Choose your initial state. Starting from the same state every time improves consistency.

If you want consistent results, you must perform your action from a consistent “base.” Your physical and mental focus and environments must be practiced and correct. This includes your emotional state, the color of the room, the temperature, and how you use your body. Which outcome will profit you most affects your bias, perception, and performance.

For example, if you listen to a stereo system, it’s very likely that your brain will “think” the sound is coming from where you are looking. If you are positioned perfectly between the two speakers, and you are listening to a sound that is supposed to sound like it’s in the center of the soundstage, if you look up, then it sounds like it’s coming from up there. If you look down, it seems to be coming from down there. Thus if you’re ever trying to judge the quality of a sound system, you must make sure to point your head the right direction, or you’ll alter the results.

If you shake your head in disappointment when you miss a shot, guess what you will do when you miss the shot in a non-practice environment? You’re more likely to do the same thing in the real world that you’ve been unconsciously practicing. Miss shot, show disappointment. Screw up, show disappointment. Being disappointed and looking down or shaking your head is the opposite of performance. You can’t make a good shot when you’re not looking at the target. Keep your eye on the prize and don’t waste time practicing bad behavior, conscious or subconscious.

That missed shot is in the past. Always focus on the present and the future.

When the shit hits the fan, you will perform at the average level of your practice. You’re unlikely to do much better or worse than your average.

Focus on the action, not the outcome.

Revisit it every once in a while to make sure that the process is still the right one you should be focusing on. Some large companies focus on process too much and lose track of the reason the process was originally good.

If you put your focus into the area where a thing is happening, your brain has all kinds of mental and physical tricks it will use to get you better results in that area. If you’re playing baseball, focus on the ball. If you’re bowling, focus on the pins. You can still make changes while the ball is in your hand.

Focus on those things you can interact with, the things you can touch and influence, and the world will bend to your will. You most focus on that which is coming at the expense of what which has passed. The future is rapidly approaching, and the past is forever out of reach. The past is but an idea, unattainable, while the future is unavoidable.

Change the focus of your mind to get better physical results. Limiting feedback and focusing on touch.

I hold my personal typing speed record of 116 WPM on a laggy computer with a Logitech Kl20 ten-dollar keyboard. It’s probably the finest of all the cheap keyboards. Good key feel, rather short travel distance, standard key positioning.

You might ask, “What’s the point?”

The laggy part is important. You would think that on a laggy keyboard you would type slower, because it would take longer for you to verify that what you were typing was coming out correctly. You would be right—up to a point. But once the lag is so high that you realize the complete and utter futility of even trying to see what’s coming out, you can focus all of your mind directionally on your fingers, and if you’re good at typing, you already know when you’ve made an error. You don’t need the screen to tell you, and thus by cutting out the feedback loop of the screen and the visual system, and by only maintaining the feedback loop of the touch system, you have a more pure data stream to focus on, and one that is perfectly in sync.

I also believe that where you put your focus, your body tends to naturally locate resources.

ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. The system attempts to improve the appearance of text on computer display.

Do not use quality settings on your graphics processing unit (GPU) or ClearType. It will blur up all your work.

The Contour Design Rollermouse Pro 2 is pretty great if you do a lot of typing. Every second you’re not moving your hands away from the keyboard is a second you can get back to typing faster.

Middle click, or ctrl left click to mass open windows you are interested in. Then they can load in the background and be ready for you when you want them. This doesn’t work great if your computer runs out of memory.

Chrome plugins

Tab outliner plugin for chrome!

Ad block

Try out high contrast mode.

Green text on black screen.

Black because why should you be illuminating things that aren’t data?

Green because it’s the most visible color to your eye.

On OLED screens and all other screens that don’t have a backlight, you pay for every pixel you illuminate, so don’t bother lighting up pixels you don’t need, burning through battery, and shortening the life of those pixels.

Typing emails and comments and forum posts: Type them locally in your own text editor, or be very angry when backspace takes you off page and deletes all data, instead of backspacing in your text. Or their form submit doesn’t work. Or you were posting too fast, etc.

Anything you generate in this world, whether its text or images or videos, you need to have it backed up, for if it was important enough for you to spend the time making it, then it’s important enough for you to spend the time to make sure it doesn’t get accidentally deleted.

Accidental deletion: Hitting cut 2x means you actually hit delete on the first thing, unless you pasted it first, or remembered to ctrl+z a lot. You should install a clipboard manager to warn you and keep a history of things you’ve copied.

RAID stands for “redundant array of independent disks.” All spinning disks need to be in RAID. It is not a backup.

In Windows Live Mail, whenever you right-click on a folder under an email account, you get an option “Add to Compact View.” If there’s a compact view option, use it.

If you use an OS which supports multiple “virtual desktops,” you could also just put your distractions on one desktop, and your real work on another, and there would be little question as to whether you were really working or not.

Let the computer search for you. Don’t use your eyes.

It’s easier to type what you are looking for than to try and find it by visually searching around, which is why the program launcher in the newer Windows versions, you just click start button and type what you want and it simply appears. They are better. It would be nice to see such a feature to be able to find that tab lost in your sea of tabs, if perhaps the tabs outline plugin didn’t have the feature.

One very powerful but undocumented search tool is the AROUND function. If you wanted to research Barack Obama’s interactions with Australia, you could simply include both terms in a search, but you’d find thousands of articles in which these two terms may appear many paragraphs apart, and bear no relation to one another. But if instead you search “Obama” AROUND (1O) “Australia,” then the first results will be one in which “Obama” appears within ten words of “Australia.” Note: For this to work, both search terms must be in quotes, AROUND must be capitalized, and the number must be in parentheses.

Know how and when to use the minus sign in a search query, i.e. search George Washington -gwu.edu

Also ~ before a word to search simultaneously for the synonyms of that word.

<Number>..<Number> to search for a range of numbers. For example, 1..10

(*) as a wildcard in quoted search strings to stand for one or many unknown words.

“The * cat” will return things like the angry cat, the big brown cat...

(+) will ensure that a word is included in every search result, (per u/izerth, google got rid of the + operator, so now you have to put” around single words or use search tools->results->verbatim)

Quotes surrounding a phrase will ensure that exact phrase turns up.

filetype: Whatever will make sure URLs have that extension at the end.

inurl: some.words_here will make sure whatever follows shows up in the URL. Good for refining your search by domain name.

Site: sitename.com will return only results from that site

So if you search for “Lincoln Park - square -oak” you have narrowed the search in a very useful way.

Quiet vs. loud keyboards: Loud keyboards could make you want to work more. If you work with others, they might want to kill you. The quiet that comes from the people around you having well silenced keyboards leaves a nice acoustic background for you to place the sounds you enjoy hearing the most. If you love the clack of keys, and you’re not working with too many people at the same time, you could very well enjoy the sound of the board itself.

Music is pretty great, so one may prefer a low noise floor. The higher the noise floor, the louder one must have to go to get the signal-to-noise ratio one enjoys, and at some point you can hurt your ears, or piss off your neighbors.

Do not build your computer into your desk. It will vibrate, get hot, and not perform very well. Oh, and also act like a giant speaker cone for the vibration. Isolation is good for equipment.

Power is when you can take the elevator into a department store’s special floor, flash your Black Card, and get free premium quality cappuccino that people without the Black Card can’t even buy because they don’t accept money there. They don’t accept money. All they accept is power. Power is currency. Power is exclusivity.

You’re likely to meet other people there who are already powerful. Power is proximity and proximity is power. Your proximity to other powerful people amplifies your power. Money is not power, knowledge is not power. Power is power.

In physics, power = mass * time * speed

Power is unused time, potentiality. When you have more things under your control for a long time going faster and faster, power increases.

Power has carry-on effects. If you’re not included, you are not enjoying those effects. Power multiplies force. You’ve got to have force to multiply.

In the words of the song by The Lox, “Money, Power & Respect,” on D-Block Records: “First you get the money. Then you get the muthafuckin, power. After you get the fuckin’ power muthafuckas will respect you.”

The guy that pays you decides what you do with your time.

If you’re a boss, your boss is the customer.

If you’re not a boss, your boss is the boss.

If you’re a criminal, your boss is the police.

Having the right status is a force multiplier that allows you to control others.

Force multipliers are what power is.

Having the money to buy a thing is one part, if it’s something that money can buy.

Knowing where to spend the money is another part.

Getting them to actually deliver what was advertised is another thing.

Getting it done on time, yet another still.

And then, after all that, finding out that thing you wanted wasn’t actually the thing you should have wanted, is a great way to explain how just being able to afford something isn’t enough.

Do you even have a complete list of all the things that are for sale that you should or shouldn’t want? How often does that list get updated in comparison to the update and release cycle of improvements, innovations, and new product categories?

Spending your money wisely to maximize happiness is more than a full-time job, even if you are so lucky enough to be able to afford the things you want.

You’re going to the same store as everybody else, but you’re drinking for free. The coffee place in the Stockmann department store in Helsinki. Nobody else can even drink coffee there. Only the powerful can. Others are excluded.

Money is what you use to get other people to do things for you, and in return someone other than you will do something for them. Respect and charisma are what you use to get other people to do things for you, in the hope that you will do something personally for them. In the end they achieve similar goals in that they motivate the other party to do a thing. In one case the payoff is directly from you, and in the other it’s indirect and through the money that they will give to someone else, that is very likely not you.

Did you know that streets and boulevards and even numbered highways go east-west and avenues and odd numbered highways go north-south? Did you know that cities have an origin address, usually where the city was first founded. All the new streets grow out from that position with higher numbered names farther away, and they’re divided into 4; NE, SE, SW, NW. So if you’re near the center, you could find two 1st streets!

“Left” of something means literally the opposite of what you want it to, if the person you’re speaking to is on the other side of what you’re looking at. Your left is his or her right. It’s easier to say north, south, east or west, or reference another landmark, such as closer to the ocean, or sunset, because then it doesn’t matter what direction one is facing while giving directions.

Be specific when you guess how long it will take to get somewhere. The specificity will make you notice when your guesses were wrong, and they’ll get better with time. Often getting ready to go somewhere takes as long as getting there, and people often guess wrong how long it will take to get ready, or account for the crap that always shows up, like “Where are my keys? Oh, I need to get gas, there’s traffic, and I have to help my kid with XYZ thing.”

Stop using the word “here.” No one knows where “here” or “there” is. Be specific. Where is here?

Tune out the rest of the world to turn on yourself.

If consciousness is the most important and valuable thing in the entire world, then you should be mindful of what you spend that consciousness on. If you understand sports, you get more of that in your life. If you’re good at business, then you get more of that in your life. If you read a lot of news, play a lot of games, then basically foregoing some of the things that are the rewarding and powerful in the world, which are things that multiply how you affect other people. To invent, to build, to influence are the things that scale. Think about the quality of what you’re doing, not just the quantity. Is starting another dumb thing that the world needs? Is taking advantage of people’s poor programing attention skills what the world needs?

If you spend all your time absorbing music that other people created, reading books which other people created, watching movies which other people created, reading comics which other people created, watching other people have fun, listening to other people’s jokes, then it’s very hard to be producing. We’re not full duplex. You can’t really listen when you’re talking, you can’t really talk when you’re listening, you can’t really create or be an individual or do that thing that only you can do, if you’re busy absorbing everyone else’s consciousness and not being your own consciousness.

Now, do you need to start your life absorbing other people’s consciousness? Yes, you do. You just need to learn a language, learn customs, thrive, eat, break bread, make love, enjoy. You need to do that. Once you’ve done enough of that, got the low hanging fruit and got the Pareto principle (80 percent of the results from 20 percent of the input), you need to switch gears. You need to give back. You’ve been a child, you’ve eaten from your father’s hand, so it’s time to be a father. It’s time to give back. You spoke the language, you use the language, you read the words, so now make your own words.

You think that there’s not a place in this world that you can have an impact. If you focus your mind, regardless of how ineffective you might think you are, or how powerless you might actually be, with enough focus you can make an impact.

The more you’re willing to focus on a thing that other people aren’t, the more you’ll stand out, the more contributions you’ll make, the more money you’ll make, and guess what? People love to do what they’re good at, and people get good at what they focus on. You can change what you become by changing what you absorb. If the world is a light and you’re a crystal Swarovski bear, whatever you look at, that light shines onto you, and now you’re that color. If you focus on negative energy, now you’re a negative person. If you focus on positive energy, now you’re focused on your positive person. You will literally become what you focus on. If you focus on why you’re not good enough, you’re going to keep on being not good enough. In theory, you’ll tend towards that direction. Tony Robbins says if you focus on the wall, you hit the wall. If you focus on the road, you get the road. It just makes logical sense, it’s tautological. Your brain is constantly running simulations.

Scivive doesn’t like the term “question,” so a lot of people, like Tony Robbins, like to use the phrase “internal questions.”

First of all, that’s bullshit. Because people without language, which human beings didn’t have two hundred thousand years ago, were still doing that “what might happen” processing without language. It’s obvious that you can do processing without language.

Please don’t let remembering be the end, please do not become a crappy version of an encyclopedia. Synthesis is the end.

Don’t become Google, and stop training your kids to be Google. You just need to be Google long enough to get something in working memory to create something beautiful. You just need to remember something, a marker, an index. You need to know how to use Google. If you know how to use Google, you can have a bad memory for the rest of your life, because the Internet is not going away.

Choose what you know. So many people find it useful to not know things, such as their partner cheating on them.

The consciousness economy, which is kind of a new field of understanding, which Scivive hopes to elaborate upon, with how the world is suffering due to bad marketing, and marketing only for things that are evil and not good.

A lot of people actually have terrible memories. They don’t remember to brush their teeth, what day it is, what time it is, when they last ate, they don’t remember birthdays, they don’t know what season it is, sometimes, that’s because they don’t truly care about those things. You can make a compelling case that they shouldn’t care about those things. Let your iPhone remember them for you! Your iPhone will wake you up when you need to send someone a happy birthday text, or gift, or selfie, or whatever that you’re sending them, your phone will wake you up. You will not wake you up. You are a crappy alarm clock. If something that falls out of your circadian rhythm needs addressed, your brain is not going to do it for you. Your phone will. Let your phone do all the remedial tasks. Let your brain do what juices it, what gives it passion, what engages it, what is at the limit of its understanding. I believe that a lot of people that may seem like idiots may actually be using all of their considerable memory powers on areas they actually care about. Give your brain the best memory gift it will ever receive and start caring about something.

This reticular activating system that subconsciously decides what you hear and what you don’t, what you see and what you don’t, what you focus on and what you don’t, why not use it to empower you? Let’s look for what is right in the world, let’s look for what is powerful, let’s dream the dream and let’s starve out that disempowering feeling about everything that’s wrong, and everything that can’t be and all the fear; let’s drown that out. Let’s only look at that for the minimum amount of time we need to, to invert it to see the solution, to execute that beautiful solution and never have to think about the old destitution. You never have to think about quitting again when you’re not a smoker anymore. You just don’t smoke. It’s no longer a fight. When you change your identity, it becomes much easier to execute the behaviors that that identity has. When you keep an old identity that has try-and-fail as a component of it, it’s harder to do the new thing.

Give yourself the gift of focusing on what you want, not what you don’t want. Give your brain the gift of knowing what you want, so that you get more of it. When you fill your life with what you want, you’ll find out that you don’t have space for unwanted behavior, because it just doesn’t fit. It’s really simple and lots and lots of people have solved it. You just want to think it’s complicated and hard so you don’t feel like a bigger failure. You don’t feel more regret. It’s like writing a book. Is writing a book hard? No. It’s just like writing an email to a friend. Well, then how come more people don’t do it? Somehow it feels unrewarding at times during the process.

Scivive would support people exploring what there is in the world as far as consciousness is concerned, and would advocate at least the preemptive execution of all the other tried-and-true awesome.

You may have already heard about scale. We live in middle earth, where we’re like one order of magnitude bigger than the smallest things and one order smaller than the biggest things. As fun and trivial as that is to know about, Scivive is going to tell you why it’s trivial; if you’re good at understanding how things work in the arenas that you don’t live in, you’re not likely good at the critical things that may actually help you, here in the world you do live in. It’s just like people who want to solve problems they don’t have. People who think that when they lift weights, they’re going to get so big they don’t fit in their clothes. I have a good idea. Why don’t you worry about getting so big first? You won’t. It isn’t happening. Then, after that happens, you can work on fixing your clothes, but don’t waste your time fixing a problem that’s not yours and probably won’t ever be.

If you’re still worrying about the universe and where it’s going, that’s not your problem. You’re not making a left turn at Mars. You don’t have a space ship. Worry about the little blue ball you live on.

The amount of up-time of thought that people have is greatly dependent on the habits of internal focus that go on in their mind. If people are honest and aware when queried as to what it was they were thinking about, the range of things that people actually spend their time focused on, concentrated on and are concerned with is so very wide. Some people are thinking about sports, some people are thinking about gossip. Some people are thinking about family, some about friends and others about ideas. Dependent upon the amount of time that remains engaged, if you perform thought-killing activity like gaming or remedial tasks, such as data entry perhaps, then in theory you actually are less alive. You have had a portion of your consciousness and your ability to become unique and to grow destroyed.

It’s reasonable to see some of the outcomes that we see in this world, where one guy will win nearly 100 percent of the time of fighting against another guy. One guy will win nearly a 100 percent of the time in a test of mental ability versus another guy. One guy will know nearly a 100 percent of the time the answer to a question that another person will not. It is because the amount of available up-time and the application of that up-time to a goal.

The law of attraction is actually perverse; every moment you spend focusing merely on what you want instead of focusing on doing the things that get you it, is a waste of time.

Focus on the real world. If you focus on the real world and not fiction, when you care to disengage and do screwing around you can screw around better because you’ll be wealthier, fitter, and have better resource material to write and gain enjoyment out of other people’s fiction.

If you’re wondering if the world is actually just a digital simulation on someone else’s supercomputer, you’re worried about someone else’s problem. You don’t live in that scale, so it doesn’t matter.

Be effective and useful when you’re deciding what to do with your life.

For example, playing chess. Think about it, if you were alone on an island, would you play chess with yourself? No. You would build a hut and a boat, and make your life better, and that’s what you should learn to do when you’re learning skills, investing in companies, or when you’re helping other people do things. You should do things that actually benefit their life and aren’t wasteful time sinkers.

It is the same reason it’s often good that companies lay off people, because if a company can get the same job done for the world with less people, then it’s the same thing as you finding a smarter, better, more effective way that takes less time to get something done, so that you can go do something else with your life. If a company is just an abstraction, or just a combination of people, then you can treat it like a single person. If you don’t need a person to do a thing, free them! Let them do something useful with their life instead of trapping them. Not only trapping them, but forcing someone else to pay the price for them pretending to work.

This is a competitive world with limited resources, and the romantic partner you want has options. If you’re doing self-improvement for a potential lover, you can throw that idea that “you’re enough” out the window, because you’re never what you could be. You’re never barely what you should be. So what’s the art? The art is to be the most that you can be, comfortably within reason. The Pareto principle says you’re getting 80% of your results with 20% of the effort. Eat healthy—most people don’t. Be fit—most people aren’t.

Learn some game, learn what an attractive person looks like—most people won’t.

Now you’ve won. Now you actually are unique, measurably. You can do things other people can’t. You can lift weights they can’t, you can make smiles they can’t, you’ve got skills they don’t have, and that take years to develop. Guess what? Those years you put in are the years that put you past everyone else. If you thought that you’ve got to start this game and outcompete other people because of your “uniqueness” that brought you here to the “please fix me for money” club, you’re dreaming a dream and someone’s blowing smoke up your ass. Don’t believe the feel-good bullshit. There’s real work to be done, there’s real excellence to be had, and you don’t start with it. You end with it.

You can sacrifice depth of knowledge for more effectiveness on whatever level you’re on.

Because of the recent gun craze, many more people practice target shooting and want to do better at it. You do not need to know how to load your own ammo, load your magazines, clean your own gun, and break down your own gun or even draw your weapon from your holster. You don’t need to know any of those things in order to be a better target shooter, because the things that make you good at target shooting have literally nothing in common with any of those other things.

Knowing how to use your breath, knowing how to squeeze the trigger the right way, knowing how to hold the firearm the right way, understanding how to use your body symmetrically and all the things that go into being a good shooter have nothing in common with being a good re-loader of ammo or a good tactical-draw-from-the-holster-without-shooting-yourself-in-the-leg kind of guy. The statement is that you need to decide whether you’re going to trade depth of knowledge in a bunch of other levels for excellence in the level that you’re at or maybe excellence somewhere else. You can’t have both.

If you dedicate yourself in a direction so hard and immerse yourself so hard in a behavior or an outcome, you begin to see the whole world through that lens. It affects what you think is important, it affects what you spend your time on, it affects who you meet, it affects where you exist, and most of your life will be muted, deleted and unseen. You might neglect family relationships, you might neglect showering, you might neglect knowing about the news or brushing your teeth or eating. When you are so in a fixed state, addicted, single minded, and focused, there’s the risk that you have great personal pain during those rare moments when you notice that you sacrificed much of what you might want in your life for a different goal, either by choice or by obsession, either through a healthy decision or by having no choice and having an addiction.

The important part of being effective on what you’re typing is you and your brain, not the tool. Let’s say you learn how to have a schedule. Everybody’s cell phone these days has a calendar on it, a little alarm clock and reminders and things. How many different scheduling things could you use? You could use Outlook, you could use Trello, there’s all kinds of different things that you can use to manage your schedule. Are those things important? No. What is important is that you have a list of what you need to do and the times they occur and the alarms necessary. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a wristwatch or a pocket watch, it doesn’t matter what it is; it’s just another tool. The important thing is that you’re using your time the way that you want to use it.

Part of the giant myth of personal development is that if you read a book on how to manage your time and you finish it, then you’ll think about reading another book. No. How about you just hope that you were already smart enough to read a good book and you just learned how to execute the lessons learned within? Realize that whatever gains you might get from switching are going to be very small as opposed to the gains you would get by having any system over no system.

Instead of getting diminishing returns at things that you’re already good at, why don’t you perhaps allocate the time you want to put into learning and making up for big gaps? For some people, their big gap is that they’re working on the wrong thing. If you’re working the wrong thing, then almost no amount of reading is going to convince you of it. It seems like people don’t want to be convinced externally that what they’re doing isn’t right.

Try and talk someone out of their religion sometime, give that a try, or try to talking them out of a love interest. They’re not interested in it. It is not easy to find the right way to help people who have picked the wrong thing to do. They just need to discover it on their own maybe. Maybe there’s a line of questions that can be asked in the style of Plato and interrogate of what’s learned together. (Socrates actually.) Ask a bunch of if-questions that he already knows the answer to, and you think you’re coming up with new answers.

Some people may think of this as condescending. People may not like when someone asks a bunch of questions when he or she knows they already know the answers to; or they just tell them so they don’t have to be manipulated until getting whatever outcome they prefer from the interaction while extending time.

In summary, a lot of you guys that have read a lot of self-help stuff, you probably need to stop reading self-help stuff and do what you already know. If you’re doing what you already knew and actually doing it, you would be living a dream. You’d be bragging about how much ass you were kicking, bragging about how fit you are, how good your relationships are, how happy your prospects were and how proud you were of your activity. It doesn’t take but a couple of YouTube videos to get to the point where you know what you need to do.

The hard part is getting you to actually do it, and that’s the magic. The magic isn’t knowledge. The knowledge has been out there for free, forever, and it’s only getting slightly better, if at all. Some of the classics are still classic. If you can’t find that advice to execute but you’ve got tons of willpower, lucky you, you’re going to have a very easy life ahead of you. For everybody else out there who knows what they need to do and they’re not yet doing it, you guys are going to have it a little bit harder. Intellectual learning and understanding isn’t what you need to get where you want. What you need is a kick in the ass, either self-delivered, externally derived or helping someone kick you in the ass based upon your request.

A lot of people don’t want to become evil, and that’s a good thing. Therefore, a lot of people don’t want to do things that evil people do—but that’s where the problem occurs. How can a person gain great power, wealth, influence, impact, intellect, and positively affect the world unless he or she does much of the same behaviors that evil, mal-intentioned dictators and bad people in the past have done? For you see, the effectiveness comes not from the evil, the effectiveness comes from the strategy. The strategy can be used for good or evil.

Who has good marketing? Google. Are they doing good deeds for the world? Yes. (Most people think so.) Who also had good marketing? The Nazis in Germany. Did they do good deeds for the world? Most people will tell you, no. Is having good marketing therefore evil because the Nazis did it? They also made the trains run on time, cared about people not smoking, built roads, they did a lot of good things. Unfortunately, they poisoned many of these good things because they did so much evil as well.

So what is the point? If you want to make a huge impact in this world, you want to make this world a better place or you just want to make lots of money or you just want to be loved, you are going to need to do what works, and a lot of what works is what worked for both great people and terrible people. If the world is lucky enough to have a good person such as you, using the same tactics and occupying the same receptors sites on the global consciousness, it’s much better that those receptor sites gets filled by the good that you’re doing than by the evil that these jerks are trying to do. If there’s a lot of people out there with podcasts trying to convince you to buy their “get rich quick” bullshit, wouldn’t the world be a better place with your podcast sharing the same ideas but not trying to scam people out of money?

Scivive’s theory on life is that a lot of people spend a lot of time doing things not because they want to do those things, but because they don’t want to do something else. If your marriage is unfulfilling, you would try to spend all your time at work. If you don’t want to write a book, you would spend all your time playing games, doing whatever else, getting laid, etc.

One way to overcome this is to decide what you want and then go and get what you want. Now, it sounds simplistic and that everyone is already doing that, but they’re not. If you think about something you want, and that’s what’s clear in your mind, instead of what you don’t want, you’re more likely to go do it.

Greed could be a useful way to beat procrastination. Just decide what you want and then just do it. Do it leisurely, do it quickly, do it however you want, just get what you want. Don’t do what you don’t want. Don’t live a life of avoidance doing things only because they’re not some other thing.

When we’re truly interested in learning a thing, we have Wikipedia, and it’s fun to read. We have Discovery Channel, which is fun to watch. We have podcasts, they’re fun to listen to. If you’re actually interested in something in this world, there’s a nearly limitless amount of content locations. We have libraries and free books. There’s a nearly limitless amount of information for you to absorb and enjoy in regards to any topic that you find interesting, across any media format you prefer. If you’re truly interested in learning something, you’re probably not waiting for class to start in the morning.

In Plato’s classic book, Republic, he suggests there are three classes of people in society, and the state should educate those classes differently. They assign standard timeframes to those education periods. Why on Earth would you treat all your students on the same time frame? That’s quite stupid. There are some people who are ready to be professors at the age of eighteen. And there are some people who will never, ever be ready to be professors. How tragic would it be to use some artificial timing that has nothing to do with the student, and nothing to do with the update of science, and nothing to do with the update of education tactic?

The Pomodoro technique is a time management strategy that involves breaking work into twenty-five minute chunks. It works is because it flips your brain’s desire to hunt things that are scarce and it makes your time available to do work scarce. Therefore, your brain tries to hoard it, whereas quite normally you have an overabundance of work, and therefore you don’t get any benefit by just doing it. You lose out on all the other scarce things you’re not doing because of the work.

When you’ve got some type of mission that’s all consuming, that’s all you think about, and all that you know that you should think about, and then you finally have found a way, a strategy, a method to think about that thing, then your old habits and your old vices begin to fade away to become replaced with something more valuable. If you used to be addicted to women, women matter a lot less. If you used to be addicted to games, games matter a lot less. That’s a great unexpected side effect of focusing on what really matters. All the things you used to have to try and focus on not doing, you don’t have to focus on not doing now, because you don’t have time to focus on not doing them because you’re too busy doing what you love now.

People are like cars in a race. You can have a very fast car, but if pointed in the wrong direction, you are not going to cross the finish line. Your intellect is the size of your motor. What you focus your mind on is your fuel. Your goals are your steering wheel. Your suspension is your persistence. Your tires are how well your goals match what’s possible. Your body is the car’s body, and the more fit for purpose it is, the less hard you will have to push aerodynamically to your goal. Sometimes if you go too fast, you will be pulled over by the law, and it will take longer to get where you are going, if you ever get there at all. Perhaps you crash. Go through common problems people have where they don’t get where they want to go by missing key parts of a well running car.

Knowing the real good or bad of a thing in hindsight, the wisdom of crowds and prediction of markets. Should you have kids, how many and when? How does one make the decision between working harder to make money, then one day spend it to change the world, versus starting to change the world now and stop making money? There comes a day when you can’t make up the time you’ve lost thinking about it instead of taking massive action. Pick your battles. There is an endless amount of challenges. You will always be presented with conflicting ideas, the question is, which shortcut to action pays better? Sometimes not delaying is better, but sometimes waiting is better.

We are all capable of great things, even the worst of us. There has always been and will always be a few things standing between us and greatness. Scivive will call these the great traps. Some of these could be described as circumstance, lack of opportunity, lack of time, complacency, “it’s good enough”, lack of creativity, lack of follow-through, too individualistic, no teamwork, not individualistic enough, or no unique ideas. We can also be held back by greatness that is too small in scale or learning things that become valueless.

It’s pretty inspirational to hear about people that you might think shouldn’t have been successful, but who ended up wildly successful. For instance, Dr. Seuss apparently was going to burn his book after it got rejected from twenty different publishers. He met his friend on one side of the street that he was walking on, which distracted him and prevented him from burning it. If he hadn’t been walking on that side of the street, he said perhaps he’d be in the dry cleaning business now.

You hear the same thing with Walt Disney. A number of times he tried to get funding for Disney World. You hear things about really old people getting started like Mr. Sanders, Colonel Sanders, who started KFC. He was perhaps in his 50s, and Morgan Freeman who got his first real good acting gig at not so young an age. Stan Lee is another example, having created his best works as an almost middle-aged man.

All these things, look them up. Verify them for yourself. The point is that if ever life is hard for you and makes you want to stop, there’s a lot of people who have had it a lot worse, and it’s worked out just fine for them when there was no clue that it should have.

Here is the secret on the downsides to believing your own bullshit. Take a guy like the person who made Star Wars. The first Star Wars was good, it had many of the elements, themes and storylines and arks of other successful good stories. It was about a guy faced with a problem and a journey to solve that problem. Then, think about Jaws, the movie. The next movie was about the shark, not the guy. That’s a different movie and personal development, science and music it’s the same stuff.

The whole pool of the universe was the fuel that they used to create their original progress and all of the excellence that could be copied, found and used from everyone that preceded them that allowed their original excellence. Now, they feel obligated to honor themselves and up talk themselves and not prove themselves wrong. If you come up with a new belief system and it’s not identical to your old one to some degree, you must admit you had it wrong before.

Just like a giant company that doesn’t want to lose a bunch of sales on their worst product by coming up with a better product, which will cannibalize those sales. The greatest thinkers and the greatest companies that are having the most impact screw themselves over with their greatest enemy, previous success.

A great title for that is the greatness of the past poisoning the future. You see it with musicians, you see it with thinkers, and you see it with scientists. If you haven’t produced something smarter, different, better than what you originally created, you are no longer the person that you used to be; you are less powerful and less effective. If you’re Tony Robbins and you take 15 or 20 years off from book writing, and the next book that you write isn’t version 6 of your original book, where you got something wrong, fixed it and came up with better ways to understand the world, and is instead a book on how you should give your money to other people that will make you money in a 401K and a fund, that’s terrible. That is not a proper development of what could be widely defended as the most successful success coach. You have failed. If you have stopped producing, if you have stopped creating, if you have not proven yourself wrong and proven your own ideas, you drank your own Kool aid, you drank your own bullshit, you rested on your laurels. Scivive doesn’t want to say you shouldn’t be rewarded for it, but the world would be a much better place if you were still kicking ass as you used to.

For all you guys that don’t want to be so hard on the greatest and most productive of us, and you want to make it okay for them to rest on their laurels and just chill and write out their success, know that they’re going to pay that with their lives. They will die more painfully and earlier than necessary, as will everyone they love and all of their offspring, because they decided to not perform and not produce. Those were the heroes. Those were the guys that had the easiest path to make a huge and great impact in this world and they shirked their responsibility or pretended that they didn’t have responsibility to themselves, to their ancestors, to their offspring, to their loved ones, to their friends, to their culture to their fellow men, and/or to their future selves, which will harshly disagree with what they did this day.

Having sex and curing aging are the same thing from the guy’s perspective. Guys don’t dream about baby showers and baby clothes on kids, we just dream about the act of procreation. For the same reason you don’t have to dream about making people immortal or never age, you just need to worry about doing the things that cause that. You don’t have to worry about the outcome, you just have to worry about curing the little parts. You’re not trying to create super long living human beings, you’re just trying to cure cancer or heart disease and all the things that kill them.

In physics we have rolling and starting friction. It’s basically a subset of Newtonian motion whereby an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion. That is why if you’re already moving, it’s very easy to keep moving, and if you’re stopped, it’s harder to start.

Parkinson’s law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that members of a deliberative body or project team give too much weight to trivial issues, thereby voiding difficult decisions.

Using stimulants like caffeine might pay the same dividends in uptime-downtime volatility, increasing energy to overcome starting friction costs that having a sleep cycle effect creates for animals. The same could be true for CPUs, obviously not with caffeine but with the constant application of electricity as a stimulant.

This type of logic can also be applied to being in the “zone” if you play sports or have bursts of creativity. It’s also a way to recognize that very often what you need isn’t more weak force, but just a burst of strong force, like getting the brakes to lock up on a car.

Some people think that they just have to stop doing everything else in their life to be productive and be useful. There is a disagreement between two ideas. If you want to make something so it doesn’t need willpower anymore, and so that you amplify the chances that it keeps occurring, then you need to fight through discomfort and fight through identity issues, and become a person that does that thing whether it feels good or whether it doesn’t, because it’s just what you do. It becomes easier to do it than it is to not do it. How do you get to that place? You get to that place through whatever trickery and effort and trying hard that you could possibly think of that allows you to do it for long enough that it sticks as a habit.

Maybe you use motivational posters, self-speech, a coach, or a team; or maybe you use drugs, or hypnosis. It doesn’t matter what trickery you’re using to do what you should do, but once you’ve done it long enough, it becomes a habit, and it becomes harder to not do it than to continue to do it.

Let’s talk about that time management. Studies have been done and have determined that it’s good for you to get eight hours of sleep. It changes based on your genetics, light, location, and diet.

Let’s call it six to eight hours. Twenty-four hours in a day, with eight hours of sleep, leaves you with sixteen hours. Sixteen hours is just two other eight-hour periods, at least one of which most people are used to working and culturally accepted as working, not including transition time. A nine-to-five job is eight per hours a day, but they actually take an hour off for lunch, so it’s really only a seven-hour job.

The question is, if you were willing to sacrifice all transition time and every other activity except sleep, then you have sixteen hours to work with. Most people are used to working eight, and they’re used to taking off Saturdays and Sundays. Your maximum hourly increase is from eight to sixteen. We’ll just exclude transactional costs, like driving and dressing and preparing, we just want this math to be a little easy.

You could go from the eight hours of productive output that most people have, five out of seven days, and move it to sixteen hours of productive output, seven days a week. The math is actually pretty simple. Sixteen times seven is 112. If you work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, it is 112 hours of work per week.

The math is 112 hours @ seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, versus 40 hours a week. If you only slept and had no transitional time at all, you still cannot triple your productive hours. It’s not possible, which is why if you want to be more than three times as effective in the world, you need other people, or things, or ideas that aren’t you, because no matter how much you break your own balls, you are only worth three times the hours. One could argue that immersion is more valuable because hard ideas have start up and spool down time. Or, one can argue that more time is less valuable, because you burn out, and you get tired of focusing on a thing. Either way, let’s just call it about three times effectiveness based on total sacrifice of any non-productive enjoyment. You want to watch a movie? You’re not in the movie business? Disallowed.

You want to go outside to eat? Nope! No eating outside. As a matter of fact, no getting up from the chair. No! It’s not that great. If you want to really make breakthroughs in this world, you’ve got to use people that aren’t you, because you can only get about three times as many hours.

Now, can you change behavior and do things that are better tactically and strategically? Sure, and you should, because as said previously, more hours is only worth a maximum of about three times. When you look at the people ahead of you in this world, three times isn’t going to get you even close, and it almost doesn’t matter who you are.

A great example of this is trying to cook a steak by a committee where 10 people come into a room, look at the steak and blow their warm breath on it trying to cook it. You could increase the number of people on the committee to 100 and you still wouldn’t be reaching the temperature that you need in order to cook the steak. You need one hot thing, not 100 warm things.

When you want to create an outcome and you’ve got limited resources, most people choose the objective based outcome filtering of “what’s the critical path?” What’s the least number of steps with the least amount of risk? Where we are now to where we want to be? Then you look at where you want to be and you say, “Well, what do we want?” We want customers and we want our customers to like us. Do we let our customers develop the product that they will fall in love with? Yes! What’s the minimum viable product to get out the door to start getting feedback with our case study, to start optimizing the product and make it amazing?

We already have a good product; every money value that we already spend will not only generate the best return, because it’s the most sticky and most useful product, because it’s already been optimized by some pre customer test cases. It’s already more reliable because we tested it with those guys and improved it, so now the new guys get it better. It’s also because it better enhances the likelihood that every new customer that we get tells a friend and we might be able to get some free customers from word to mouth advertising that we didn’t have to pay for. Those customers tend to stay longer.

The problem with that approach: the upside to that approach is that it cuts out a lot of needless steps that would waste time and energy, and not create a better product for your customer and not create a better market fit by choosing the right pricing, loading the scope and doing one thing really well instead of doing ten things in mediocrity. It’s very good for those things. That way the lean startup methodology and critical path analysis are effective in those areas. However, there is a downside to using critical path analysis and lean startup minimum viable product style of creation; Some of the things that you could have built that may be more profitable than the original idea is, and you may have easily pivoted into. You never notice these things because you filtered out and cut off the other novel and interesting things to focus on the one thing that you decided was the most important. What you’ll find is some of the companies that are wildly successful are wildly successful with products that were definitely not what they were originally invented to do.

Flicker was a video game company. Then they turned into a photo company, because people liked that more. Slack was a video game company and they turned into a product management company, because people like that more. When you use novelty search, when you care about bottom up, when you do what is interesting and perhaps you have enough energy to survive that indeterminate space for longer, then you can end up with unpredicted excellent reward outcomes that you would never have been able to find or figure out from the end point backwards style.

In summary, by choosing a destination, an outcome, and reaping the rewards of not wasting energy falling down paths that are maybe dead ends, you have a high specificity, you don’t get false positives and you don’t waste time. You also have a low sensitivity and you don’t capture what you might have been able to do, and so it is the path between what you want, which is profitability in most cases in business, and where you are now, which is the idea stage.

The point is, you might be able to create some good things in the world regarding people making better decisions and taking responsibilities in their own lives. Use an interesting novel search pattern, since human beings are trained to care about that stuff more than brute objectivity anyway. You must try to optimize the objective likely, the minimum viable path to get the thing done, because of the uncertainty in the likelihood of that path over the others. Quit wasting time trying to optimize outcome strategically and with the concrete vision and be happier with a more flowery “throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks” kind of style.

If you don’t do it, you don’t know it. If you didn’t build it, you didn’t invent it. Most of what you think you have invented, you will find has already been patented by people a long time ago, or they already tried it and it failed. For example, the human eye. We aren’t the only animals with eyes; they’ve developed separately and unrelatedly time and time again at least 50 different times across many different animals, because they serve a very useful purpose. For the same reason animals developed useful eyes separately, you likely came up with a cool invention to solve a common problem, just like everyone else did, you just know about the problem and solving it more than you know about their attempts. Someone who spent more time reading patent applications might have the opposite experience.

It’s easy to think that what makes a man rich is what he does. In fact, what makes a man rich is what everyone else does; What the society you operate in allows you to own, what the judges and lawyers will let you keep and not tax away, what good work your employees perform and how much your customers will buy, and how many people didn’t choose to compete with you or do the same job at roughly the same quality for free. You can’t get rich in a vacuum, unless you’re in the space exploration business. Or thermoses.

If you’re not doing it, you don’t know it.

A lack of balance is the definition of pain.

How do you get people to focus on commonly forgotten ingredients of a successful recipe? What is more important in a cake? The sugar, the flour, or the cooking? You need them all, or you don’t get a cake. By this analogy you can see that a successful person such as Bill Gates isn’t wealthy solely because he started a business. He’s wealthy because he started a business and the entire world bought his products. When you see that it is the world and its systematic behavior that causes things to happen, then you can understand better that a different human Bill Gates would have performed the same task perhaps at a different time. There has to be some merit in shifting the focal point externally.

If you’re a seduction-ist and you have the normal training, it is very self-centered and not system oriented, the same way that many self-help and personal development materials are. When you include your relationship to the system and their relationship to the system, you can save a lot of time when you’re not swimming against the current. Egocentrism is one of the lowest forms of understanding.