I’m always eager know how influence works. What are the things that make us say “yes”? How do we comply with a request? There are two reasons why this topic is interesting to me:

1. I want to be able to increase my influence.
2. I want to avoid being exploited by ill-intentioned people.

As it turned out, the book Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini was what I needed. It talks in details about the factors that make us say “yes” to a request. There is actually a similar book from the same author entitled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Here is the difference between them:

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Following your heart is a key to living a fulfilling life. Without following your heart, you may do things the right way only to find later that you’ve chosen the wrong things to do in the first place. You may live to meet other people’s expectations without ever finding what matters to you. At the end, you just live someone else’s live without ever living yours. Scary.

That’s why it’s important to follow your heart. In fact, I believe it’s one of the most important lessons for an effective life. The obvious next question is how.

From my experiences, here are some tips to listen to and follow your heart:

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Have you ever experienced wasting your time without realizing it? You started working on something, but in the midst of it you were distracted by something else. The next time you checked the watch, one hour had passed and nothing got done. Or, perhaps, you didn’t even touch the thing you were supposed to do in the first place. Instead, you were just “busy” with something else.

I call such time “black time” and it is an enemy of productivity. You may try to save time by doing only a few things and do them efficiently, but once you are caught by black time you will lose your entire time surplus and may even fall into time deficit. That’s why it’s important to eliminate black time if you want to be productive.

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Who doesn’t want to have a sharp mind? Having a sharp mind is something we all want. I recently read a thought-provoking article about it entitled Cognitive Fitness in Harvard Business Review. The article talks about how the minds of people like Warren Buffet and Alan Greenspan stay sharp even in their old age.

What is the secret? The secret is brain workout. They exercise their brain continuously and that makes their minds sharp.

One way to exercise your brain is playing:

Play engages the prefrontal cortex, responsible for your highest-level cognitive functions - including self-knowledge, memory, mental imagery, and incentive and reward processing… Activities like bridge, chess, sudoku, role-playing games, and challenging crossword puzzles all provide rigorous neural workouts.

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In March Life Optimizer was honored to be included in the Lifehacks page of Alltop with many big blogs like Lifehacker, Dumb Little Man, and Lifehack.org. Alltop is a service that aggregates content from top sites in multiple topics. It helps you see the newest content in topics like career, humor, music, and many others.

Now, let’s see in details what happened here last month.

Best Posts

There were 13 posts published in March. The two most visited ones were:

• 14 Awfully Simple Things to Be Grateful for in Your Daily Life
• A Simple Guide to Finding Opportunities

In addition, here are two more favorite posts of mine:

• Finding Happiness: 20 Ways to Achieve Happiness in Life
• A Simple Way to Improve Your Life Everyday

You can read the other posts on the archives page.

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If you want to drain your mental energy, there is one easy way to do so: compare yourself with others. Comparing yourself with others will only give you two things: either you feel proud when you are above, or you feel jealous and intimidated when you are below. As you can see, both are negative emotions that won’t do you any good.

Unfortunately, our culture is full of comparisons. People like to compare themselves with others.

While some people may say that comparing is a way to motivate themselves, I think there is a better way to do that without draining our mental energy. Here it is:

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