People often force their worst personality traits onto others. If they are liars then they demand you to tell a degrading lie on their behalf to others. For instance, a friend goes on an exotic and enjoyable trip and then portrays it as work stuff and make you a part of their lie when he/she needs convincing it to boss or partner, to give a simple enough example.
Our loyalty and friendship then are dependent on us mirroring and adapting to his/her bad personalities.
Restrictions
Once you devised a plan, try to put as many restraints as possible in terms of time, money, place, infrastructure, people, technology, and others that you can think of. This actually improves your plan and subtracts unnecessary deviations and extra resources we added without any need.
If you have put the time restriction and are forced to complete much sooner then automatically a smart idea pops up in the mind suiting the constraint. Try to go as hard as you can and increase the pressure on the plan. In the end, you can’t help but improve the original game plan you had on the board. Restrictions move the needle!
Architecture
How people build houses, what they put in them, and what colors they use reveal a lot about their personalities. The artistic decorations or the minimalistic styles show what kind of lifestyle they choose. Likewise how they organize space, arrange toys, and clean windows show the importance they give to the details. The green-minded ones putting plants, the film geeks displaying classic movies, and other such bizarre tastes tell the stories of people. The things we own reveal what we are. For instance, a person having a great audio setup at home or vintage paintings convey their hobbies and the balcony chairs exhibit the philosophical bent of the people living there. The smell, the marks on the floor, and the dining table all give clues about the individualities and their preferences. Next time when you visit someone’s house, try to pick the life they created in these items. of course, this is not to judge but to better understand them.
Work
A lot many people and especially so-called successful people usually downplay the hard work they have put in or over-exaggerate the effort that went into it but no one hits the sweet spot per se. This creates either anxiety or gifts overconfidence to the listeners. It is understandable that it is subjective and cannot be captured by words. However, deliberate misguidance is dangerous and toxic which is done by the biographies written under the handheld mentoring of marketing and PR agencies.
Next time the founder of a start-up says his/her story, take it with caution. The garage origin stories are all usually lies.
Inverted
Maintain a not-to-do list, create an uncomfortable log that keeps a record of what are the uncomfortable things that you did in a day, prepare an ingratitude list, write down bad mental models, dream about the anti-vision of your life, jot down how not to retire, document the 10 ways to embarrass yourself, plan the worst day of your life, sketch the 7 habits of highly worst people, dress in the weirdest way, think about the baddest diet to be on, note the easiest way to ruin your health, compose the ugliest tune and melody, watch and read all-time lowest rated movies and books respectively, find the horrible financial advice, send letters, put the worst picture on Instagram, discuss on the idiotic topics possible, start a difficult conversation, debate on controversial topics and ask silly and the most basic questions.
Improvement
One of the best tips I ever got is don’t reject what is already working. If reading a physical book is fine for you then don’t go for kindle or playbooks, no matter how cool they are projected to be, for the sake of upgrading your reading.
The mobile in your pocket can do everything you want. Wake you up at 5 A.M., play your playlist, make a call for you, screen videos, and take amazing pictures of your face. There’s no need of changing it. You are not missing out.
If you can do silent meditation then there’s no need for a Headspace subscription. I see people constantly changing pens to write even though they liked the previous ones. Why abandon something when it’s doing the job for you? Why update when there are no bugs?
Children
Kids are the real deal. They can bend realities, unlike adults who never dare to. If the little one wants a toy then there’s literally nothing in the world that can stop that wish. They cry, laugh, terrorize, throw something at you, and do all sorts of things to make sure you get that for them. And by chance, if you forget it then they bug you and remind you how important the task is. They literally won’t sleep until the thing is done, literally and figuratively. Time, money, and stupidity are never constraints to them. But grown-ups can’t even chase one wild idea.
Kids never see reality checks!
Necessity
Friedrich Nietzsche in “Twilight of the idols” says that he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. We can apply this on a micro scale to reframe our goals and achieve at least a few of them. Post planning an action, whether it is going to the gym, writing, blogging, podcasting, painting, or building, we need to sit down and ask why we need to do a particular thing. Why should I save the money instead of buying the overpriced t-shirt? It might seem obvious but actually, it is not. If we don’t have any particular reason behind what we are doing, we might easily get influenced by great marketing or fall prey to poor pieces of advice.
New year resolutions like journaling and meditation too fall away after a week as they are not necessities for you. You could have simply wanted it as it is the new cool thing or read it in a newspaper. The consistent action that we demand from the body and mind also demands a consistent answer from you. My friend recently said he wanted to do cycling and bought a decent bike from Decathlon. After 3 days, he decided it quit as it was not “his type”. Likewise, why should you start a business? Is it for the freedom that money gives or Is it really bringing value to people or Is it something else?
The recent trend is complaining about the rat race of 9-5 jobs. However, If asked why people wanted to quit then many find it hard to give a solid answer except for the usual workload, creativity, fun, boss issues, and EMI answers. Having clarity on the “Why” gives you not just strength but also keeps away a lot of mental trash and negativity that you perceive from doing a task, either through conditioning or unconscious reasoning.
Potential
Our past experiences and belief systems largely shape our view about the potential we have in our heads. The fact of the matter is even you don’t have a clue about your own potential. Just because you haven’t aced some math test in your high school or bombed the essay when you wrote your college application, it doesn’t mean you fail today as well nor does it mean that you can never improve the damn game. A lot many carry previous failures and treat them as the standard benchmarks that one can never cross in our lifetimes.
If people laughed at you when you gave your first business presentation or when you did some stand-up comedy at the local club, then it only means you couldn’t perform well at that time and you got some work to do. By no means, it is your static capability.
Fear
One of the biggest negative things about fear is it makes you blind to all the opportunities that are available to you at the moment. In fact, the solution in the form of a great job or money or person could be right in front of you and we may never grab it to pull ourselves out of misery. And also obviously, this limits our circle of experience and the actions we take daily. Without fear we see life with floodlights and with fear we look at it with a flashlight.
Thy Vox 