years and years of relentlessly trying.

Work on embodying these 10 excellence principles in you and start seeing yourself soar to excellence. I’d love to hear from you personally on how they work out for you :)

Celestine Chua writes at her popular The Personal Excellence Blog for people who are passionate about achieving excellence. She has been featured frequently in press and is a highly sought-after coach. A list of her top articles among readers can be found here: Top Personal Excellence Articles.

Photo by notsogoodphotography

Recently the idea of personal analytics hits me more and more. What is personal analytics? It’s a way of making decisions in someone’s life based on numbers. You measure certain aspects of your life, analyze the results, and make decisions based on them.

Over time I find more things pointing to this direction. All these make me wonder: is personal analytics the next big thing in self improvement?

It started about two years ago when I read an excerpt of the book Super Crunchers. The book talks about how smart companies “act by numbers.” Instead of making decisions based on intuition, they make decisions based on what they measure and calculate. For instance, they use mathematical models to accurately predict how the customers will behave in certain situations and adjust their operations accordingly. This way the companies can directly make the right decisions without wasting their resources. The book even says that those companies know about your preferences better than you.

Reading that made me think: is it possible to apply that at individual level? Can individuals live by numbers? Can someone make decisions for his life not based on intuition but based on facts? If we can apply that, that will be a great leap forward. Just like the companies, you will be able to optimize your life to get the most out of it.

As it turns out, some people already do that. They already live by numbers to optimize their lives. My favorite example is Jim Collins, the author of Built to Last and Good to Great. Here is what The New York Times wrote about him:

And in a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps this short list:

Creative 53%

Teaching 28%

Other 19%

That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.

These aren’t ballpark guesstimates. Mr. Collins, who is 51, keeps a stopwatch with three separate timers in his pocket at all times, stopping and starting them as he switches activities. Then he regularly logs the times into a spreadsheet.

That’s not all. From the same article:

Oh, he sleeps with vigor, too. He figures that he needs to get 70 to 75 hours of sleep every 10 days, and once went to a sleep lab to learn more about his own patterns. Now – surprise, surprise – he logs his time spent on a pillow, naps included, and monitors a rolling average.

“If I start falling below that,” he says, pointing to the short list on his whiteboard, “I can still teach and do ‘other,’ but I can’t create.”

Isn’t that amazing? He carefully measures certain parts of his life in order to improve them. He makes his decisions not based on memory or intuition but based on numbers. Jim Collins is the best example I’ve found so far of someone who is living by numbers.

But will personal analytics be a common phenomenon?

Well, there is one difficulty here: the data-gathering process. A company has a lot of resources to measure almost anything in its operation. It can set up a separate division to do just that. But an individual has limited resources. You have only yourself to do everything. I’m sure many people won’t be patient and diligent enough for that. Even those who do must be careful not to spend too many resources on it at the expense of the real, productive work. Because of these difficulties, only a few people like Jim Collins apply personal analytics effectively.

Fortunately, it may change in the future. There are new products coming out that make it easy for you to gather data. One good example is the Nike+ system:

Veronica Noone attached a small sensor to her running shoes and headed out the door. She pressed start on her iPod and began keeping track of every step she took. It wasn’t a long run – just 1.67 miles in 18 minutes and 36 seconds, but it was the start of something very big for her.

Since that day, she’s run 95 more times, logging 283.8 miles in about 48 hours on the road. She’s burned 28,672 calories. And her weight, which topped 225 pounds when she was pregnant, has settled in at about 145.

Noone knows all of that thanks to the sensor system, called Nike+. After each run, she can sync her iPod to the Nike+ Web site and get a visual representation of the workout – a single green line. Its length shows how far she’s gone, and the peaks and valleys reflect her speed.

Products like Nike+ make data gathering effortless. We can expect more and more products like that emerge in the future. When that happens, you can easily measure many aspects of your life and use them to optimize your life.

Photo by Hexadecimal Time

Note: This is a guest post by Ali Hale of Aliventures

Have you ever had one of those mornings where you woke up filled with energy and fired with enthusiasm, and got straight into your day? Chances are, you raced through a stack of work before lunch, and kept up that sense of momentum in the afternoon. In the evening, you felt happy and relaxed, pleased with what you’d accomplished.

Or … have you ever had one of those mornings where you dragged yourself out of bed, downed a mug of coffee, and pried your eyes open whilst surfing the web or watching television? Chances are, your day didn’t really pick up from there: you found yourself procrastinating, wasting time, and making mistakes. In the evening, you felt like you’d wasted the day.

Getting your morning off to a great start lets you have more good days and fewer bad ones. There are a few simple steps and routines you can put in place to maximise your chances of an energised, productive morning – and a great day to follow:

Get Enough Sleep

If you find yourself extremely reluctant to part from the duvet in the mornings, it could just be that you’re naturally lazy … but it’s more likely that you’re not getting enough sleep. Some people are fine with six or seven hours, others need nine: so don’t assume that your current sleep quota is enough for you.

Ways to maximise your chances of a good night’s sleep include:

• Going to bed earlier (set an alarm to remind you to go to bed, if necessary!)
• Avoiding caffeine and alcohol in the evening
• Switching off the computer and television and reading for an hour or so before bed – bright screens can prevent you from getting sleepy

Drink Water and Eat (a Healthy) Breakfast

Many people swear that they’re not human until they’ve had their morning coffee. I’d suggest holding off on the coffee for at least a little while after waking up, and drinking a big glass of water instead: being slightly dehydrated will knock your concentration levels right down.

Don’t forget the importance of eating breakfast: your brain won’t run well without fuel. If you don’t feel hungry in the mornings, you’re probably eating too much at dinner. A healthy breakfast like baked beans on wholewheat toast, or oatmeal, will give you slow-release energy to see you through the morning.

Pray, Meditate or Write

Starting off the day with some quiet, inward-focused time really helps you to think about your priorities and goals, and to decide how this day is going to contribute towards your general purpose and aims in life. Depending on your religious beliefs, you might find prayer a helpful way to do this – or you might prefer to meditate.

If you find your mind wandering during prayer or meditation, try writing instead: taking the time to work through your thoughts in a journal will pay dividends, as it often helps you to work out solutions to problems, or to articulate worries that have been nagging unvoiced in your mind.

Get Straight Into Your Day

The first part of the morning is often spent either idling (catching up with friends on Twitter, watching the news on television) or rushing around (finding the kids’ school books, packing lunches, hurrying to work).

Try to set up your morning so that you can get straight into the important part of your day. That might mean doing your work first and saving distractions for when you really do need a break. If your mornings are often fraught and busy, get into the habit of putting as much as you can ready the night before.

Tackle a High-Resistance Task

All of us have jobs on our “to-do” list which we really don’t feel like getting on with. Perhaps we’ve been putting off a particular phone call or email for weeks. Maybe we’re writing a book or a dissertation, but can’t ever seem to get started.

If you tackle one of these high-resistance tasks right at the start of your day, you’ll get a huge sense of achievement. It doesn’t need to be time-consuming – just something that you feel a strong reluctance to do. When you overcome this, you set yourself up for a great day when everything else feels like a downhill ride!

Ali Hale runs a blog, Aliventures, about getting more from life – not just from your mornings! (Grab the RSS feed here.) She also writes for several personal development blogs, including Dumb Little Man and Pick the Brain.

Photo by McPig

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by a task or project? Perhaps you need to write a report that requires a lot of effort to prepare. Or you need to do something you don’t like that seems big and difficult.

In such situations, there are two responses you might take. The first one is procrastinating. Procrastinating is a way to temporarily relieve the pain associated with being overwhelmed. When you procrastinate, you choose to delay doing the task so that you don’t have to deal with it. The second response is doing the task despite being stressed. You still do what you need to do, but you have many things in your mind that drain your mental energy.

To deal with the situation, there is a good tip in The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz:

I had the good fortune of being trained at Skip Barber’s racing school… What they taught me at Skip Barber was all about focus. In order to navigate the course at top speeds, I was trained to focus exclusively on the next turn while the car was still piloting the current one… Not the current one, nothing beyond the next one, just the next turn.

The paragraph is written in the context of running a company but I believe it’s also applicable to individuals. If you want to be more productive, you should focus exclusively on the next thing to do. Don’t think about what you did or what to do later. Just focus on the one thing that you need to do next. Doing this simplify the situation since you don’t have many things in your mind. Instead of having your energy distracted by the past and the future, you focus your energy on the task that you need to do now.

What if you still feel overwhelmed? Then make it simpler. Break the task to even simpler tasks.

Focus only on the next turn and you will navigate your tasks and projects at top speeds.

Photo by iwona_kellie

Which one do you prefer: linear growth or exponential growth? Do you want your progress to be at the same pace year after year or do you want it to be increasingly faster? I’m sure you prefer exponential growth. After all, it enables you to achieve more with less effort over time.

To achieve exponential growth, the key is using the power of leverage. The more you use the power of leverage, the faster your progress will be. On the other hand, those who don’t use the power of leverage will need to work just as hard every time to get the same results.

Living a Lifestyle of Leverage

I believe that leverage is so important that you should make it a part of your lifestyle. You need to live a lifestyle of leverage. That means seeking potential leverages constantly and using them whenever possible.

To see whether or not you are living a lifestyle of leverage, ask yourself this question:

Do I achieve more with less effort over time?

The more you can answer yes to the question, the more you make leverage a part of your lifestyle.

Here are two things you should do to live a lifestyle of leverage:

1. Creatively use what you already have to build new things
   Here the focus is on the present. Look at what you already have and find how you can use them to build new things. If you have a business then find what new businesses you can build based on it. If you have a machine then find other ways to use the machine.
2. Think of what leverageable assets you should build
   Here the focus is on the future. Instead of looking at what you now have, look ahead and think of what you want to leverage in the future. This way you can start building those assets so that they will be ready by the time you need them. Without such a planning, years might pass before you realize that you have nothing to leverage. Start working now to make your future easier.

The ability to build leverageable assets (a term I learned from Beyond Code) is a good way to see whether or not a career is good for you. There are many people who just work year after year without ever building leverageable assets. Consequently, ten years from now they may need to work almost as hard as they do today to get the same results. Choose a career that helps you build leverageable assets.

Leverageable Assets to Build and Use

Here are several leverageable assets you can build and use:

1. Contacts

Your network is a great source of leverage. When you need something you don’t have, you can reach out to your network to see if someone has it. Even if you can do something yourself, chance is there is someone in your network who can do it faster and better than you.

To maximize your network’s leverage potential, you should know people from as many different backgrounds as possible. It won’t help you much if all the people you know have similar backgrounds.

Of course, to be able to extract value from your network you should invest in it first. Help people in your network sincerely.

2. Knowledge and skills

When you already master something, you can use it to quickly learn related skills and knowledge. What you know becomes a foundation to build upon. For example, in the programming world once you know a programming language it will be easier for you to learn a second language. Why? Because there are similarities between programming languages and you can use your knowledge of the first language to learn a second one.

There is a category of skills that has especially high leverage power: transferable skills. Transferable skills are skills that are useful across different fields. Some examples are time management (or, even better, energy management), marketing, and communication skills. You can use these skills in many different circumstances, so they are something you should pay special attention to. The more transferable skills you learn, the more leverage power you have.

3. Passions

Just like you can leverage your knowledge, you can also leverage your passions. Your passions act like a power source that motivates you to go further and dig deeper than you would normally do.

So use your passions to your advantage. Follow them and tap into the energy they provide. Leveraging your passions helps you overcome the initial period of failure on your way to success.

4. Achievements

You can use what you already achieve to achieve even more with less effort. Let’s say you already build a successful business. You can use that business as a basis to build a new business. You may promote your new business to your existing customers. Or you may assign some of your staff from the first business to the second one. You may also use the equipment of the first business to build the new business. As you can see, there are many ways to leverage what you already achieve.

5. Money

Money has great leverage power as long as you use it wisely. Instead of spending the money you earn on consumable goods, reinvest a significant part of it. Use it to buy other people’s time and expertise. Use it to buy tools and equipment. Use it to experiment with new opportunities.

Photo by Davichi