Don’t make perfect the enemy of the good. Iterate. Fake it till you make it. Do what’s important first, and get the basics done. Only if you have time should you then worry about reaching perfection.

Urgent isn’t always important.

What can you do that has lasting value? What can you do to reward and punish yourself so that your life has the emotions you want, and the destiny you desire?

How can you set up the game to win? If you don’t set up the game in a way you can win, you will never win.

Know your outcome, and know it very specifically. If you don’t know exactly what you want, you may never notice that you’ve already achieved it, and thus steal from yourself the glory and good feelings you deserve.

Realize when you’ve won the game and celebrate!

The stair climbing strategy of want, get, be satisfied, want different, get, be satisfied, over and over is the most effective that exists. You’re not supposed to be in any one of those three states too long, you’re supposed to cycle through them. As a living person, it’s not normal or desirable to be totally still, neither in emotion or location. To be human is to experience not just the storms and calms of Mother Nature, but of our own passions.

You eat cheeseburgers in a single direction. You don’t eat a circle around the outside, or at least you shouldn’t. Thus, when you are working, feel free to get started, and just iterate and go a single direction. Don’t worry about understanding everything up front, you’ll understand it better once you’ve started. If there is work that has to be done no matter what, go ahead and do it, instead of sitting in analysis paralysis.

Do that of which others only dream.

Having tunnel vision is more efficient than removing distractions.

Tunnel vision is discipline, changing your environment is “motivation.”

Another strategy you’ll see of people trying to break through the barriers to getting hard work done is they’ll try to minimize all the distractions. Sure, you could do that, but you are falling for the Meta of controlling what isn’t the work. If you saved the time you would have spent doing that, and just forced the discipline of doing the work, then you would win twofold. Once from actually doing the work, and once again from not wasting time “minimizing distractions.” You’ll find that if you maximize whatever screen you are working on, it’s already done all the distraction minimization for you! All you see is that window. Maximize and go!

Imagine you are back in the Stone Age, and you are hunting for your dinner. You spot the prey in the jungle. Meanwhile, you are surrounded by “distractions”—other animals, the wind, the mosquitoes biting you, the tiger lurking nearby. Can you eliminate these distractions? Of course not! They will never go away. To kill your prey—and put food in your stomach—you must ignore the distractions and focus on your task.

Now think abut your office. Phones ringing, people talking, your boss interrupting. You cannot remove these distractions. Learn to ignore them and power through your day.

If you want an excuse to write your book, perhaps try out that new keyboard you’ve bought, or a new key layout, or new hotkeys, perhaps a custom programmed keyboard layer. The trick here, is that, if you get used to testing your new setup while you are doing something productive; you will get progress in both the productive thing, in this case book writing, and in the other, experiment for fun thing.

You can see this example in other places like trying your new headphones out on a jog, or testing your new running shoes whilst running.

Now, where is the pitfall here? Well, if you get used to testing the new cool things in the wrong, useless place, you will get more addicted to doing the wrong thing, and it will leech away the time you would have had to do those things that you know you really should be doing.

Make your fulfilment fun. Picking some cool or fun things around what it is that you know you should be doing is great, if and only if you can make sure you use and have fun with the cool things only when you’re doing the productive thing that you’re trying to make more fun, to produce a good habit. Don’t spend 100 hours doing typing tests of random words fed to you. Do spend 100 hours expressing yourself using your own words. Only one of the two has lasting value.

If you’re lucky, the two things you’re playing with might even amplify each other. For instance, if you wanted to practice your singing, and you wanted to learn a new language, great! Now you can practice singing a song in a new language!

You only have so much attention, so be careful what hobbies you have and how many, for at some point they control you more than you control them.

It’s amazing how few hobbies you can really have. They’re extremely time consuming. Every single little thing you want to do that you don’t think takes a lot of time, “Oh I’ll just lift some weights” “I’ll just, you know check some sports” - takes twenty, thirty per cent of our useful hours in a day. You only get to do about five of those until you’re out of time. You then become a product of your hobbies and enslaved by them.

If you look at the Wikipedia on hobbies, you’ll see that there’s not actually too many of them. There’s less than 300, that’s pretty damn surprising to me. The next time you’re bored, you’ve got a great excuse, there’s only 300 things to fool around with. Just kidding, there’s a fair amount of depth to many of them.

Go to the gym and delete Facebook, good for all times.

Great analysis of how terrible Facebook is.

http://www.saHYPERLINK "http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/"lHYPERLINK "http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/"imvirani.com//facebook/

The specifics of why facebook sucks

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=K418NM74fCw

If you’re a good measurer, whatever you measure, it’s true. It’s easier to get truth out of the real world, measurement-wise. Some other truths are much harder to come to when you have to do more than measure, like predict or see something without measuring points like that.

There are a lot of times when the worst person to measure whether you are performing well, acting well, or have good posture, saying the right words, or lifting a weight the right way is you. This is because you are busy doing the thing and being reactionary, responding to your subconscious impetus to do the thing.

On the contrary, the people around you have more processing power to observe what you are doing with your body, which you’re not focused on, what you’re doing with your voice, what you’re focusing on that is to the exclusion of other things. It’s actually possible that someone else could see you doing something before you’re aware of the concept that you’re doing it.

It doesn’t just apply to martial arts or lifting weights, it applies to facial expression. If someone else looks at you and can tell you don’t like a thing, you may not realize that you do not like the thing, because it’s outside your focus. You’re focused on the thing and he’s focused on you. You could respond to people’s internal state quicker than they can, and be aware of it quicker than they can, because they’re busy doing it and your busy watching it. There’s a trick where if someone’s going to slight you, you can preemptively slight them, or perform an activity which punishes their bad behaviour, but do it so quickly that you don’t seem petty, or slight, and just seems like the natural course of events.

Your personal attributes compound against each other so if you’ve got a really strong position in one area, you’re already in diminishing returns on it. You should work on the other areas that would multiply against it. So if you’ve only got three traits, let’s say they’re looks, money and leads, then you’d work to improve the ones you don’t already have.

When people say that you should dress to impress and dress for a job, it’s not the dressing that matters. It’s other people’s perception of your usefulness. So, dressing is one part of that. Posture is one part of that. Knowledge is a part of that. Focus, are you self-centered?

Do you care about them? Do you work well in teams? It’s not just dress for success, it’s be obviously useful.

Forget dressing for success, like dress for usefulness. Success looks different in different environments. You wouldn’t want to wear a business suit scuba diving, one would assume. If you want to save money, you should be taking your extra downtime and using it to research getting a lower cost and buying larger quantities on places like eBay or Alibaba because it is unlikely that you’ll find a better deal on almost anything than those places.

If you must try drugs, try to do it after you do all the other cool, bad ass things. And if you must try drugs, realize they are dangerous. Get the testing kits, do a lot of research, be very careful. Don’t take anyone’s word for anything. Have all the safeties in place. Don’t plan on driving. Plan for it to go bad, plan for your heart to stop. Why wouldn’t you? You only have one heart.

So, do your research. Plan it. Do it right, or be someone that’s happy living this life where you only get to feel what you earn to feel through directed focus. Maybe it is meditation, maybe it is yoga, maybe it is deprivation tanks, and maybe it’s just having a really positive outlook. You can feel all the great feelings of life without needing to do the superhuman feats.

If you’re ever curious why you shouldn’t sacrifice all of your time and life energy for a giant mega corporation, think about dividing up what you are across all the people of the world. Give everyone a penny. How much money do you have? Or more interestingly, everyone needs to eat, so you give a little piece of your body to everybody and see how many people you can feed. What you discover is that if you want to live properly in this world, you need to be a little greedy.

There exists an iteration that women enjoy building problems, thinking about things and associating with them and making great narratives about whatever problem that they have going on. When they bring that thing to you and show it to you, they don’t want you to destroy it with your simple, logical, easy, solution because that’s to disrespect all the work they put into understanding such a fine and beautiful problem that they’re very desperately trying to convince you is insolvable and therefore gigantic. They want to take small problems and make them large, and if you take a large problem and make it small, you’re an asshole. You just destroyed a lot of work they did. You just made it less important, and they spent all day making it more important.

Really make sure that it’s one of the one out of fifty times that your female companion actually wants you to solve something before you go and destroy the excellent problem that she helped create.

• If you’re not using a paper and pen and taking advantage of the fact that the worst paper and pen is better than the best memory, you’re doing harm to yourself and your friends and your loved ones. You’re making their subconscious work against them.

• Don’t discount the power of repetition. In addition, don’t discount, in a lot of areas, the necessity of repetition. In other areas, still, you might not have to pull your punches. Your hardest punch might not be enough.

• No one else has the privilege of seeing how you can destroy people by being overly nice, because you have had to have worked hard enough and saved hard enough to be able to be overly nice to another person. You don’t get to see the destructive effects unless you’ve experimented in the world of doing something most people can’t, which is providing, financially, too much for another person.

• Couples who don’t have prenuptial agreements, they get divorces. The reason is if you give someone a million dollar reward for thinking you’re not funny or cool to hang out with anymore, let me tell you, for a million dollars it’s very easy for people to fall out of love with you. For a million dollars, it’s very easy for people to think that you’re just not that cool anymore. You could be the funniest guy in the world and if there’s a million dollars payoff for not laughing at your jokes, that million dollars is going to get paid. Don’t structure the underlying agreements and mutual beliefs in a way where the parties have a reason to break it. If you’re married, you and your wife having a join account makes a good bank history.

• You hear these stories about terrible things happening to people and no one even called 911 because they felt someone else was going to do it. You learn the way to overcome that is to look at a single person and point directly at them and say, “You. You call 911 now. You.” And make sure that they understand.

• People need to learn the contraindications for their suggestions, particularly the medical ones, because they’re a very small set. In the unlikely chance that anyone accepts the advice it’ll prevent great harm from the people accepting it.

• It’s important to know that there are some principles which apply all over the place which are the great awesome things, that’s like learning how to duck a punch. You don’t have to be a really smart guy to duck a punch, you just have to practice. You don’t have to be a really smart guy to throw a punch, you just have to practice it. What was being taught earlier about things that can be taught and things that can’t be taught, this is one of the great revelations that will make you smarter, make you more powerful, make you more effective that can be taught, so let’s learn it.

• Timing is important. If you go to get your eyes checked, it’s best to go with your eyes already tired, already under strain, because those are the times when you will need your glasses the most. Therefore, it’s better to go there with your eyes under that condition when you do the testing, so that the prescription that you get is there when you need it the most. Now, would a normal person know that there was a better and worse time to get their eye test? No, it’s not easy to know. Would a person know that when you get your prescription made that there’s actually a level of tolerance at the lab that makes your glasses, and some labs have higher tolerance than others?

For instance, if you have astigmatism that needs to be corrected by a certain number of degrees, then some labs are okay with five degrees, some are okay with two, some are okay with seven and the person writing the prescription is actually able to write on the prescription that no tolerances are allowed. You wouldn’t normally know those details. You would just assume that when these glasses came out of the glass factory that they were properly created. These types of assumptions about timing and quality exist all over the place and people are just starting to become aware of them.

• People thought that what you ate was super important and then they realized that there’s micro world of amazing bacteria in people’s guts and that they’re mildly different. What might be a great diet for you isn’t for someone else, not only because they’re biologically different, but because of this other species of microbes that has nothing to do with their DNA, they have their own DNA. All the bacteria and little things that live in your stomach operate differently from human to human. What lives in your stomach is so important that koalas actually eat their mom’s excrement, it’s called Pap; in order to colonize their guts with the bacteria that they need to digest what is primarily their food source almost exclusively their primary nutrient source, eucalyptus leaves.

Put your food in the fridge oldest to the front, newest to the rear, so that when you use them in that order it makes some sense. Same with your clothes, when you’re done washing your clothes, put your clean clothes on the very back so that you use the ones that haven’t been used yet. Otherwise you short cycle and the small group that is in the front gets used and then washed and will just keep getting cycled and cycled quicker. Then they’ll fade or get too small and you won’t be able to use them anymore. It’s better to cycle everything evenly.

Shortcuts to organizing things in your house could include using the same organization system from the store that you bought it from, because they already put the effort in putting things in the categories. You benefitted from the categorization when you bought it, so you can use the same categorization in your home to find it.

Travel checklists are pretty useful.

If you’re looking for an obviously easy way to improve your life, take a look through your Internet search history, see if there’s any particular type of pretty people that you look at more than others on the Internet. Maybe they’re naked, maybe they’re in bikinis, maybe they’re just smiling, and move to wherever those people come from, wherever they’re most numerous. Then you’ll be naturally triggered to be happier and getting it the natural way can’t be any worse than paying for a bill for brainwashing yourself.

If you aren’t specific about what you want, then you’re not able to make those decisions where they can be made.

If you get an A in the class that you don’t care about, then you’re going to see your worst on the things you did care about, but didn’t have time for.

The people that have, through dedicated habit, luck, or curiosity, or chemical intervention that can stay engaged with a task for longer, they’re able to reap the profit from having skill that takes many hours to develop, remember and execute.

It would be useful for people to see personal development as rewarding in the short term to enhance repetitive and short term achievement, so that people don’t have to bridge these vacuous gaps of friction. It would be even better that they stay in the rolling friction of constant, intermittent rewards, but shorter, smaller term rewards would be the next best strategy. Thus, if you know that when you go to the gym you are actually getting laid (by proxy of a future time), and that’s what triggers in your brain, or if you know that when you are working hard, making money, you are actually getting laid, then that’s just one more reason to do the right thing, and overcome the easy wrong thing that’s always there nagging you to choose it to your own detriment.

Maybe someone should solve the reward problem. Maybe if you gamified book writing and have a voting system and a peer group that rewards you for work well done, and then you pay into the system by reviewing other people’s feats the same way they’re reviewing yours, maybe you’d have a self-reinforcing cluster of people circle-jerking each other into greatness. Isn’t that what teams are? Isn’t that what clubs are? Pretty sure that’s what they are. Pretty sure there’s people circle jerking each other to get excellence and performance out of their lives.

Make all your clocks and watches accurate to National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) time. Why not?

Use alarms, now you don’t have to be worried about missing a thing, let your phone worry for you. Use calendars with alarms, now you don’t have to miss people’s birthdays or forget to get your teeth cleaned.

[Copyrighted images removed]

Here’s a scene from The Simpsons:

Mr. Burns: Tell me, Simpson. If an opportunity arose for taking a small shortcut, you wouldn’t be averse to taking it, would you?

Homer: Uhh, not as such.

Mr. Burns: Neither would I. I’ve always felt that there’s far too much hysteria these days about so-called cheating. If you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it’s your duty as an American to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift or the jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well, I say cheating is the gift man gives himself!

Homer: Mr. Burns, I insist that we cheat.

Mr. Burns: Excellent.

From <http://www.simpsoncrazy.com/episodes/mountain-of-madness>

Get off your ass and do something. Stop learning. All of these chapters of awesomeness mean nothing if left unacted upon.

The world doesn’t need to learn more. The knowledge is all free; free to deliver, free to receive, and free to put into use. It’s never been better, it’s never been more plentiful. We don’t need more knowledge, we need people to get off their ass and do things, and that’s what sales people do, more so than anyone else in the world. They get you to sign on the dotted line and to use your economic resources to better your own life, and then you got to do something for somebody else.

General success, gratitude, relationships, peer group, internal environment, fairness to one’s self

The pain of working goes away when you start the work. Getting to the gym is hard, being at the gym is easy. You can’t live at the gym forever, or at work forever, which is great. You don’t need to, and you shouldn’t, but you should develop have a healthy duty cycle.

If you picked your top 25 things and took off the bottom 20 and avoided them, because they might hurt the top 5, you would be using the negative space idea. The result is more work on the stuff you really care about. Depending on how far different your 1-25 really were, you might have a top 10 that were almost all the same thing, so there’s a little bit of accuracy of scope that is involved.

You know how there’s a momentum thing to working out, once you get the ball rolling towards going to the gym, once you’re there it’s very easy to just work out, well the same thing applies to developing bad habits. If you start becoming lazy, or missing a workout, or eating unhealthy food, then it’s really easy to keep that ball rolling as well.

Thus as important as it is to show that you should get the ball rolling in the right direction, it’s almost as important to make sure that you don’t get the ball rolling in the wrong direction.

Avoid everything you “kind of” want to do.

The “avoid at all cost” idea states that if you list your top 25 things you want to do, pick 5 and avoid at all cost the other 20. Your engagement of the 20 ideas will make it more likely you don’t achieve the top 5. Scivive doesn’t agree with this, because the 6th idea could actually be on the path of 1-5. However, the fact that you only have space for a couple hobbies, and really only have enough time to personally work on a couple of things professionally, is evidenced by another quote attributed to Warren Buffett:

“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.”

A different approach to getting things done is called the negative space idea. If you picked your top 25 things and took off the bottom 20 and avoided them, because they might hurt the top 5, (which is the direct opposite from avoid at all cost idea above) you would be using the negative space idea. The result is more work on the stuff you really care about. Depending on how far different your 1-25 really were, you might have a top 10 that were almost all the same thing, so there’s a little bit of accuracy of scope that is involved.

How to use this: Start your day with what is first on your list and work your way down.

Avoid at all costs the following; time sinks, and the general wasting of pointless effort that have stolen the most hours of your life. Those hours aren’t coming back.

Steve Martin also quotes the ascetic style of focusing on only one thing! Never mind all the other shiny distractions so other comics got taken away with.

You can skip motivational stuff by just getting your significance from the hard stuff you’re doing. The reason it’s easier to argue with people on the internet than it is to write a book, is because you get a feeling of winning nearly instantly when you crush trolls on the internet, but you don’t really get any positive significance feedback in a reasonable time frame on text that you write for a book.

Thus when you want to get things done, you can either work building motivation, or you can work doing the actual hard things that you’d hoped that the motivation would get you to want to do. You make it easier to do the hard stuff when you create a short term reward where your psyche feels good doing the hard stuff, because you feel important having done it. If you can manage this without involving third parties, that’s even better.

Distractions eat time and create problems.

Most books are written by people in their 30s, because if you’re 20, you’re too inexperienced to know anything to write about. If you’re 40, you may not care to write about it anymore. If you only have a couple of good ideas, it’s a lot easier to get started and feel good about what you’re doing than if you have tons of good ideas. Knowing too much, or being too old, or being too smart, can all get in the way of being productive. Possessing any of those qualities makes it harder for you to focus on a single thing till completion, because there’s more and more side interests and things that get in the way, like a house, or a family, or your hobbies, or your yacht.

There is no better way to start your day than by growing your strength and willpower. The feeling of accomplishment makes all the tasks of the day so much easier.

Let’s be serious. If reading a book on how to get rich actually worked for people, well by golly, you’d know a lot more rich people. Knowledge is only as useful as its application.

The first step to getting things done is actually wanting things. When you want things badly enough, that you must have them, then you might schedule them. If you schedule things, you might do them. If you do them, you might get what you thought you would get, and thus get what you wanted.

The first step to scheduling is the desire. The why and the urgency. Why must you have it now? If you solve the why, everything will pretty much work on autopilot. It’s just like habits. You only have to work to build a habit about three weeks until it sticks, then its autopilot, you just do it without thinking. It’s free and awesome once you’re three weeks in. If you want something urgently enough, you’ll find a way.

Don’t watch, do! Life isn’t a spectator sport, get in the game.

“You can’t call failing to do the important thing ‘multitasking’” - Richard on June 2nd, 2016

Wake up 7am, bathroom/weigh yourself, walk to your home gym, Chin-ups, Bench, Deadlift, overhead press, breakfast, shower, floss, brush teeth, scrape tongue. Now do the thing you’re most likely to put off, first. Just as you exercised your body, you shall exercise your willpower.

What are the strengths of this schedule? You put in slightly better reps on chin-ups because you’re one breakfast and one bathroom trip lighter. You alternated pushing and pulling movements and ordered the exercises by muscle group. You worked on external attractiveness. You showered after working out while combining teeth maintenance, shaving, hair care, deodorant, perfume.

Performing hard tasks improves will power, just like lifting heavy weights improves muscles.

Willpower gets stronger with training, just like your muscles. You might not be surprised to hear that perhaps willpower could be grown in different ways just like muscles can be grown differently. There might be something akin to fast-twitch and slow-twitch will power. Just like you should exercise your body every day, you should exercise your will every day as well.

Drive, the feeling that makes you do.

Upgrade your “shoulds” to “musts.”

The more things you upgrade from “shoulds” to “musts” the more you’ll actually schedule, and then do, and then get.

Get a coach or a partner or a team

You’ll do more to maintain your positive relationship with them than you will for yourself.

Free up your time by not wasting it (Don’t do wrong things)

Waste not a minute, for minutes are what life is made of. Time is the great equalizer of men. We all have only 24 hours in a day. Use this to outcompete everyone else. While they’re watching the game on television, you can be catching the winning pass and making love to the homecoming queen/king.

Most people waste tons of time every day. Since you’re reading this book, you might not be “most” people, compare yourself to the average American:

[copyrighted image removed]

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/51wsy6/how_americans_spend_their_day_oc/

http://www.datavisualisations.net/visualisations/how-americans-spend-their-day

Replace time wasting with time honoring

Take everything you do that upon analysis doesn’t actually lead to any tangible benefits to your life, and just replace them, and do it for three weeks so it sticks. If you cut out browsing Facebook, or really idly browsing anything you choose, what could you use that time for? Learning a new language? Finding love? Creating something beautiful?

The sky isn’t the limit! You can built a weather balloon and send a miniature camera into space, past our sky. Use GPS to find it when it comes back down and view the photos of earth from the stratosphere.

Jealousy exists to motivate you to act in the right directions! If you don’t have juicy things you want at first glance, then notice what you’re jealous of, and try getting those things. If you are still having trouble finding something juicy to replace your time sinks with, then just pick something other people enjoy, and try it for a few weeks to see if you’d learn to enjoy it to. Anything is better than the same dead ends you’re already an expert at.

Are you really good at the wrong things? That’s worse not better. Makes you like the wrong things more than you should. If you have a lot of “achievement badges” in a video game, you could say that’s a counter achievement anywhere outside that game.

Pooping

Eat less

Drink less alcohol, take less pain killers

Squatty potty

Combine your pooping with other tasks you already would be doing in near the toilet. Drop a piece of toilet paper in the bowl first so you don’t splash your butt with water. Pee sitting down if standing up is making a mess

Learning things you don’t use

Honour your time Highest and best (do right things)

Be efficient Do the right things the right way

Don’t fix what isn’t broken (time sinks)

Respect how hard things really are (complexity)

Before you think of changing the motor in your car, think about how often other people do that. Want to be the first person on the block to have or do XYZ experimental new thing? Be prepared to see it blow up in your face, perhaps literally. Someone once tried silencing a coffee machine with Dynamat, didn’t work. Another person tried sanding their keyboards’ keycaps with a Dremel to make them smoother, boy did the surfaces melt fast. If you want greatness you have to experiment, just respect complexity while you do. The more complicated your idea, the more and more likely it will not only never happen, but mess you up the whole way.

Use proven solutions, don’t experiment.

Being on the cutting edge makes you bleed. First adopters are how you discover what needs to be fixed. Whenever you can, massively favour as many parts in your master plan as you can that are already known to work together. When you do hit a problem, and you surely will, you are absolutely going to love all the free tech support and innovative solutions that all the poor souls that were there before you had to discover and create, and luckily tell the world about. Ask anyone that has been modifying a “project car” of theirs for years and years, the progress is slow as hell and often seems to be going backwards. The car seems to get more disassembled instead of assembled. That looks like, and often is, the opposite of progress. If you’re looking for a competitive advantage, or want to do something never before done though, you might just have to bite the experiment bullet.

Focus on a future that is yours and not somebody else’s

What the far future looks like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

You shouldn’t care. You have to earn being around long enough to meet those challenges. Futurists, and transhumanists are largely guilty of focusing on problems that will never be theirs.

Stay in the game. Remain relevant.

Autobiographers often have time to be as such, because they stopped being important.

Autobiographies are created when you write about what things were like back when you used to matter, using all the free time you have, because you don’t matter anymore. Maybe some are instead ghost written and thus don’t actually take much time out of their days.

See how valuable your time is

Don’t be a degenerate gambler with your time.

So many of us look down on those with crippling addictions. A man who just can’t stop losing money gambling, taking the same bad deals over and over again. Well, don’t feel too superior. As that man gambles with money, it’s likely you do the same with your time. Doing the same things over and over again that never pay off, yet you just can’t stop doing them. It’s easy to see that man’s bank account is empty, it’s not as easy to see how you’ve wasted away so much of your precious time.

Copy what works.

Model great behaviour that gets great results.

Many of the concepts Scivive developed regarding influence were just by looking at the patterns used to generate influence successfully, like giving positive and negative reasons to do a thing to help the person feel it. Maybe they respond better to fear, maybe greed, maybe they just like more reasons to do a thing. It’s by analysing what worked that a name was created for it, and now that you can see the framework, you can translate it into different behaviours. Negative space is used in art, let’s notice where it’s used in influence as well.

Turn procrastination against itself.

People don’t like doing things that suck. If what you need to do seems like it sucks to you, and you might be right, then there are some tricks you can use to make the dreariness of doing what you must seem far less. If you can sit in front of what you must do, and not do it, but not do anything else either. Use the inaction, the boredom of just sitting there in front of your work. Amplify the pain.

You may not yet have the willpower to do what you must, but you might have the willpower to not do all the other distractions, and bullshit that takes your mind off the fact that you are not doing what you must. Then it will be just you, and your work, sitting there, looking at each other. You will be fidgeting and in pain, for the boredom should be pretty intense as you sit there without diversion, just you and your work, and the thought that you are sitting there, not doing it.

What we’re doing here is creating a lever by which you can create a new greater suck, far larger than the suck of just doing what you have to. The suck of boredom, and living in the state of knowing you’re not doing what you should, is far greater, and becomes far greater with time, than the suck of just doing what you need to do.

No music, no fidgeting, on reading, no dreaming, no browsing the web, no chatting, just you and the terrible boredom. The more unpleasant you can make it, the more likely you are to get to work. Make work the path of least resistance.

We use that desire to not do things which are boring, to create a greater suck of boredom and discomfort that makes our original suck of doing our work seem so small in comparison. We use our own bad habits against themselves. To avoid the pain of boredom, we’ll do even the pain of work. Often to discover that the work is quite enjoyable once started, and truly pleasurable when complete.

Distractions: Tunnel vision is your friend.

Add distraction: You might work better with a little distraction.

Play media.

If you work better with music or movies playing in the background (which some people do, because it may quell the desire to switch tasks, or it may dull some of their conscious to leave some other parts of the brain to be more effective). This is actually done with transcranial magnetic stimulation as well. If you stop some of the interfering things that are going on in the brain, it will amplify your ability to do some other things.

Music can change the way you feel. If what you feel affects how you perform, then it’s an obvious that for some, listening to music can enhance performance. Lots of people that jog or work out hard in the gym have some playlists just for that activity.

Music can change the way you feel. If what you feel affects how you perform, then it’s an obvious that for some, listening to music can enhance performance. Lots of people that jog have some playlists just for that activity.

Thus, if you’re one that enjoys music, you’ll find that most of the best music has a YouTube video to go with it. And some of the 2nd tier music, assuming you have tastes similar to other YouTube users, has non directed, weaker videos, usually of a spectrum analyzer jumping around, or some other non-specific filler content.

In conclusion, the tips are:

1. Click “next” faster on songs that don’t have real videos directed specifically for them, because they’re less likely to be good, if you have common tastes.

2. Keep the YouTube window minimized so the cool and well done video doesn’t distract you from your work and use hotkeys to click next or pause when needed. Unless you can ignore the video and still benefit from it being there. That is entirely dependent on how accurate your opinion is of whether you work better under silence, or audio only, or audio and video together. If there’s a difference at all.

XX (this should be made into an app, it gives you the benefits of time dilation ((if you’re male) (from red color)) and it gives you the subconscious focus and drive and competitiveness that comes from seeing a mate you desperately want (thesaurus desperately)

If you work to make a nice playlist, save it, then you don’t have to do the work again, or you can just use other people’s playlists, to save time, or discover new media.

Enjoy the silence. Your creative mind will fill the gap with music of its own. Let the sound of your fingers on keys be your music. Do things worth writing about, or write about things worth doing.

When you feel like you must stop, you must program your brain to think, “Great, that’s the trigger for me to continue!” Like an infinite loop. It will stop on its own eventually, no reason to help it fail early by not using it. Remember the phrase, “If I can’t, I must.”

Execute and share your ideas

Doing your ideas instead of writing about them

Put first things first

Whatever you put second sometimes never happens.

Do things in the right order

If you’re making a cake, you need to mix the batter before you try to bake the cake. If you don’t, you’re never going to produce an actual cake.

Tony thinks you should coin the term of doing the amplifying stuff first, perhaps using the order of operations moniker.

Find an edge somewhere - working on a weekend night can be the difference between those who win and those who work for those who win.

Collecting things and following through on a task and getting a minimum viable product and getting your essential fatty acids and doing a little bit of everything to get a complete useful thing is important. Prevent yourself from overdoing one aspect, and then running out of money or steam before you can get any type of business done and signalling cleaning up your nest. Showing people that you have the ability to both organize and acquire things from the outside world and manipulate them into the way that you like is a reason that collecting things exist; it’s signalling to others that you can manipulate the world around you. And find things that other people can’t find and maintain them in addition to all the other defective parts.

Do what you’re supposed to.

There’s all kinds of ways that you can enhance the likelihood that you will actually do what you’re supposed to do.

Non-violent crime, patience

Some people are (and should be) enraged with every new violent crime that is listed in the news that is the result of some backwards, cancerous culture. Cancer culture is the worst kind. Tolerance is weakness disguised as virtue, similar to patience.

Now let’s say that properly and reasonably applied tolerance and patience is surely virtuous however it comes, not in name, but in application. If you are patient about breathing, you may surely die. If you are tolerant of ingesting poisons, you may surely also die, tolerance and patience have their place, and you must harshly have adjudicated where and when they may be employed, and when they need be banished.

Being creative is a lot like pull-ups, it’s quite easy to improve it, once you are doing it. It does take concentration and effort, and your body may be trying to tell you to stop, but perseverance is the key; being creative and productive is quite the same. Creativity is a muscle and the more often you use it, and try using it at different speeds and in different ways, the stronger that muscle gets.

Break the anti-lock brakes of life

Anti-locking brakes work by making sure your tires never get into sliding friction and they stay in starting friction. Because sliding friction is really low and starting friction is really high. Life has the brakes on you. Life is making sure that you don’t kick ass and slide forward through life and go really fast through life and get a lot of stuff done. By making everything just hard enough. That’s why you can’t break into the zone, break into the sliding friction. It just makes everything just hard enough. It’s just hard enough to get a phone number. It’s just hard enough to get a credit card. It’s just hard enough to get a storefront. It’s just hard enough to do these things. But if you’re able to break through the anti-lock brakes of life, if you’re able to break through the difficulties, then maybe you just slide right on through. That that’s the reason that it’s very easy to keep doing something that you’ve done for a couple weeks. It’s very, very hard to start out, that is the anti-lock braking system of life.

All right, it’s analogy time. You spend your time going out and getting drunk and using what you’ve got, doing sales instead of product development and research and development moving yourself up the attractiveness food chain. In an ideal world, the top 10% of guys get the top 10% of girls, and then on down the way, then you have variants for people that got lucky or are willing to work harder, hooked up with people with weird brain mutations. You’ve got this analogy between business, product development, pricing, framing, and brute cold-calling sales. Those things are kind of opposites, you have to choose, and you’re going to do one or the other.

That’s how it works; employees cost money, employees take time, you have finite time, you have finite money; you either choose to do one or the other. Step 2, just like a car, if you have a really big engine it’s going to output lots of torque and it’s going to be hard to use because it’s going to spin the tires and that’s going to have a lower RPM max because it’s heavier. Then, there comes along a smaller turbo engine that can outperform on the top end but not as much on the low end because of the leg right.

What if you turbo the giant motor? Well now you can do things that the little motor could never do. Because the little motor is already at the top of its game.

It’s like buying an M3 from BMW, can’t do anything to it before they had turbos when they’re naturally aspirated. It was already maxed out. You can maybe spend a couple thousand dollars and get a few horsepower. But if you get an M3 with a turbo now you know you change the software map in a chip and it just boosts more at more rpm ranges and now you’re just pumping out more power for nearly free.

In life there’s this choosing the shape of your torque curve and choosing the shape of your horsepower curve. Getting more area under the curve is better than getting a giant peak saying that’s how much power your motor puts out but only does it for a second, right before red line or it only does it for a second before it overheats. That same type of distribution of energy and getting more area under the curve kind of applies to other areas of human endeavour, such as being fit or being wealthy or being happy or finding love in your life. Some would say that they would rather have fewer absolutely amazing experiences than more mediocre experiences.

Power is energy over time. Like a solar sail, just a little bit of energy in the right place and environment, over a long time leads to massive velocity.

Calvin Coolidge

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Keep getting better

If you’re not perfect, keep getting better.

Disproving the stupid, asymmetric warfare

There are easy and hard things to do in this world. Multiplication is easy, division is hard. Just as it’s very easy to create new ideas that have no basis in reality. We call it fiction. It’s the most popular content on the planet. Fiction is easy to create. Sadly, as fiction is multiplication, disproving fiction is division. Division is how you undo multiplication, and truth finding is how you undo fiction, which unfortunately is a losing battle. For every 1 hour of fiction creation requires 10 or 100 hours of disproving. For this reason Scivive must speak as much as possible direct truth, rather than the truth dirtied by touching the ever-expanding fictions of the world.

It is unfortunate that great minds like Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, and nearly all other speakers including Tony Robbins seem to get to a level and just stay there, their talks don’t evolve. They say the same crap for years, it hasn’t evolved, and you can’t really enjoy watching it again once you can tell what they’re selling as well as they can. Why is there this stagnation? Why doesn’t the same interesting thought processes, focuses, and processing power lead them to a refinement and development of what is worth listening them speak about? Have they nothing more interesting to say? Perhaps that’s one of the advantages fiction has, you’re really not likely to be writing and selling the same book again and again over the years. You’re really expected to be novel and new.

If you take a guy like the waitbutwhy.com guy, he never has the same things to say, because he’s more focused on spreading newly discovered ideas and information he’s researched than he is saying yesterday’s interesting things over and over again.

Why do artists and directors start to lose greatness over time? Is it because they’re returned to the state they existed in before they were awesome, which was non awesome? Or is it a different form of failure, is it that they stop searching, stopped experimenting, and stopped paying homage to other great things. If you think you’re the smartest guy you know, or the smartest guy around, there’s no reason trying to learn from other people, right? Don’t make the same mistake these guys did resting on their laurels. Whatever you did that caused you to transition from being mediocre, to being good, you should probably keep doing that.

If you change your horse midstream, particularly to a worse horse that’s nothing like the original horse, you’re probably doing it wrong. What you’ll see in many great companies and artists, and even cars, is a gradual refinement and progression, more so that just giving up entirely on the old things, and just doing the new thing.

It could also be the case that whatever mistakes and missteps that truly great artists and companies need to watch out for, are nowhere similar to what you need to watch for. If you’ve never achieved greatness, you don’t need to worry about losing it. This is more of the opportunity cost of changing stuff. If you already type 100 wpm, and you change to another keyboard or system, you could lose 50 wpm. If you’re terrible at typing, and only do 20wpm, well, if you cut your performance in half, you only lose 10 wpm. Thus it costs more of the successful to experiment. It costs more for the wealthy when they make mistakes, if you look at this in flat dollar cost. An already great artist has lots to lose if he switches from the rare state of excellence into the experimental state that was similar to non-excellence whence he came.

If you’re not perfect, keep getting better.

Perfection is rare, thus progress should be common. If your model of the world hasn’t changed in 20 years, then you are not making progress. What’s more likely, that your model is perfect, or you’ve stopped caring?

There’s something Scivive will call the preparation-application ratio, and basically you will hear, and maybe miss-attribute it, that Abraham Lincoln said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’ll spend the first four sharpening my axe.” There’s many different useful variations of similar ideas, such as “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world” or “The early bird gets the worm.” What are these things? When preparation meets opportunity, that’s what luck is. There’s all these statements regarding the effectiveness of preparation. Good outcomes are not universally affected in the same way by good preparation. In some places preparation leads to amazingly great force multiplication, and in other places good preparation doesn’t make much of a difference.

Let’s say you’re planning to go to a weightlifting championship, and you’ve been training for six months, lifting weights constantly to get ready, and you miss your last work out. How much of an effect is that going to have on you? Probably not very much. You might even do better depending on whether you have been over-training or not. Now let’s say you’re going to sit down to eat dinner and you’ve got Sloppy Joe sitting in front of you but no bread, just pulled pork and you have to choose whether you’re going to just try to eat it with your hands or get up and get a fork. In this case the time spent getting a fork is going to pay off huge, just in the savings of having the not look like an animal when you’re eating and clean the your hands repeatedly, because it’s going to be really messy.

There’s places where preparation is very important and pays off really well and there’s places where preparation is really just application. Like sharpening your axe and using your axe have nothing in common. The preparation is like orthogonal. It’s like at right angles to its related but not the same thing. Sharpening your axe and like chopping a tree down with your axe, they don’t have anything in common.

However, in painting and in learning how to paint you’re just painting, right? You’re not cleaning your brushes. You’re just painting. There’re some things where preparation is identical to application and you’re just doing it for lots of time and then there’s other places where preparation has nothing to do with application. It seems to be that those places get much more bang for the buck.

For instance, if you had to practice opening lines if you like to go out into public and meet people, and you use openers to like meet new people, whatever your opener happens to be. You can sit at home and practice it against the wall. Or you could try it out in public it’s probably better to try the public option. Learning some new ones that you didn’t previously know, that’s different, right? Because you’re getting information from somewhere that’s not yourself and that would be more of like a sharpening an axe type of behaviour. Again, when opportunity meets preparation that’s luck. It’s unfortunate that we can’t just assign a flat percentage of time that you should assign to improvement, development and then this is the percentage of time that you could assign application. There are too many variables depending on the actions.

You can’t invent such a percentage, because of that wild difference between some preparations only are just doing the same of the thing and so that really the preparation is just more application. Then other things where the preparation isn’t application at all. Having a fork is so useful compared to just like trying to eat food with your hands if it’s a messy food. That’s another type of sideways preparation, having some type of sculpted metal tool has nothing in common with sticking food in your mouth with your hands and chewing it with your mouth.

The forms of preparation that have the most payoff in the least time are those where the preparation is most different from the application. Sharpening an axe is very useful, because it has no similarity to the actual application of the axe towards its target. It’s also only as useful as your axe was dull in the first place. Over-preparation in one area leads to under preparation in another.

Scivive likes the idea of not all years of experience having the same value. There’s a great comic: Do eighty one-year-old babies have eighty years of combined experience?

Amplified Activity / rest states (crash and burn for profit)

CPUs and many creatures have periods of activity and periods of rest, and the cyclical nature provides them with results and efficiency superior to a more constant lower volatility state. It’s why animals pounce. It’s why boxers cock their fists back before releasing them forward. And if it works at that level, it’s very likely that one level extra on top of it, by having stimulants push you harder, and then crashing to lower, is likely an effective way to compound what the normal activity / rest states are doing for you.

You can see other examples of this such as “work sprints.” HIIT training. Even chewing and eating works this way.

More at: Multitasking: The art of doing twice as much as you should, half as well as you could.HYPERLINK "https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/2tdhhe/multitasking_the_art_of_doing_twice_as_much_as/"”HYPERLINK "https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/2tdhhe/multitasking_the_art_of_doing_twice_as_much_as/" - Despair.com

Penn Jillette’s theory of doing what only you can do

Everyone can beat that video game, only you can as a son spend time with your parents.

Tasks

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management system that encourages people to work with the time they have, rather than against it. Using this method, you break your workday into 25-minute chunks separated by five-minute breaks. These intervals are referred to as pomodoros.

The way the Pomodoro system works is by forcing you to take a break, so you feel greedy about getting the most of what seems limited, and in that system you’re always limited! It’s using time limits to create scarcity and rarity, and your subconscious responds to that by wanting to do what it’s doing harder as long as you can because you’ll run out of time soon.

It’s a way to use scheduling to make the time you have to do work limited, and therefore increase your conscious and subconscious desire to do that thing that you know you need to do. It also reduces the perceived cost you have to start working on a thing because it makes the amount of time you can put into the thing more limited, which makes the thing seem like a smaller investment and therefore reduces starting friction.

This strategy of time gating is one of a few ways you can kick more ass on tasks. There’s others like the Dickens Process where you focus on what the real cost to your life will be if you continue to engage in disempowering behaviours, and you can amplify the negative feelings associated with doing the wrong stuff and the great feelings from doing the right stuff. The Dickens Process is a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) technique and a process of transformation popularised by Tony Robbin’s seminars and highlighted in Tim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans book. The Dickens Process is based on the character of Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ novella “A Christmas Carol.” Scrooge meets a ghost on Christmas Eve night, and is shown what his future will be if he doesn’t change his current bad behaviour and limiting beliefs. The knowledge frightens Scrooge so much that he decides to change his life.

A lack of balance is the definition of pain on the cellular level. If you want to unlock a door, you need the key to move the tumblers to allow the cylinder to turn, only the correct balance of height of each tumbler will allow to work, and you find that same kind of required balance solution to everything else in the world as well. For you to be able to classify the thing as a thing, for instance an open lock, it needed to be lined up the right way first.

If you didn’t have the lock balanced and able to unlock, you wouldn’t be able to classify it as an unlocked door. This is worthy of mention it because it exists with all matter, if there are too many atoms of one kind instead of another, you have a whole another material. For instance, if you change the ratio of hydrogen and oxygen, you would no longer produce water, and even amongst those atoms, if you move some electrons around, you no longer have the same atom any more. At some point, the value of seeing that everything contains balance is a little tautological because by definition if it wasn’t’ in balance, it would cease to be that thing, and it would instead be a different, unbalanced thing.

Maybe the world would be better off if we saw balance as a solution of sorts; it’s a pretty easy shortcut to see that you shouldn’t overdo some things. The more solution based, perhaps containing more input variables to measure whether a thing was “in balance” or not, may be technically more accurate, but at the cost of ever being useful in day to day life. You have to admit, many folk have neither the ability nor inclination to overthink things, nor often moderately think about things, so perhaps it is better that we keep the marketing up for balance instead of multi input solution based measurements.

There’s this balance between conserving energy and finding new awesome resources. And it’s not just new resources that are physical in the real world, but mental ones as well because there’s always a better way to understand the thing. There’s always a thing that can be learned, so to speak. And that progress led to tools, language, writing, city-states, and nation-states. When you are feeling guilty that you haven’t had the type of progress and production that you think is possible in your life, it definitely is possible. However, unless you’re some lucky mutant, you are going to need to bust your ass and use your brain, thoughts the right way and schedule the right things. Either have the world’s best discipline or be a lucky mutant or understand that it’s a fight and it’s a battle.

If you dedicate yourself in a direction so hard and immerse yourself so hard in a behaviour or an outcome, you begin to see the whole world through that lens. It affects what you think is important, it affects how you spend your time, 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 and addicted and single minded and purpose 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.

Tips for executing your vision in the real world.

If you want to help yourself get something creative done, or something hard done, you may benefit from having a partner or coach that you answer to, one that expects you to perform. It’s much easier to let yourself down than it is to let your friends/employees/coaches down. They will hold you to a tighter schedule. You will deprive yourself of sleep, which enhances the chance that you will go to sleep earlier that day, which increases the chance that you will wake up at the right time the next day so as to be effortlessly awake and able to put first the things that are most important to you.

Now you’re paying to have someone that you don’t want to let down. It’s harder to let him down than yourself.

If you don’t have someone to hold you to that higher standard than you would naturally have, you will sleep in, and you will then go to sleep later at night. You might find yourself on a 26 hour long cycle when the days are only 24 hours long, and unable to stay synced up with any of the other people that you should be using to help you be productive. You will be operating on the opposite schedule of other business you need to work with, and perhaps the stores you might be using to acquire food, services, etc.

This one is dangerous, many people make a commitment to do a thing, they tell all their friends about it publicly. Then they proceeded to do the much easier thing, which is to go back into doing the old behaviour they were trying to get out of, and just never mention it again in the hopes their friends forgot about it too. You may fail to do what you said you would so often that you just don’t even care to pretend to be reliable or truthful in your personal declarations in regards to what you will do, or when you will do it.

Thus if you commit to do things often, and don’t do them often, you have strengthened your loser muscle, and increased your loser momentum. It would have been better for you to have remained silent and been a loser in quiet instead of training negative and training to break commitments and be untrustworthy. The later added insult to injury basically.

Two statements appear to be true: “Stop starting new things, focus on finishing.” That one works if you already started on something.

The other one is, “stop focusing on finishing, focus on starting.” That one works if you haven’t started yet. They sound like opposites, but they’re both equally true at different times.

If you haven’t already started, do so. If you’ve already started however, finish.

The hard part of working out a gym is getting to the gym. Once you’re there, everything is easy, you just hit the weights autonomously. Getting there however is difficult; there are all kinds of good excuses to put it off until later. That’s because you think that you get to modify the behaviour, you think it’s ok if you don’t go, you export the real cost of not going. You see, when you don’t go a single time to the gym, you think that the entire cost of that not going is encapsulated in that single workout that you missed. Not everyone accurately accounts for the fact that with every single workout you miss, you are more and more likely to miss more workouts.

This isn’t a way to understand only gym attendance, this is a way to understand all of the behaviours you have in your life both good and bad. The longer you do a thing, the more muscle memory and subconscious- driven it becomes, the better you get at it, the more you enjoy doing it, and the less you feel like it’s something optional that you can displace with whatever else shows up. In this life, the things that we are most likely to get are the things that we MUST get. The things that are MUSTS’s go first, and everything else takes a back seat. In a world of limited time, limited resources, and limited willpower to do what you know you should is mandatory.

Scivive doesn’t know which of the awesome behaviours you could have in your life you’re currently trying to integrate, but is confident these tactics will help you make it happen.

When you’re good at the level you’re at, you move on to the next level, and you get whole new problems. If you ask a really handsome guy how to meet girls, he’ll tell you just smile. You ask an ugly guy the same question, he’s going to tell you every trick in the book. Same for business, guy who gets lucky, picks the right business, he gets to have a whole new problem about scaling and regulations and such. But the guy who doesn’t get lucky, picks a hard business that’s been around for a long time, boy he’s got to fight for every nickel.

Don’t take away the profitable inaccurate belief someone has unless you have the time and likelihood that you can give them a better one that sticks. If you only take and don’t give, nature abhors a vacuum, and they might replace the old pitfalls with new, worse pitfalls. Some people might replace cigarettes with cocaine instead of exercise.

Bet on your progress, for if you fail, you’ll lose money. Here’s the screwy part, the people that have enough money to try this one are the least likely to care about losing the money. Perhaps the wealthy care more about a loss of status than wealth.

Some good tactics should be stolen from the cancerous, casual gaming wallet-emptying strategies that casinos use. Maybe time gating can get people to write books, that’s what the Pomodoro method is right? What other tactics could work? Jingling sounds in the “casino acoustics” genre? They’ve found a way to addict humans to useless behaviours, let’s find ways to addict humans to useful ones!

You get what you focus on, so do others it seems, they sense your focus and may understand what you are trying to accomplish.

It’s funny how what you read during the day is what other people are working on and their opinions of what they’ve read. So the more popular and worked on a thing is, the more worked on and popular it will be in the short and medium term. Think of how many copies of the same movie you’ve seen come out at the same time; nearly the same movie, twin movies they’re called. (Armageddon and Deep Impact, for example)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_films

This is the kind of thing that happens in business and art and all things that involve humans’ attention as well. Someone gets a good idea, mentions it, now it’s another person’s good idea too. This is a reason that jealousy and competition are closely related concepts in that, you become aware of a strategy that works and gets a result you want, and now you want to compete and dominate by doing the same.

You could actually use this tactic against other countries to make them less effective by convincing the people of that country that certain members of their group were benefitting from an actually stupid behaviour, say winning at video games. Then this would addict other citizens of that country to want to compete in that thing. Perhaps gaming is too fun to make fun of. Think of the classic “pissing contest,” could there be a larger waste of time than to see who can piss farther? Now imagine that it’s not so obvious, or tripped enough interesting human triggers, and now it’s an addiction. How much of our disempowering addictions and habits are the result of entering our consciousness through someone else falling for the addiction, and so the virally bad behaviour has its “patient zero,” through which it infects the rest of us.

This happens internally in your own life without looking at anyone else at all. The things you are used to doing, you’ll want to continue doing, and the things that you’re not used to doing are more likely to be stopped. So the lesson is, if you starve the bad behaviours, you forget to do them, because you’re too busy doing the new ones that you’ve done long enough to stick. Thus, starve the bad behaviours for three weeks, and see them become weak. Engage the new behaviours for three weeks and see them become stronger.

This timing is probably dependent on the individual but they’re only matters of degree. This is the same reason it’s so important to be very serious about not having long breaks when you’re doing a new workout plan, or perhaps whatever else your new year’s resolution might have been. Those little missed instances of the new behaviour you are supposed to be doing are the virus of bad behaviour trying to get a foot hold, and each consecutive screw up is vastly more dangerous than the last. When you’ve missed probably four or five instances of a thing in a row, you just might never get around to it again. Maybe next year. This trend, combined with it being easier to keep doing a thing once you’ve started, where 80 per cent of the mental hardness of a thing is getting yourself to start, and 20 per cent is actually the doing of the thing, those two things are why no zero days works well as a strategy for performance. You don’t have to kick all the ass in the world, but you must have zero days in which you do nothing.

More at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NonZeroDay

https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated

You focus on what you don’t want only long enough to invert it, and find what you do want, so you can focus on that. Then, you actually don’t focus on what you do want either. You should only focus on what you do want long enough to calculate the stuff you need do to get it, and then you focus on that. Once you know what you need to do to get stuff, you don’t focus on those things anymore, you focus on your schedule, and hitting your short term goals. If you look at the things you want, you are not looking at what you need to do. If you are looking at what you don’t want, you are not looking at what you need to do.

Only action matters, and dreaming is only useful to action as long as you need it to create the plan. Once you have the plan, stop dreaming and start doing. Your goals and dreams are really only as useful as they point to correct actions you take. Your knowledge of correct actions are only as useful as you can actually act on them.

Focus on the results your decisions will get you

Time shifting can save you or drown you. If you’re going to optimize for the future, stay focused on it, and feel good. If you’re going to optimize for the present, stay focused on the present and feel good. If you make choices for the future, but only focus on the present, you’ll be unhappy, and vice versa.

We want cake now, and we want to be skinny in the future. We don’t want to do our homework now, but we want good grades. Because they are binary propositions, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, so to speak, you always can be unhappy. If you eat your cake now, you can mess your happiness up by thinking about fat future you. If you don’t have the cake, focusing on fit future you, you maybe mess up the present, regretting not eating the cake. If you want it, the unhappiness of not getting the other things on the menu, because you can only choose one, is always there to help make you unhappy. Obviously more choices should make you happier. Oddly enough, in the real world it doesn’t, and it’s actually scientifically proven to make you less happy.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. More choices leads to unhappiness, partly because you can’t feel good knowing you made the right choice, when there’s too many choices. This is also why most sales optimized websites offer you three price points to choose from, not because they have to, or because it even makes sense, but because you will feel better choosing one, and they will make more sales, and happier customers.

There’s this concept of heads I win tails you lose—which is similar to the Catch 22—which is similar to the damned if you do damned if you don’t. Scivive is going to add a new level of resolution on understanding to the concept. What will happen is, you’ll make a decision based on a feeling that you have. Let’s take cheating on a diet for example. You’ll say: “It is summer” or “I’ve had some drinks” or “It’s Friday” or “I’ve been doing good on my diet” or whatever excuse is. Then you’ll say: “You know what, I want to treat myself and I’m going to have something that tastes really good.” and that’s not the problem. The problem is, that you get some of the taste, and a lot of it you swallow so quickly that your poor little tongue doesn’t even get a chance to enjoy it.

You have to keep stuffing more in there to get the flavour. Sometimes you’re engaged in conversation or listening to music or listening thinking about the future thinking about the past. You’re halfway done with your dessert and you don’t even remember what it tastes like. Because you weren’t paying attention. If you were to die after that moment, that would be a good decision statistically. The chance that you die after that dessert is very low. Therefore you live, and live long enough to regret that decision. What does that regret look like? How is it similar to all the other regrets that you have for decisions that you made that were the right thing at the time, but wasn’t the best thing for your future self?

Food is one of them. A minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips. Let’s say you have a lot of money. You say, “You know what I have a lot of money and I don’t like spending it shipping. I don’t like spending on transporting things. I don’t particularly like shipping fees. If I buy something I might as well buy two of them to save on shipping.” Unless it’s food and it rapidly spoils. If something doesn’t rapidly spoil and doesn’t rapidly depreciate and you can save on shipping fees and save on the concept of adding to shopping cart and going through checkout process and finding it again. Then you might as well buy two.

It makes total complete sense when you do it. Then future you comes along. The future you is optimizing for a different set of outcomes. That person says “I want more space in my house and a better version of this thing.” Now future you wants to sell the thing.

This is one example you could use food. Where you’re fat and looking at your stomach, going: “how did we get here?” Compared to when you’re at lunch going: “You know I’m sick of dieting, I just want to enjoy some food for once.” The right decision for one moment and the short amount of time thereafter, is a wrong decision for another time and it is a real-life execution of the damned if you do, damned if you don’t based on time. The level of abstraction, the extra level of understanding that is sticking on top of this, that “damned if you do damned if you don’t,” appears to apply to a specific slice of time, which is nearby. Whereas the understanding that Scivive is trying to impart, is not that “you’re damned if you do damned if you don’t,” but that you’re not damned now, you are damned then. The reason for that is because your desire changes, your goals change.

Now this has been explained in other words and analysing why it is that, right before you’re about to go to sleep you dream of conquering the world and doing all of these wonderful things that you’ve never done before. Learning a new language and learning to dance and seeing the world and writing that novel you’ve always been meaning to write. Eating more healthily and going to gym all that bullshit seem so easy and so nearby and so motivating when you’re about to go to sleep. This is because you get all of the feelings of the benefits with none of the cost that you shortly have to actually do the tasks as soon as you wake up.

Then the beginning of the new day comes and you’re not about to go to sleep, you have an actual opportunity to do these things. The benefit seems just as real however, the cost seems so very much larger. Because you would have to put down the croissant, grab some salad or just enjoy the feeling of being hungry.

That time shifting in your own mind which is documented elsewhere in the book, because it has been studied, that time shifting in your mind screws you so that whatever decision you make that would be right in the short term, will screw you over with interest later. People have difficulty finding a good way to overcome because there isn’t a good way to overcome it. You either learn to time shift in your brain and try and cancel out the effects of this real-world time shifting, so you take the world time shifting of: “I’m going to not eat this delicious food now, so that I can have fitness later.”

You try and shift your mind to match the reality and the reality is, you’re going to try and shift those future benefits into the present. You’re going to try and feel those future benefits in the present. In neuro-linguistic programming they call it future pacing. That’s the best chance you have of feeling good while depriving yourself of something that would quite easily and quite readily bring you emotional joy.

Who doesn’t enjoy the feeling of filling up on delicious cake? The exception is people with mental illnesses like anorexia or people that have trained themselves to deliberate action over and over and over again to hunt something else, like fitness. They don’t have room for cake because they’re so busy ingesting kale or whatever other horrible tasting bland foods they have found a way to addict themselves to.

The important part of this summary is that you are (or will be) “damned if you do damned if you don’t.” Beware of the “Catch 22” of each action. Prepare for the “the screwing you get for the screwing you got.”

That other reference that they’ve studied involves some word like “satiation.” Whenever you make a decision to save money now, you hurt now but gain later.

By the way, the grass is always greener on the other side. The problem with the grass being greener on the other side is, it means that no matter what side you pick when you look at the other grass it appears greener. The funny part is that you could actually like have factual representation physically because your perspective of the grass changes for when you’re standing directly above it and for when you’re viewing it from the side. That also mirrors what would be expected in reality because these plants, the whole reason they have leaves, or foliage whatsoever, is to absorb light from the Sun. And, the Sun is always above them. Whereas you as a human are only above, in a similar position to the Sun, that grass which is directly below you.

The saying that the grass is always greener on the other side, it may not just be a colloquialism. It may actually have physical optical representation in the real world. This would be interesting to study. Why would a plant spend time, whatever optical properties a plant has from the side are very likely and predictably different from the optical properties it would have from above. Because it gets its energy from above eighty per cent more than it gets its food from the side.

Moral of the story: you’re going to make decisions that you regret no matter what. Because what you optimize for in the short term is not going to be the same thing in the long term. As you flip flop between the two, you can’t win. “I saved all this money to build a big business. But I can’t buy back those years of decreased quality of life by not spending that money earlier; and I’m with one girl therefore I’m not with another girl.” How do you win that one? Be with no girls? Be with all the girls?

Order of operations - Behaviours

If you were a hippy tree hugger before your Tony Robbins event, you will be a larger one after the event. If you were a money hungry business killing machine before, now you’re a bigger money hungry killing machine. Same applies to meditation and money, if you adopted meditation because you wanted to become more powerful in business, it’s likely your meditation will bring you there.

It’s funny, if you have a weekend, life’s good and on Monday you can function well; if you have a three-day weekend, even better, yay, more rest and relaxation. On day four though, you become a zombie and forget how to function as a human being. Schedules shaving, showering, these things all become optional. It’s an example of if you have a cheat day or slip a little bit, now you’re in rolling friction instead of starting friction, and it’s easier to keep slipping, just like locking up your brakes on a car or slipping on ice.

Diet immersion, slower loss = more risk at least.

If you go out with friends, they hold you to old lifestyle habits, and don’t count calories, and you eat more of the tasty food because it tastes good, and you try more items because you don’t go out that often. A single cheat day leads to more cheat days. The slower you lose your first kilogram of fat, the more likely you are to give up before you ever build the habit that makes continuing easy.

Don’t confuse personal excellence with “self-help.” Calling books on how to kick ass “self-help” is kind of stupid, because it’s quite often that the people that read these books are far beyond the needing of help than those that are smart enough to read this excellent and life changing material over all of the other options on the book shelves. Who came up with that dumb ass title? How is personal excellence in any way similar to “self-help”?

Do you even produce, bro?

Yeah, I’d better produce this book quick. Because when I have to start repeating content - because it’s been so long since I said it, that I don’t remember whether I said it or not. I’m going to have a lot of fucking duplicates.

This one is about tortured geniuses. Isn’t it interesting that some of the most productive and effective people in the world are tortured? Some would say that they are tortured and productive because that productivity relieves their pain just ever so slightly. Whereas these hippie bastards spend all their time “happy as could be,” they but don’t have to produce for happiness and thus they don’t produce, and thus they have worse health and countries without borders being taken over by their neighbours.

To tell you the truth that behaviour is kind of selected against. They’re going to be extinct unless the world becomes a much friendlier place.

Timing to do the most difficult thing first, so you can enjoy the rest of your day without it looming over your head, is called “eating the frog.” Yes, it’s really called that.

If you feed a positive habit long enough you don’t need discipline to do it any longer. It actually becomes harder to do the other thing that you used to do.

Reminding you to do something that you already know you should be doing, like a greatest hits list of tasks that you should be doing, is more important than adding a new novel thing to the long list of stuff that you don’t do.  

When you’re trying to change the way you think about things, you have two options: you can either immerse yourself or make thinking the right way so easy that it’s what you do. You wake up, you don’t care whether you feel like it or not, you do the thing that you’re supposed to do; it’s scheduled and you just do it. It doesn’t take will power because it’s engrained as a habit.

Don’t spend your time leeching human consciousness via games that produce nothing when you could be solving things that matter.

I was addicted to games for a decade or so. For at least two decades I almost had a crippling game addiction. If you are quite lucky to have achieved enough to get a lot of free time, you know, yeah, I spent years on those games. But I got nothing out except the ability to confess how horrible it was.

Moreover, there are teams of people who are very well paid and very intelligent; their only goal is to make you addicted. They are paid to abuse your own psychology, to damage your personality, to destroy themselves and the world we are living in. They may make money, but they have sold their souls, and they may not realize it until it is too late.

In a world of limited resources, when you assign too much energy to a particular task, the system works less well. If you spend all your time absorbing content and not creating any, well then, you’re not adding anything to the world. You’re just the world’s worst version of Google.

You should never spend your time checking things. If things need checking, let another human or some mechanism like ifthisthenthat.com, IFTTT. Then let it just trigger to tell you maybe you shouldn’t check defaults, subreddits or any Reddits whatsoever. Maybe you should customize the Reddits.

Sports are a means to an end. The end is love and significance. It’s important to not see them as ends. How important is our ability to put a rubber ball through a piece of metal / a basketball, soccer ball, football. How much time should we spend on this?

If we had to go to war, and we had to win, and we had a way to consume the enemies’ population with gaming, they surely would lose that war, perhaps even before their 10th achievement trophy.

How gross is it that teams and teams of people are sitting in rooms right now, scheming of ways to addict the youth to basically mental death? This might be exaggerating a bit, because games you participate in are way better than games you just watch. Participating beats the crap out of spectating. Sadly though, the same mental triggers that have served us so well throughout the years are stealing away from us our ability to reach the next level. The level where we don’t become permanently extinct.

If you spend your time figuring out how to brainwash kids to grind and grind out the same recycled garbage content, and sacrifice their life force and time to get another gem, or sword or gun, or trophy, the world should hate you, sincerely. Can you please take your manipulation skills and brainwashing skills and gamification skills, and go gamify the real world, so we can survive. Many people become addicted to these products, and often regret it later in life. Even the slave masters are slaves. How fun must it be to create ways to addict people to beat the same boss 10 times? These games steal your soul even while you sleep. Your dreams are consumed by the grind.

There was a pretty interesting interview with some suit working at Nestle, and the interviewer asked, “You guys focus on selling healthy foods, and you sell chocolate, is the chocolate healthy?” The guy responded in a pretty genius way. He said, “There are no unhealthy foods, only unhealthy diets.” That’s actually legit.

It’s probably true for games as well, some gameplay is probably great for the same reason it’s great in the wild. There’s just some things that cross the line, and when you aim for crushing addiction and hours stolen as your goal, you’re hurting the users. Go steal someone else’s life.

When you see a movie, it has an end. When you play an MMORPG, the content creators own your soul.

It’s not just MMORGs, its NASCAR, the NFL, you name it, they want your hours, and more importantly they want your money. South Park had a great episode on it, making money on the backs of the addicted. You should watch it.

Here’s the situation we’re in as human beings, one could focus on oneself and loved ones, and on survival, in which case one may need lots of people to get their act together. If we change our goals, and we stop caring about ourselves in the present, and begin to care only about those that come long after us, then we can shift our focus to becoming multi-planetary. Of course, the only way that pays off is when one of our planets gets destroyed, otherwise, the insurance policy never really paid for itself.

Some would much rather bet the whole farm on this one egg basket not blowing up, then they might get to survive without rolling the dice of deciding to move to Mars or not, and watching one of the other planets fail. Who are you kidding? It is more likely that you are going to die of some boring stuff, being complacent, a lifelong collection of should of and could of, culminating in a whimper, not a bang.

Or we could fight, and take our destiny into our hands. We need only unplug our bad habits from our hands and put them to good work on the world around us. Wash them first.

You rarely hear about great men being womanizers or great dancers as well, for greatness tends to require a fair amount of time to cultivate and outcompete your fellow woman, and so it’s very likely that if you want to be greater than other people on the thing, you’ll need to put in more focus and more time at the sacrifice of other things that they will have time for, because they haven’t made the same sacrifices. Luckily the world is so lazy compared to what’s possible that you don’t really have to make that many sacrifices in the grand scheme of things, because you can get quite a lot done in the time that everyone else is literally messing around and doing things they barely even enjoy.

Beware however that the other reason that you don’t see a lot of great men being great at more than a single thing is because it’s also just a function of your filter; even if the other thing that you ere selecting for wasn’t great at all, and it was just say, being six feet tall, or having green eyes, you’d still knock out a lot of candidates just with that rather non great selector.

Being a good womanizer is very time consuming. You will spend your days hunting, and scheming, and dating, and gaming, and “making love,” and in the end, you’re very likely to get the same results out of it that most other men have. They in general don’t become rich, nor powerful, for making women want to have sex with you one by one is more of a sales thing, and less of a product development thing.

Every time you go out and don’t pull (take a woman home or get her number), you have a real cost, and unless you have much better than average state management, you will be riding a difficult cycle. Scivive suggests only going out to pull if you can continue to do that long enough to get a win and ride it. If you have a win, and then go cancel it out by getting a loss and riding the loss, you’re likely to focus and feel the more recent event over the better farther away one. This applies to games, and love, and all other matters of, rage if you lose, joy if you win; we have emotional momentum as humans.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80 per cent of the results come from 20 per cent of the causes or effort. This means that the next 20 per cent of results will require 80 per cent of the effort.

Car detailers live far outside the Pareto 80 / 20 effectiveness principle. That’s why no matter where you go in your life you could stare at a thing and make it ever so incrementally better all day long and unless that scales to other people, if it’s only for you only for a single other person, you’re probably wasting your time.

Being a jack a jack of all trades is better than going deeper into a single skill, because going to deeper on a skill just gets you incremental returns. Whereas, it’s binary if you’re missing components to get your business complete, you’re not yet doing business. But if you can perform moderately at bit of all the components done, then you are in business. Then you can incrementally improve.

You can’t really improve what doesn’t exist. Therefore being a jack of all trades and entrepreneurship needs to come before deep diving into improvement. I think that’s the same reason that hoarding exists. You need all of the things more than you need more of a single thing. That’s like the concept behind essential multi-vitamins. You don’t need more, you need just that one.

If you are a complete neophyte at something, it costs you quite literally nothing to learn one better format over a different, perhaps more common, but worse format. For example QWERTY versus DVORAK typing. However, if you are extremely proficient at the QWERTY keyboard format, then you will incur a gigantic up front cost to switching, that the new person doesn’t. Thus Experts pay a much higher cost to change course than noobs. You could call this skill momentum.

Another reason endurance sports are tough is because not only do they take longer, they take longer to recover to from too, and then you’re really tired as well. You may feel really sore, so you not only lose the time it takes going and flopping about, you also lose the time going and driving to where these faraway places that you can flop about in for a very long time, and then recovering, and then being sore, and then going to sleep earlier.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, by knowing what the big stuff is.

One mistake people make is not noticing that they’re chasing a small percentage difference that doesn’t matter. Another common mistake is mistaking linear changes in a number for importance, when that change is a small percentage. What really is the difference between being able to type 115 and 119 words per minutes? And how many hours of testing and practice eat into whatever useful gain could be had? The time one may have spent overclocking and typing faster will never be recovered in actuality, one may forever be cash negative on the endeavors. It is an insurance policy that you can buy very expensively in your “free” time. That would pay in the event that for reasons outside your control something needed to be done very rapidly, and due to your low ROI, spending many hours making things faster, you could win back some of the time through the increased speed. It’s like being in a race, and trying to do some pushups real quick at the start so you could try and run faster. You would just be losing ground without much, if any, benefit.

The time for practice and warm up exercises is before the race. Bad analogy, the idea is, if you slow yourself down trying to go faster, it can actually be a net loss.

You might want to stick with the computer you have for as long as possible, and as far as typing goes, don’t be surprised if Google and their Al team has speech recognition entirely solved for English speakers in the not so distant future. In this way, technology advancement could make all your hours of typing practice completely wasted.

I used to own a car stereo store, we would make peoples cars as loud as possible, particularly in the bass area. Now when you are younger you don’t have quite the same empathy or knowledge of what other people are thinking about you, or how you may be affecting other people’s lives. Such was the case with the very loud vehicles I drove around.

Get this, amongst people that are into the car stereo scene, there’s actually something called a SPL contest, or dB drag racing. Basically you armour your car, turn it into a giant concrete box, and fill it with speakers that are only great at playing a single frequency (which is basically the opposite of music). Then you try to hit that tone, and usually break much of the speakers and car and amplifiers during the process. Also you most likely drove that car to the show on a trailer, because it was far too dangerous and unreliable and slow to drive of its own volition.

Equally as stupid as incentivizing the destruction of cars into science projects to make noise in very short bursts. I’d say drag racing and fast cars are just about as stupid. The death tolls are gigantic, and once again I’m guilty of playing into that stereotype of boy racer as well. I wonder if I’m executing any bad ideas disguised as good ideas right now. Come to think of it, if you look at all the things on the magazine stand in your local book store or supermarket, I think you will find that we humans have all kinds of inane and backwards hobbies.

How about the irrational hoarding of things? If you are artful enough with it, you don’t look like a generic “keep all things” hoarder, but to some degree you are fulfilling the same driving impetus. You could call it a sport to find all the stupid things you’re doing that don’t fit with what you’d say a fulfilling and rewarding life for you would look like.

It’s also funny how these things change massively with age. You don’t see a lot of young kids worry about politics, and you don’t see a lot of 40 year old people worrying about doing BMX tricks on their bicycle.

Some stupid things stay for the long haul, some go away, and some come anew. If you haven’t really thought about gardening too much, but could imagine that if there was some time of break in the normal food distribution systems, you would dearly wish that your roses were perhaps more edible and more the size of say, pumpkins. Not very many young people that are into gardening.

If you want to know how important transition time is, you basically have 16 hours left in a day after you have sleep; and that doesn’t include the transition from waking up, brushing your teeth, eating, talking to people, putting on clothes, taking off clothes, and driving to and from work. So basically if you want to know how important it is to cue out transition time out of your life, just assume that you had to spend all of your time in transition, so what if your time to and from work, walking or driving that’s all you ever did you slept (pulled over to the side of the road). That would be an unfulfilling life, you wouldn’t enjoy it, and so it’s very likely that cutting that out in its entirety would add great value to your life. Meanwhile many people still commute, on average, 45 minutes to 1 hour each way to their jobs. 

Life is made of time. If you spend 25% of your working hours of a day doing something which disappears the moment you go to sleep, it literally dies the moment you lay your head to bed. Man, you are recreating the same work over and over and over and over and over and over again, and it doesn’t stack, it doesn’t build, it doesn’t scale. You wouldn’t even need to do it if everyone else would be willing to lower the arms race.

It’s way easier to do some squats in your living room than it is to get dressed, then go to the gym, then do squats there, then shower, then return home, and now you are back where you could have been with 1 hour less spent. Actually an hour or more, why waste the hour of your life? Are you actually hitting on people at the gym? If you’re not, why would you go there? Perhaps you like sports, and that takes more people. In that case, or in any case where the hour spent commuting and such provides any real additional benefit to you, then it could be cool. Sadly, it’s hard to have a squash court in your building.

How much time have you wasted in the past 10 to 12 years of your life, doing things that you can’t even remember doing now? Some of those years may have been wasted during what is supposed to be the best years of your life, which maximizes the penalty. That’s why it’s so important that you do things that checkpoint in your mind, you must do things that have lasting value and impact, if not for the world, at least yourself, because one day you’ll wake up and ask yourself, “where did my life go?” Dickens process.

That’s a time frame issue, it’s very likely that everything we do is likely to fail. It is very likely that you are going to meet the same fate as everyone that came before you, therefore you must play the odds. Are you on a calorie restricted diet starving yourself? Not if you love food. Is that going to make you die earlier? Yes, very likely.

How can you do that? Well you’re playing the odds that this live forever idea doesn’t work out anyway, and so you’ve got to get the quality while you are here, so you maybe walk a fine line between enjoyment and savings. You walk a fine line between spending and savings, between working out and taking a break, and maybe having a drink. And if you don’t work that fine line and you don’t perform that balance you’re very likely to end up in pain, because a lack of balance is the definition of pain.