Living The Dream

I recently finished listening to another biography. It was one of those 30-hour monsters! A typical audio book is 6-8 hours. Why these authors think more is better. No, no and no. In most cases they are wrong, because they end up filling the pages with unnecessary facts and speculations. For example, in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, author quotes his sources like its a freaking science book: with page numbers! Do I really care what in exactly what month each Disney movie was released and all the details of its production? NO! 🚫

So far I listened to three of them and all three of them despite high reviews (herd mentality?) are terrible, boring (even at 1.5x) and full of uncertainties:

• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
• Steve Jobs
• Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

About uncertainties—that’s my other beef with biographies. Why do authors have a need to psychoanalyze the hero? Just list the facts and move on. Why they feel the urge to present multiple accounts? Pick one side and tell a story. Humans love stories.

Also, they try to stay neutral. Authors need to have an opinion. It’s like talking to someone. That someone needs to have an opinion. Without authors having filters, it’s just a boring text book. Well, judging by the length they are textbooks! 📚

Note to myself: stop “reading” biographies. They are waste of time! Start reading and listening more to autobiographies instead. They are livelier, full of opinions which makes them congruent and just overall have better story lines sans boring facts… and they are shorter because interesting successful people understand that they shouldn’t waste other people’s time!

PS: I’m getting close to my new goal of 100 books per year with just 35 to go.

Let me share a little secret. 😉 While it’s nice to get a discount and save a few bucks, especially when you’re going to buy a thing anyway, there is something magical in when you pay a full price. You’ll tend to enjoy the thing more, feel better about yourself and use the thing more often.

Studies show that this phenomenon of getting benefits of paying the full price (or a premium) is even more applicable to buying something special, something experiential such as an online course, a music CD (which see only at Whole Foods and Starbucks checkout lines), or an event like a seminar or a conference. How many online courses or books did you buy on at a discount and never finished them? 📖 I bet way, way more than the ones for which you’ve paid a full price (and a high one)!

Human brains are wired to appreciate according to the price you’ve paid so buy torrenting a book or a movie or buy looking for coupons to your favorite artists’ or speaker’s performance—you are robbing yourself from a pleasure. It took me a while to realize it, but once I did 💡, I started buying music on iTunes and now subscribe to Spotify as a way to appreciate and give back to my favorite artists.

With commodities, which are all the same, you can get the same sweet potato chips from any website which sells them, so buying the cheapest and most convenient is less damaging to the pleasure (but still is).

That’s why luxury industry exists. The quality of a Gucci bag is not 100 times better. It’s roughly the same. The bonus is in the enjoyment. This principle applies to non-monetary payment, for example when working on a book or a PhD—that’s hard and painful sometimes. However, most people treasure the results and outcomes more after a tougher journey.

So either pay a full price or pretend that you did (and then forget that you pretended), because you’ll get more usage of whatever that thing is.

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of paradoxes when it comes to attitudes and life which you can’t easily solve:

• Focus on doing vs. learning and expanding your horizons: You need to keep up with the latest stuff, meet new people and generate new ideas by exploring new things but you need to focus on the tasks at hand to see them through.
• Patience vs. obsession (hard work): You need to give enough time for something great to materialize (10,000 hours, over night success which takes 10 years, etc.), but at the same time when you work hard and obsess, that’s when you see more short-term results and build momentum. Marathon or a sprint?
• Confidence vs. humility (being open to being wrong and feedback): You must be confident to overcome obstacles, yet at the same time it’s important to be receptive to feedback and improve on/learn from on your mistakes.
• Saying “no” to opportunities vs. saying “yes to them
• Changing vs. adapting: Sometimes it’s good to change your provider, environment, equipment, etc., while other times, you just have to suck it up and not worry about mundane things which might annoy you otherwise.
• Work on weekends and have no vacations vs. taking time off
• Stay in one place vs. living a digital nomad life: Staying in one place are more comfortable and allows to establish connections and network (it’s who you know, not what you know most of the times even in tech); while traveling allows to expand horizon, and explore new opportunities.
• Being analytics vs. artistic
• Being good with tech&numbers vs. being good with people

The best thing is to be doing both of these extremes, but they are extremes for a reason. How to be humble yet confident? Or how to stay and build connections and reputation in one area but bring new ideas from other spheres of life?

The million dollar question is how do you tell the difference when to pick what option? Maybe you need to take it to extremes to know your limit and that will eventually allow you to find balances easier? To put it differently, wisdom to remove paradoxes or act on both of their extremes harmoniously comes with practice and time. Or is there a magic formula with criteria to follow?

A few years ago I would consider myself a person who likes to do things in a batch by focusing on one thing and see it through completion. For example, implementing a feature in an app.

However, there are certain tasks which you simply cannot finish in a few days, like writing a book, building strength in your body or learning a new language. It’s better to turn the work on those things into habits. Just do a little bit every day.

I found that instead of results which are often fluctuate in time (e.g., writing 500 words everyday), it’s better to block time, let’s say one hour on my new book and 30 minutes on learning Spanish everyday, even weekends and vacations. After a few days those activities becomes not very dissimilar to brushing your teeth.

You can accomplish a lot by doing small and simple things every day. I started with doing 10 push-ups and 20 sits up every morning a year ago. Now, I’m on to doing 100 sit ups and 50 push ups effortlessly. Chunk down your large projects and be consistent in the execution!

We often hear that we need to listen to our customers/users from business, marketing and product development gurus. A popular Lean Startup methodology teaches to make as many experiments to learn about customers, their needs and wants. Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn and Tony Robbins said something along the lines of: if you help enough people, you can achieve anything. Everyone seems to be crazy about customer satisfaction. Do we live in a tyranny of a customer?

As I’m re-writing my new book React Quickly, there are some concepts I don’t agree with. However, the book reviewers told me they want the book to cover certain things, so here I am, catering to my customer. What is the majority is not right? What if there’s something morally or ethically wrong with the thing that the majority of customers want?

Historically, there are plenty examples when majority, and democracy in particular, made wrong decisions. So does it make people who like to create a great product, company or business also morally or ethically wrong in the long run, just because they listened to their customers with their wrong ideas and they knew the ideas were wrong? Something to think about. Maybe the perfect approach is to know what your customers want, but give them what they need (and what’s right).

This is a note to myself: the more I can be comfortable being newbie the more I can keep up the pace with current events, tech and apps. The reason being, it’s not enough to master one tech or app and assume it won’t change.

With the popularity of SaaS and web apps, they are constantly updated without us even asking us! You can forget about an app and comeback to it six month later—it’ll could be a completely new app. You’ll have to learn where all the menus and buttons all over again. Learn to love it. Future apps will update even faster. Same happens with open source and programming languages.

Generally, the more you stay behind the worse the pain of an upgrade later. There is no way around it. Just embrace being newbie forever, because the faster you learn the more comfortable you’ll be in using the recent tech. Learning fast is your competitive advantage.

Obviously, you can’t keep re-learning all the things continuously, that’s why focusing on a specific area is paramount. Therefore, focus, learn, re-learn and don’t afraid to be a newbie because being newbie is and will be our normal state. Being newbie is forever.

People tend to think that someone is shy just because he/she is not talking to anyone or not going to social events… Although this might be true, I came to the conclusion that there is another reason.

I just want to do things instead of talking. While some conversations are insightful. For example, talking with your colleagues or customers is paramount for maintaining good communication. Other social chat is not just boring but mostly a waste of time.

With this in mind, I’m not shy. I’m just biased towards taking action instead of useless talking.

I wrote before about how being on a paleo lifestyle is like having superpowers. Last week, I was lucky to attend PaleoFX, the biggest Paleo conference. It was kind of surreal to be around thousands of like-minded people, to see in-person almost all famous New York Times #1 Best-Sellers paleolebrities, and to be surrounded with all kinds of safe paleo-friendly food&drinks. Here are some of the highlights:

• Paleo business is growing: There were all kind of paleo flours, sweets, bars, powders, broths, fats and coffee infused with just about anything (butter, coconut, even mushrooms!).
• Paleolebrities are regular people: most of them hang out at the expo or after giving their presentations to answer questions. I took a picture with Robb Wolf with who’s book my paleo journey started 6 years ago.
• There were insane number of healthy and fit looking people doing workout workshops (inspiring) as well as average looking people (making it less intimidating).
• Bone broth is liquid gold: I knew that broth is healing but after listening to Dr. Kellyann I decided to become disciplined about drinking 2 cups of bone broth. Her protocol is bone broth for 21 days and fast 1-2 days per week.
• Ben Greenfield’s presentation was full of bio hacks to increase cognitive performance like jaw realignment, morning brain flush, infra-red saunas, yoga, low intensity PEMF and others.
• Our gut bacteria has more DNA material than we: Dr. Perlmutter gave a great presentation reinforcing the importance of our gut biome. One of the analogies stuck with me: we uploaded our DNA/genes to the cloud which is our gut bacteria.
• Lack of sleep is aging and killing you faster: Just one night of sleep deprivation increases aging 10-15 years (temporarily) and decreases cognitive functions.
• It’s harder to legally sell raw milk than marijuana (in some cases).
• A lot of science is not reliable, because studies to replicate findings and peer reviews are disincentivized.

Overall, it was a great event to reinforce familiar, and learn new things about paleo lifestyle. I also got a lot of contacts for paleo-friendly web stores, products and services which will make my life on the paleo lifestyle even easier than before!

Have you heard the preamble about the fisherman and the businessman? It’s often told in a feel-good blogs and talks. The fisherman’s nationality varies from Brazilian to Mexican, but the gist is that you don’t have to strive for success and achievement. If all you want to do if is to fish and go home early, then you can start doing it now (fisherman). In other words, if your goal is to relax after you’ve made money (businessman), then why not skip making money part and relax now ?

I think it’s utterly bullshit—and potentially dangerous for those who take its advice seriously—for three reasons. The first is simple: the story don’t take into consideration risks. Let’s say your family member gets sick. If you have the money, you can send him/her to a good hospital. This is not an option for a poor fisherman.

Another reason is the experience, adventure, the thrill and satisfaction of making money, doing well in your craft (fishing and business management), career or business. This is the reward in itself for most people in the world of business. Think of it as the journey which will make you a better person. If all you do is fish, go home early and relax, then you are not challenging yourself enough. You’re not growing in your craft or skills.

The last reason is that if you just fish for your family, then you deprive other of the fruits of your labor. If you’re any good (and with practice and time you should become good at pretty much any trade), then you’ll be depriving others, e.g., people in a seafood market, of your fish. So staying at your current level and not taking it bigger is stealing from society. It’s selfish.

Don’t believe all the stupid stories you read or hear from the so called gurus of life. Think for yourself!

Success is what we crave. Parents, peers and culture pushes success down our throats as it’s the best thing ever. Yet not many people claim success in their lives. They jump from one hot opportunity to another.

One day they are building SaaS, the next month consulting, and then selling cheap privately labeled and growth-hacked shit on Amazon.com. It’s like an addiction. Starting a business is easy. Starting micro businesses like SaaS, info product or private label is extremely easier than managing brick and mortar. Entrepreneur become parallel entrepreneur. They juggle multiple things. Each is moderately successful, but nothing great… why? Because success is boring.

Some people like the thrill more than success. Like many thrill seekers they deny this fact. They sabotage their success. They are like gamblers who hit the slot machines and frustrated by the interrupted flow of their trance when they actually do win. The adrenaline junkies, those people love to start new venture and see them succeed from 0 to 60, but they never stay long enough to see any really great fruits.

Some people like the inviting adventure of new projects more than the steady long-term progress of established ones. If you need some serendipity, then go pick up a new sport (surfing, rock climbing, Krav Maga) or learn how to ride a motorcycle, but don’t bet your career on a risky proposition.

I wrote this post mostly for myself to stay focused and as a reminder that real success is boring. Find the thing you’re great at and which is in demand and valued by others. Then, you stick with it unless you fully get its potential. It might be 5, 10 or 15 years. Give it a time. Everything great takes time; otherwise we won’t treasure it much. Boring is good. You have my permission to be boring… and achieve the success you want be it personal life, health or business.