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
Note: This is a guest post by Amber Hensley of Online College
While you might already be ahead of the game if you are studying at all, you might as well make the most of the time you spend preparing for class and ensure that all those hours you put into reviewing notes and reading chapters actually pay off. Here are some tips that can help you learn to study better and get more out of what you’re studying so you can spend less time pouring over books and more time enjoying life at school.
1. Find some peace and quiet. Studies have shown that just 20 minutes of highly focused, quiet time can help you learn and remember more than hours of working with distractions and while multi-tasking. So, to get the most out of your study time retreat to a place where you won’t be bothered by loud music or talking and can just focus in on your work.
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.
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!
