Life Optimizer is about how to live life to the fullest through personal growth. You can read the newest posts below and some featured posts on the sidebar. If you find them useful, make sure to get free content updates via e-mail or RSS feed.
How to Live Life to the Fullest Through Personal Growth
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.
Note: This is a guest post by Jered Slusher of Copper Copy
Everywhere I go, I have this little green monster telling me what I should and should not do. The monster criticizes everything and tells me that if I want to be the very best I have to avoid certain things, and embrace others. He tells me to shave and to brush my teeth so that I look presentable. He also tells me to avoid picking my nose because it’s embarrassing. This can be overwhelming at times, especially when he tells me how to write.
Yes. This ugly monster happens to be my inner critic. And just now, as I sat down to write this article, he jabbed his elbow into my neck and told me that I had to start this article off just perfect. “You’ve got to hook the reader,” he says, “grab the reader’s attention.”
All the time he pokes and prods. “That comma doesn’t belong there… You shouldn’t use the passive voice… Why on earth would you phrase that sentence like that?”
Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.
Emile Coue
Being a better person is a process. No matter how good someone is, he can’t be perfect overnight. So the important thing is that you grow every day. Make growing a habit and you will see significant progress when you look back.
Here are several things you should do to be a better person day by day:
1. Take responsibility
Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.
Carol Burnett
Before anything else, you should realize that the one who is responsible for your life is you. Don’t blame other people or external condition for how you live your life. No matter how bad the situation might be, it’s you who decide how to respond to it. No matter what happens to you, it’s you who decide how it affects you.
Note: This is a guest post by Adam Curren of Character Development Blog
Life can be a grind…. in fact, most of the time it is. In between working 40-50 hours a week, mowing the lawn, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, taking the kids to soccer games, well..… you get the idea. At the end of it all, we’re toast! The body reacts negatively to consistently high levels of stress and many times lead to things such as burn out, anger, depression, and even physical illness. The body wasn’t made to go “Indy 500” all day long.
Our bodies need to regenerate as well as our minds and spirit. Many people are drinking 3-5 cups of coffee a day just to get by. Our culture tends to treat the symptom and leaves the root of the problem alone. The result is never fixing the problem and in many cases, making it worse. Illness can generally be traced to one or more of three sources: environment, diet or genetics. Stress lowers the immune system, making you more susceptible to disease. Combining this with a poor diet and toxic environment could potentially create a disaster!
Note: This is a guest post by Jonathan Beebe of Develop Minds
Apathy is something that most of us have experienced a time or two in our lives, and for many of us, the feelings of apathy are all too familiar. The good news is, there are ways to rid yourself from feeling the absence of passion, emotion, and excitement… and it’s a lot simpler than you may think.
But first, let’s talk about how apathy affects you and your ability to live life to the fullest. Not only do apathetic feelings ultimately leave you feeling empty and unhappy due to the lack of motivation and desire, but it can also have negative effects on your social life, your studies (if applicable), and your work. Apathy seems to heavily promote procrastination, and unfortunately, it has even been closely linked to suicide. Suffice to say, apathy is a little more than a mild issue.
If you want to grow, one important thing you should do is keeping a journal. It may seem simple, but it can make a big difference in your life.
I myself have been journaling for years. Writing all the lessons I learn and all the ideas I get has become a habit for me. And to be honest, it’s difficult to imagine how my life would be without it.
Here are some benefits you will get by keeping a journal:
1. It trains you to be observant. Once you make journaling a habit, you will develop the habit of being observant in all your experiences. You will get way more ideas and lessons this way. Instead of paying attention to the negative side of things, you pay attention to the positive side to extract lessons from it. Instead of taking things for granted, you look for new ideas that you can implement.
