Fill your life with adventures and positive experiences.
For most of us, 2020 was a complete shit-show. Plans were cancelled. We weren’t allowed to participate in our favourite activities. And we couldn’t meet and hug our best friends and family.
The situation was made worse by taking us by surprise. At the start of 2020, very few had prepared for a pandemic, even though there had been warnings. We had no plan, and rather than adapting to the new situation, we struggled to find meaningful things to fill our lives with.
It is a common approach to just let life happen. When things are going well, we feel good. …
Skill development expert profile — John Wooden
John Wooden was one of the greatest coaches of all-time. He was a great basketball coach, but perhaps even better at teaching his players how to succeed in life.
He is most known as the head coach for the University of California at Los Angeles(UCLA), where he won 11 national titles (including 10 in 12 years). At one point, his team won 88 games in a row. He became the first person to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame both as a player and coach and ESPN named him coach of the century.
What made him so successful at bringing out the best of his players? The following seven factors helped him become the most admired coach in the history of college basketball. …
Gamify your life to make every task easier.
When I was younger, I used to play a lot of video games. But as I was getting older and life became busier, I stopped playing. I didn’t find time to play anymore.
But recently, I started playing again. After finishing work, I started playing for an hour every day. This made me remember how much I liked it, and now I was motivated to get to the end of the day. I even started finishing my work faster, as I was motivated to get to play.
This got me wondering. What exactly makes computer games so compelling? What if I could design my life so that I would be equally motivated to finish every other task in my life? …
The Dunning-Kruger effect explained.
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight and robbed them. He didn’t try to disguise himself and even smiled at the cameras. Later that night, he was arrested, as he had been recognised and identified on the security tapes.
When the police showed him the tapes, he was shocked. ‘But I wore the juice,’ he said. Mr Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing his face with lemon juice would make it invisible on video recordings. …
#2 An adaptive mindset
Developing skills is essential to growing as a person. It keeps your mind sharp, and staying engaged in mentally challenging tasks can lead to better memory and cognitive functioning.
When choosing what skills to learn, it is beneficial to go for something that engages and challenges you at the same time. Whether that’s playing the piano, learning to dance or improving your chess, they are all beneficial for your overall health.
It is especially useful to improve meta-skills, which help you learn any skill faster. …
Skill development expert profile — Nelson Mandela
While trying to end Apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to jail for the rest of his life. In prison, the conditions were gruelling, and the prisoners were often set to do meaningless tasks such as digging deep holes only to fill them in at the end of the day. The guards tried to break them down and make them give up on their fight.
Mandela stayed in prison for 27 years. But rather than being resentful when he came out, he forgave everyone. Revenge is not the solution, according to Mandela. Forgiveness is the only way forward.
No bitterness
‘As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.’ …
What’s the final message you want to share with the world?
Our lives are filled with noise. The internet is overflowing with too much information. This makes it difficult to find those bits that are truly valuable, and we often end up reading things we’ve heard over and over, only with the words ordered in a slightly different way.
As writers, we are all guilty of creating this noise. We are under constant pressure to create more content that our readers can consume. But how much care do you show for those readers? What value does it have for them to reread an argument they’ve heard a million times? …
More effort is the fastest way to achieve better results.
We are always looking for shortcuts and easier ways to do things. We want to achieve more by doing less. People love to hear about hacks and tricks to get great results without much effort. Unfortunately, a lot of this advice is rubbish. Anyone who ever achieved outstanding performance, has put in a ton of effort.
For those of you who are waiting for the lift to success, I have news; it will not arrive. Although the stairs next to the lift may look long and scary, they are the only and the fastest way to the top. …
A new way of living requires a new way of doing things.
After close to a year in home-office, we could all have become productivity masters by now. What a great opportunity to finally focus on those projects that we never used to have time for. Starting a business, a blog, or finally learning that skill.
But working from home has its dangers. All those temptations that are easily avoided at the office are so much more accessible. Netflix, YouTube, the fridge, your bed and the arch-enemy of productivity, your phone.
Despite having more time available, we end up getting less done. …
Learn to play like the star of The Queen’s Gambit.
Since its debut on Netflix, ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ has taken audiences around the world by storm. It quickly became a record-breaking show and was watched by 62 million households in the first month.
We follow the young Beth Harmon, a chess prodigy, on her way to stardom. The story about an orphan turned global chess champion has led to a huge boom in people playing the game, especially women. She has motivated the world to learn chess, but how can you learn to play like Beth Harmon?
I don’t insinuate that most, or any of us can ever reach the level of Harmon. But she can still teach us some valuable lessons about how to improve as chess players. These are the most insightful lessons I got from watching Beth Harmon learn to play chess. …
