Till perfection

Sunday evening at my apartment. The air was thick after a sunny Juli day. I sat on my balcony totally engrossed by a book I was reading. At the time I’d forgot all about my plans of having a nice evening jog before watching the football World Cup final between Netherlands and Spain.

Suddenly I realized, that the time was 20:12 – 18 minutes to kickoff! Now, most sane people would probably have ditched or postponed the running plans, and instead getting ready for the match. After thinking about the problem for a few seconds, I found that I would not allow myself to do that. I planned a jog before watching the match, and that was what I was going to do.

This turned out to be one of my best runs in quite a while. I really wanted to get back in time for the kickoff, so I pressed myself harder than I’ve done for a long time. In just 20 minutes I managed to change clothes, lock up the apartment, and run 3,5 kms. At 20:32 (two minutes into the final) I was back at my couch planting my warm feet into an ice cold bowl of water, greeted by the world’s largest vuvuzela-orchestra as I turned on the TV to watch the match.

That day I coincidentally experienced first hand, how setting personal stakes pushes you to perform better. The reason I feel like mentioning this, is that to many people it sounds counter intuitive to intentionally setup personal risks. But the value of increasing your performance significantly, is most often worth putting on the extra risk.

I am often asked what kinds of education I would recommend for young hopeful people who want to learn the art of building a successful web business. Unfortunately, I cannot come up with a good answer to that question. What I can do though, is sharing one of the key reasons for why I am where I am today.

I love to read and learn. Feeling better than yesterday is an incredibly satisfying feeling for me. However, there are some periods where my reading gets into slow motion. Days can go by, and suddenly I realize I haven’t touched my current book for a week. Sound familiar? I’d like to share a simple yet powerful idea on how to avoid this from happening.

For my 23rd birthday a couple of weeks ago I got a little painting from my mother. It depicted a smiling doodle boy with the text “if you can dream it, you can do it”. Most people tend to see phrases like that as a silly cliche or saying. If you are one of them, please read on!

In this post I will go through some of the bad characteristics of the typical programmer stereotype. By being aware of our weaknesses, we stand a better chance of reducing them. If you are not a programmer, I encourage to read on anyway. The basic principles apply to most professions.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Holy hour and planning defragmentation. Taking time to plan your week is a great idea, but for this to work it is important to have clearly defined goals. Without a goal, how can you in which direction to go?

Most of us don’t like planning our daily lives too much. Maybe this is because planning itself does not yield any immediate gratification. Doing something that gives something back right now, often feels like a better use of our time.

What we really should understand, is the immense value of quality planning. If we understand and truly believe the value of a well planned day, week, etc., we will dedicate more time to planning. To achieve this belief we must continuously experience the positives of great planning. My way to do this, is to have a weekly holy hour.

Given the crazy amount of time people spend in front of the stream of randomness (that’s the TV) during say a year, you sure owe yourself to spend some time with some alternatives! The more you feed yourself with random information, the more a random life you will get! There are great alternatives – people have gotten this weird idea that they somehow need to watch TV – you don’t!

Most of us have wild passionate dreams inside. Maybe you want to start you own business, or maybe you want to become a movie star, or maybe you want to be better at dating. Most of these goals require one common ingredient: taking risks.