Mind the Beginner

You have a passion and you definitly want to do something with it later in life? You want to work in a field where you can exploit that passion and convert it into money? Of course! We all want that and we all have the right to do so. But maybe you are not sure enough about your passion, is this really what you love to do? Is this actually your passion?

Why wait until you’ve figured out?
You can wait until you’ve figured it out all of the blue, or you can take some actual action. Start right away, and the start doesn’t need to be very big, just start exploring, experimenting. Test what you really love, go beta on your passion!

How to go beta on your passion

• Find your passion. A big one and the most important one, you would say. But this is just a beta version of your passion! So you can be wrong, you can do something and find out that you don’t ‘absolutely love it’ and that is ok, cause this is beta! Look for your passion, imagine what you would love to do for the rest of your life. Found it? Great, next step!
• If it is something you can do for yourself, do it! Is your passion sharing ideas on kind of teas, or papyrus scrolls? Start a blog about these subjects! Find a readership who is also interested in the topic you are interested about and start develop yourself on that topic. After having a blog for a year, you will be way more knowledgable than before on the subject and it will be a great experience. And with a blog, you maybe can start to cash in on your passion just a little. Besides all of that, you are building an online presence and that can be your resume when you leave college, or start applying for a job.
• Go and intern! If your passion is something you can’t do from your own home, look for a company which does what you love! If it is your passion, you would do it for free (and of course, some experience, resume building), so go interning! Find a company what is doing what you love to do and find somebody who you can talk to who works there. Tell him/her that you are absolutely loving what they do and that you want to do exactly what do, but not right now. But you want to intern right now, in order to find out if this is really your passion. You are free, you are motivated, why shouldn’t they hire you?
• Evaluate. Is this what you really love to do, is this what you can do the rest of your life? Congrats, you’ve successfully found your passion and you may be ready to take your beta version to an official version! Is this not what you really love to do? Start over again, nothing is lost! You’ve just got more experience!

If you are not ready to quit your normal job, if you are not sure enough about your passion right now, start a beta version of your passion. Test, test more and find you ultimate passion, with experience and a resume as a bonus!

This is a guest post by Stefan Knapen who runs the blog StudySuccessful.com, a blog full of study hacks and personal development tips.

Have you ever tried to deliberately mess something up? It’s hard to make it look convincing isn’t it? It’s impossible to create an genuine mess when you know how not to mess up.

But looking at “how to mess up” isn’t what we are after, we’re always looking for ways not to mess things up obviously. The internet is overloaded with “how-to’s” to take your hand and guide you through all the steps and help you not to mess up. It’s all very nice obviously, but it doesn’t focus on what it is that makes you fail.

Why you fail

Did you ever stop and think about why you fail at something? Why it’s not the best you can do? If something is the best you can do but it’s not good enough, is it still a failure? That’s up to you, but  would it be the same kind of failure if you didn’t give it all you have to give and so failed. Knowing full well that if you gave everything you’d succeed.

If you’re just not good enough, you’ll just have to get better. And that’s not what this blogpost is about. This blogpost is about failing where you could (should?) have succeeded just because you didn’t give it your best.

A few questions for the conscience

Look back at your resent failures, yes it’s painful but it’s for the greater good here. Did you fail because of not being good enough or because you were slacking. With those failures you were slacking on, can you recall working on the project? I’m going to make a few guesses here:

• You weren’t focused
• or worse.. you were multitasking *shudders*
• and you weren’t spending enough time on the project

I know, I know, it’s almost as if I was there with you and have seen what you were doing. There are two problems here, the time spent and the focus.

Spending enough time

Taking just 20 minutes to work on a task is certainly a good idea, but by itself it will do nothing for you. You’ll have to do more than just sit there and watch a timer as it counts down. Watching it will actually slow it down! Spending enough time has a lot to do with knowing what you actually want or need to do. As soon as you have a clear images of the goal, make an estimation on how long it will take. The first pit-fall presents itself: your estimation is off, maybe even by as much as 90%. Either you over exaggerate the time it takes (no wonder you’re reluctant to do it) or you thought it was far easier than it actually was  (no wonder you got in trouble at the deadline).

Focus

If you have read the four hour workweek you know the Pareto principle: 80% of the work gets done in 20% of the time. Great! So now you can cut down your estimation by 80%. Wrong again! The 80-20 principle when applied to work implies that the 20% of the time you spend on work you actually do the best you can. You focus on the task, no distractions whatsoever. No checking facebook, twitter or steeping a pot of tea. Petting your cat or answering the phone, although nice breaks aren’t to productive as well.

Giving it your best: combining focus and time

In the time you actually work on something, do just that and nothing else. You might find it hard to keep that focus but with some training in meditation it’s actually not that hard. Steeping some tea or brewing a cup of coffee will have to wait until you take a short break. For whatever length of time you are working, cut out all distractions and know exactly what it is you are working at. You can do it!

Fail to fail

If you spend enough time and focus on whatever it is you are doing, you-can-not-fail. It is now impossible for you to mess up. And if you do fail, you either, didn’t focus enough, didn’t spend enough time or spent your time focused on the wrong thing.

Now you know how not to fail, what are you waiting for?

What is the difference between failure and success? Or more accurately, what is the difference between learning and not learning? A very simple fact of life: You have to make mistakes in order to learn. But that isn’t where things start.

The first step in learning is actually getting of your behind and getting to it. In some cases you’ll have to get on your behind actually (like when you want to learn how to program a computer, desk-flying is the way to go.) but nevertheless, you need to act. Something I’ve been learning the hard way the last few days. For a quick background on that: I’m studying for a few exams and so I’m spending almost all my waking hours on it. Not to pass the exams (it’s important) but to learn more. To end each day knowing things I didn’t know when I woke up. (much more important)

Twenty minutes

By far the best way I know of to learn something is to completely focus on it for twenty minutes at a time. Set a timer and make write down what it is you want to have done in those twenty minutes. Start the timer and immerse yourself in what it is you want to learn. The timer goes off and you grab a quick cup of tea, perhaps some fresh air and after a short break (five minutes) you immerse yourself again for 20 minutes. Spend the first few minutes reviewing what you did in the previous block and then continue with the new things.

Studying this way  you can learn anything you want. Yes it takes some time but that’s common knowledge by now, getting something for nothing is exceedingly rare. You’ll just have to come to terms with it: if you want something you’ll have to work for it.

Twenty minutes, isn’t that a very long time to focus on something? Once you get going, the twenty minutes fly by and the timer will startle you. Seriously, time flies when you’re having fun. And if you’re a bit like me, learning something new is fun and you’re always looking to learn more. Every day brings new opportunity to learn stuff and to go to bed just a bit wiser than when you got up this morning.

Cutting down time

Now we go back to success and failure. What is the difference? It’s time spent on trying to be successful. Nothing more then that! The more time you spend learning how to be successful the more you will learn how to be a failure. In time you’ll learn every single pitfall that is stopping you and you can easily navigate around them. Success!

You’re already and expert with life but I’m sure you want to be an expert in other things too. But here’s another hard truth for you: you only have so many “10,000 hours” in a lifetime to spend. Now if we apply the 80/20 principle that Tim Ferris made popular to that you can become  really really good at something in 2,000 hours. But we can cut that down even further. Learning the basics of something takes far less than that.

If you want only the barebone basics of programming in c++ for instance. That can be done in 160 hours or less. (That’s what my University expects at least, the course Programming 101 is “worth” 6 ECTS, and one ECTS is equivalent to 28 hours of investment). Like a lot of courses students somehow manage to complete the tasks and pass the exams while not investing nearly as much time as expected. Another cut in our hours to leave us with the final number: 100 hours for something as complex as computer programming. That’s 300 blocks of 20 minutes to learn the basics.

Basics

Becoming an expert isn’t all that hard, find a direction and head off into it. Keep going into that direction and you’ll soon be the expert. Teach others how to do the same and become rich. Doing it for them will be even more profitable. Conquering the basics in any field often is more than enough. Do you need to be able to dream html/css/xml to build a website? Of course not, look at this blog for instance. I have no experience with css or xml (yet) and very little html. But I’m running a blog, a successful one at that as well.

You can get a tune out of a guitar on just one string, or if you want something a bit more fancy, learn a power chord and you can slide that all over the neck. Add a distortion and you’ve got rock! 100 Hours of learning to play a guitar and you can join a rockband. That’s all it takes, and you’ll get better while in the band of course.

Ruling the world

Does every guitarist on stage have 10,000 hours spent? If they have now they sure didn’t when they started out in a band. Likewise a computer programmer is capable of producing good basic code within 100 hours. Ruling the world isn’t being an expert, it’s investing twenty minutes at a time learning something so every single day you go to bed wiser, better and smarter than when you got up that morning. Day in day out: keep learning and going to bed wiser and you will rule the world, twenty minutes at a time.

I’ve been blogging for almost a year now and last week I tweeted a question, asking how people got their blog to grow. You can read stories all over the net of people having a hugely successful blog within a year. I’m defining success as a lot of comments on each blogpost and hundreds/thousands of subscribers. Although this blog isn’t exactly what you call unsuccessful, things could be so much better. And that’s where I really could use your help.

Guest posting and engaging with other bloggers is key. That and being useful to your readers  -  Corbett Barr

The quote here is what I got back on my question via twitter. Guest posting and engaging with other bloggers isn’t to hard. My plans for that are simple: Guestposting on any blog that will have me. Small blogs and big blogs, none will be left  out as long as they fit in the same niche. To get in touch with more readers I’m going to dive deep into the blogosphere and comment on at least three blogs every single day. Of course those comments need to add value, a simple “First! hahaha”  or “What a great post, please visit my blog” won’t cut it. The most effective is looking for new blogs out there you didn’t comment on before, it’s getting your name out there. Frequently posting meaningful comments on the same blog will get you noticed by the writer and readers and so that’s also a good idea to get out there.

What is usefulness?

Usefulness is useless if nobody knows that you’re there

But I’m left with a single problem: I have no idea if my blogposts are useful to you. Am I writing things that matter and help? Or is it all a load of **** that nobody really finds interesting to read and/or is just dime a dozen content? How would you describe usefulness when it comes to blog content.

A long while back I laid out the plan on growing my blog  A blogpost filled with 16 building blocks to a succesful blog was what resulted. Back then the goal was 500 pageviews a day or 300 subscribers. I haven’t reached either – yet-, but the blog is still growing slowly every month and it’s only a matter of time until those goals are reached. There is no doubt in my mind about that. If there is one thing that I’ve learned from the successful bloggers out there is that things very rarely happen overnight. You’ll have to really commit and it can take years to build a really useful blog which is successful. Being useful by writing good content, answering questions and providing help is one side of the coin, it’s useless if you don’t reach anybody with it so you’ll have to market your blog as well. Usefulness is useless if nobody knows that you’re there.

I’d like to ask you two questions:

1. Is this blog useful to you?
2. What would make this blog more useful to you?

Blogging is very different from writing a book, you can actively engage with others and address issues that come up. It’s a great way of communicating and I want to make your experience on this blog better. Help me help you and we’ll both profit from it.

Thanks for the support my friend, I hope to hear from you

In my view there is one single skill that’s at the basis of all other skills and that’s truly essential to personal development. Although it’s very important few people ever master it. I would even goes as far as to say that without this one skill -although mastering it isn’t necessary- it is impossible to have personal development, personal growth, success, getting things done, meditate, or learn anything.

An essential skill indeed for without it, you’re stuck.

Quite literally stuck, stuck in either the past or the future. Because that’s the whole problem. This one essential skill is:

• Being in the present

There are many variations on this subject but they all boil down to the same thing. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing things can go terribly wrong very fast or on a smaller scale you’ll not remember the name of the person who just shook your hand.

Remembering names and reflecting

If you’ve ever read a book on social skills (Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends & influence people for instance) you’ll know that the single most appreciated word by all people is their own name. If you’re able to remember a name because you were totally present when you heard it you’ll make a great impression if you manage to call that person by his name the next time you two meet.

Whether it’s learning a new skill, meeting new people, writing a blogpost or going for a drive. There is so much to gain from every experience in life just by being present to experience it.

So why is it so hard to be in the present? It’s because we’re constantly either thinking about the past or dreaming up a future. The first can be relived (well, sort of) the second is pure fiction. Reliving the past is completely useless save one thing. Lessons to be learned or in other words, reflecting on what happened to avoid those mistakes in the future. It’s what all students should do after an exam. Check the mistakes and reflect on them.

If left unreflected you might act the same way in a similar event, even though it was the wrong answer/way the last time. Just because you either don’t know what’s the right answer or because you’re not present (thinking of the last time it went wrong) and going on auto pilot.

There you have it, the one skill that is at the basis of everything in personal development: being in the present. For without it you can’t learn, you can’t grow, you’re stuck.

Get unstuck, come into the present, right here, right now is where it’s at. Stop waisting time in the past or future, the past won’t change and the future isn’t here yet.

A small sidenote, not related to this blogpost it’s more of a notification. I won’t be doing a weekend update this weekend as I’m participating in a introductory period at university. I won’t have a pc or wifi where we’re going this weekend.

You might have heard of this one. The quarter-life crisis is a phase you go through somewhere in your twenties or as Wiki puts it “a term applied to the period of life immediately following the major changes of adolescence, usually ranging from the early twenties to the early thirties.”

It’s a phase where all kinds of insecurities develop. Again, Wikipedia provides us with a nice list I’d like to share:

• feeling “not good enough” because one can’t find a job that is at one’s academic/intellectual level
• frustration with relationships, the working world, and finding a suitable job or career
• confusion of identity
• insecurity regarding the near future
• insecurity concerning long-term plans, life goals
• insecurity regarding present accomplishments
• re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
• disappointment with one’s job
• nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life
• tendency to hold stronger opinions
• boredom with social interactions
• loss of closeness to high school and college friends
• financially-rooted stress (overwhelming college loans, unanticipated high cost of living, etc.)
• loneliness
• desire to have children
• a sense that everyone is, somehow, doing better than you

There are a few here I confess suffering from. Although I don’t feel the need to have children I do feel “not good enough”, an underachiever and the sense that everyone is doing better than me. With one foot I’m in the adult life, after all, I’m 26. But on the other hand I’m going back to university this September and hopefully will be busy with that till I’m 30 something. In the mean time all the kids I grew up with are now engineers, run their own practice or are lawyers and have been doing so for a few years now. I feel left behind.

I know there are more people out there suffering from this. After all, there is a term for it right? We feel we missed the train somehow and got left behind.

Advantages of the slow life

But taking things “slow” in this way has offered me with a perspective few other have. I doubt anyone who by the age of 26 is fully tied up in a dayjob and a social life, perhaps even with kids would have a chance to break free from it all. Let’s just say I didn’t get suckered in when I was not fully conscious about it and now am in the position to choose if I take that step and settle down.

Yes there is a downside, my monthly income is laughable to anyone working full time. To anyone working actually… I don’t own a car, all I have is a motorcycle I bought for 200 euro’s and maintain myself. (If you’re wondering what a 200 euro motorcycle looks like, follow this link.) I don’t own a fancy laptop/macbook pro and I don’t run a highly successful business. I do however have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment. I have few obligations and if I want to get up somewhere around noon that’s just fine. Sure, I have gaps in my resume you couldn’t fill with a dumptruck but who cares. That damage has been done already. I’m not successful according to most people, I stopped being that as soon as I decided the first major I took in University wasn’t for me and I dropped out for the rest of the semester. It took me almost six years to complete my training as exercise therapist which should take only four years. Again, failure. (Or look on the bright side: persistence)

Crystal mind

You know what?! I actually don’t care about all that. Yes I suffer from a quarter life crisis but it’s not stopping me. It’s actually my source of strength. The ideas on what I want to do with my life are crystallizing perfectly inside my mind and I have concrete steps I know I have to take to make these things come true. Take that you soon-to-suffer-a-midlife-crisis-former-classmates! You might have that nice job right now and the nice car (did someone say Ferrari?) but I’ve got a life philosophy, I’m writing a bucket list and I’m setting up a freedom business. None of these are signs of success in the traditional sense so I’m also working on that master’s degree to rub in their faces and learning skills I deem essential to become a Location Independent Professional (or LIP for short). The rubbing in is only a nice benefit by the way, I really want to learn those skills.

I’m 26 and I’m ready to take on the world, on my terms!

How do you feel about your life? Please leave a comment, I’d really like to know.

[update 20090611] I just stumbled across a blogpost that seems to fit in nicely with this post “I am a failure – The Biggest lie out there” and I would really like to share with you. Got it through @scottbradley[/update 20090611]

I was reading the success stories of several IT people (Bill Gates among others) about how they got where they are and th hard work it took. According to the writer of the stories it all boiled down to investing about ten thousand hours into something before you become really good at something. Ten thousand hours, that equals twenty hours a week for the period of ten years. If you work at it full-time (forty hours) you could get there in five. Sixty hours a week and you have spent the ten thousand in about three and a half years. 

Just think about it, do you want to become a world class guitarist? That’s going to take you ten thousand hours. A master in martial art? Well, that’s a different matter because that takes a lifetime of dedication if you ask any true master. A computer programmer, a dancer, you get the idea.

“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I’m not discouraged, becaue every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” – Tomas A. Edison 

The number of things you can master in a lifetime is limited. It’s so much work that you should choose carefully what you really want. At a young age the choice might even be made by your parents (piano lessons). The advantage of starting young are not that you learn faster. It’s that you have more time to practice and have less preconceptions as to what it’s supposed to be like.

Where I’m going with this

Where I want to go here is the investment it takes to become a master in something. But how do you do this? How do you invest your time so you will become better every time you practice. 

Have you ever tried learning a new skill and ended up doing the same old thing over and over again? (I know I have, playing the same songs over and over on guitar.) This is where you make or break the practice. As soon as you realize that you’re not actually doing something new but repeating what skills you already have stop right there. Look at what you are doing and where you want to go with the practice. 

Doing what works is not the way to go, you only learn by doing new things and messing things up. No mistakes equals nothing learned. Practicing should be a constant search for the imperfections and trying to better yourself. As soon as you stay within your comfort zone and refuse to make mistakes or don’t bother with them you might as well stop practicing.

Be honest to yourself and look at your practice. Don’t settle for the same old thing every time. Challenge yourself to learn new things and never be content. Settle for perfection, nothing less.

I’ve written before on handling all the information that we are bombarded with every day. But what I haven’t told you is what the key is to success in studying. Actually, the success to almost anything we try. The key is caring about what you are doing. If you care enough you won’t let yourself be distracted by other things because you take what you are doing seriously.

Take what you are doing seriously

Take this blogpost for instance. I’m not writing it in the wordpress interface or even in Microsoft word (Yes, I use windows) but a very simple and distractionless writing program called Q10. I’m looking at a black screen with orange letters. Nothing else in here, not even a command bar. It’s all done with keyboard shortcuts. Why do this? I care about my writing and don’t want any distractions.

Distractions always have an influence on what you are doing, how can you study properly with music in the background (barok music is the only exception, more on that in the near future) or with the TV on. You’re constantly being drawn towards the easy way out of studying into a passive kind of entertainment or Internet-related activities such as checking an e-mail the instant it hits your inbox. If you care about what you are studying or reading, would you have the tv on? My guess is you might even tell your housemates or family not to disturb you while you are studying right?

So how do we use this key? Fake it until you make it comes to mind, turn of any distractions and do only the one thing you should be doing. I’m not saying it will be fun every time but the better you get at studying the easier it all gets, you just might begin to enjoy studying. Deny yourself any sensory input other than the material to be studied. Care or fake to care about what you are studying and I promise you, you will get better at whatever you are studying.

How to apply this during class This is very simple: Let’s face it, there might be other places you’d rather be or other things you’d rather be doing but at the moment you’re stuck there. The only thing you can do that makes any sense is to pay attention. It’s just common sense right?

The key is to care