Always Protect the Downside

What’s a big goal or dream that you have? Do you want to start a business? Become a full-time author? Travel the world? Become financially independent? Change careers?

I bet you’ve thought about it, and at some point thought, “I’m not sure I can achieve that.”

If you’re anything like me, you always think about the risks that are involved with making a big move in life. And that’s not a surprise. We’re collectively risk-averse. We truly hate risk. I’ve never met someone who said, “I love to lose everything!”

But what can we do about our risk aversion? If you think about it, most of us are put off by fear. You think of doing something, consider the risks, and decide not to do it. Here are some examples.

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10 Lessons I Learned From Making Mistakes In My 20s

one step at a time

One of the biggest mistakes we make is that we assume we always learn from our mistakes. I’ve met enough people who learned little from their own stupidity.

We all know these people. In fact, we probably are these people. You know why? It’s damned hard to learn from your mistakes. I’ve never met someone who actually enjoyed failing.

Let’s be honest, no one likes to make mistakes, and lose their time, energy, or money. So that’s why we need to make an effort to learn from the things that we wish we didn’t do. The father of functional philosophy and pragmatist philosophy, John Dewey, made that point obvious:

“The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”

Learning from your mistakes does not happen automatically—it requires thinking and reflection. So here’s my reflection on the lessons I learned from the mistakes I made in my twenties. Here we go.

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Tuning Out The Noise: How To Get Clarity In Life

signal and noise

Do you ever feel like you’re completely lost in a world that keeps on racing? The world moves fast. One moment you’re excited about a new opportunity, and the other moment you feel totally hopeless for no particular reason.

And if that’s not bad enough, there’s so much noise in the world that we lose sight of what we’re doing. It’s not uncommon to think, “Wait, what was I supposed to do on this planet?”

Look, we all get distracted. The world’s a weird place. And people ask me about how we can get clarity all the time. One reader recently sent me this email:

“Love to hear you talk about how to get clarity and minimize distractions and noise around us. What techniques do you employ to find that focus?”

It’s a good question that got me thinking. And if I look at how I get clarity in my life, there’s only one technique I use.

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This Strategy Makes Procrastination Impossible

do it every day

How often have you started a new habit that you already quit after several days? If you’re like me in the past, the answer is something like, “all the time.” I had no strategy in place to beat procrastination.

Forming a new habit is hard. I don’t have to tell you that. We all know how difficult it is to live a prosperous and healthy life. If it were easy, everybody would do it.

We also know that our chance of succeeding is much higher if we start small, right? It’s common sense. “Don’t take on too much in the beginning — you’ll have more reasons to give up.” So goes the advice, which is solid. I’m not going to argue with that.

But far too few people actually start small. In fact, I see more people starting big than starting small.

Why is that? I think we can get too excited about making a change or doing new things. When we dream about making a change in our lives and start believing in it, the excitement usually takes over.

That’s why we end up doing too much too soon.

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