I recently read two things that gave me the idea for this post. The first one is a summary of Disrupt Yourself by Whitney L. Johnson. The second one is the autobiography of Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s. Both of them taught me an important lesson:

To move to the next level in life, you may need to disrupt yourself.

The concept of disruption was popularized in the business world by a book titled The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. It tells the stories of how big companies failed because of disruptions in their businesses. They couldn’t see a new wave coming. Or they saw it, but they hesitated to change because that would mean sacrificing their cash cow. As a result, many of them went out of business.

Disrupt Yourself applied this concept to an individual’s career. In essence, it says that you need to disrupt yourself every now and then to adapt to new situations. You can’t just stay the same. You can’t just stay in your comfort zone. You need to change in order to thrive.

The story of Ray Kroc shows this principle in action. He was a person who was willing to disrupt himself. He knew that things would change and therefore he would have to change as well. Consequently, he was always alert to new waves.

There were multiple disruptions throughout his career, but the most famous one is his decision to build McDonald’s. At that time, he already had a comfortable job selling milk-shake mixing machines. But he saw that the demand for the machines would drop in a few years, so he opened his eyes for a new opportunity before it’s too late.

The opportunity came when he heard good reports about a restaurant operated by McDonald brothers. The reports made him curious, so he flew out to check it out himself. Impressed by what he saw, he then negotiated with the brothers to expand their restaurant to new places.

It was a disruption in his life. In his own words, he had to “slave away” to build McDonald’s. He had to leave his comfort zone behind and faced a lot of resistance. But he did it. The result is McDonald’s that we know today.

It’s easier said than done, but we need to learn to disrupt ourselves. We need to learn to change the way we do things. That’s how you can enter a new season in your life and move up to the next level. You can’t expect something new if you just do what you have always been doing.

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It’s great to feel energized throughout the day. You will work with focus and enthusiasm. You will get more done in less time. You will also feel happy about your day. It’s a great state of being.

Now, I want to admit that I don’t always feel energized. There are days when I feel the opposite. But I’m glad that there are more good days than bad ones, and along the way I learned some lessons on how to feel energized.

Without further ado, here are six things you should do to feel energized throughout the day.

1. Get enough sleep.

Whenever I lack energy during the day, it’s usually because I lack sleep. Lacking sleep makes me feel miserable. I can’t do things with focus and enthusiasm. I might even have to drag myself through the day. Having enough sleep, on the other hand, makes me feel recharged and refreshed.

So make it a priority to have enough sleep every day. For most people, that means having around seven hours of sleep at night.

2. Exercise in the morning.

Exercising in the morning is a great way to boost your energy level. Even a 15-minute exercise is enough to increase your energy level. If you have never done that, try it. I’m sure you will feel the difference.

3. Have a purpose.

Having a clear purpose in life will energize you. Why? Because then you know your why. You know the reasons why you do things. That will give you both meaning and direction.

It’s similar to playing soccer. If there is no goal in the game, if you just kick the ball around, it won’t be fun. It will get boring fast. Soccer is fun because there is a clear purpose in the game. Similarly, having a purpose in your life will make it exciting.

Further reading:

• A Guide to Finding Your Life Purpose

4. Start with clarity.

Having a purpose is great, but you could get distracted when life gets busy. That’s why it’s important that you start your day with clarity. How? By providing time to recalibrate your life and realign it with your priorities.

In my case, I have a quiet time every morning. That’s when I get clarity about the day ahead. It helps me see things in the right perspective and reminds me of my priorities.

Further reading:

• The Best Way to Save Your Time
• The Three Key Elements of a Good Morning Routine

5. Eliminate distractions.

Distractions leak your energy. The more distractions you have, the more energy you leak.

So eliminate distractions. Turn off notifications on your phone. Close the email and news tabs on your browser. Use a white-noise app if necessary.

6. Take a nap.

I understand that it might not be possible for you to take a nap, but if it’s possible, you should try it. Many people throughout history attest to the benefits of napping.

Winston Churchill, for instance, took a nap regularly during World War II. It helped him feel refreshed to make difficult decisions that affected the fate of millions.

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I have found the above tips useful, and I hope that’s the case with you too. If you have other tips on feeling energized, feel free to share them in the comments.

Recommended Book Summaries

• The Power of Full Engagement
• 30 Ways to Reboot Your Body
• The Sleep Revolution

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How do you feel about failure? If you are like most people, failure makes you uncomfortable. It’s something you want to stay away from. The fact is: fear of failure is a common type of fear that many people have.

I wish I could say that I’m immune to it, but I’m not. Looking back, I can see that I was afraid of failing. I have made progress, but I’m still working on it now.

What should we do then? How can we overcome our fear of failure?

From what I have learned, the first step to overcoming fear of failure is having the right perspective toward failure. Instead of seeing it as something negative, you should see it as something positive.

Here are some positive views about failures:

1. Failure is the price of trying something new.

Einstein once said: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

Like it or not, doing something new involves risks, including the risk of failing. After all, it’s new; you aren’t familiar with it. So it’s likely that you will make some mistakes.

The only way not to fail is to stay where you are and not grow. If you want to grow, however, you must be willing to pay the price of failure.

2. Failure gives you wisdom.

Failure can teach you lessons in a way that others can’t. The fact that you have put your resources into something and get undesired results will leave an impression on you. You will grasp the lesson at a much deeper level than just reading books, for instance.

William Saroyan once said: “Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.”

3. Failure tests your enthusiasm.

Failure is inevitable on the way to success. That’s why the important thing is how you respond to it. This includes whether or not you can maintain your enthusiasm. Can you still be enthusiastic even after you fail? Can you still be optimistic? I know this is easier said than done, but this is something we should all learn to do.

Winston Churchill put it this way: “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

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After having the right perspective toward failure, what should we do? Thomas J. Watson gave us this advice:

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.

This advice might seem extreme, but I think it’s good advice. It means that you should be willing to have more failures. Or, put another way, you should make more attempts that could lead to failures. Why? Because this means that you are pushing boundaries. You are accelerating your progress. You don’t just stay where you are.

Of course, we are talking about intelligent failures here; just repeating the same mistakes over and over is stupidity.

The story of Stephen King is a good example.

King had wanted to become a writer from a young age. So he wrote short stories and sent them to magazines. But what happened? He got rejected. Again and again. He didn’t stop though. He read the rejection letters, learned from them, and kept writing.

Long story short, he eventually made it in the writing world. And he made it big time.

King’s story is an inspiration to me. He was willing to have failures, and have them often. He learned from them and kept getting better.

So here is what you should do: consider failures as positive and make more attempts. That’s the way you can grow and get better. As George Bernard Shaw once said: A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Recommended Book Summaries

• Rising Strong
• The Up Side of Down
• Fail Fast, Fail Often

http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/2016/11/10/overcoming-fear-of-failure/

We can’t deny the fact that we need money. We need money to pay our bills. We also need it to advance in our lives (e.g. for education). But what is the right way to treat money? How can we live a meaningful life without money worries?

I believe this quote by Jonathan Swift gives us a good answer:

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

I like this quote. In my opinion, it captures the essence of how our attitude toward money should be. Money should be in your head, but not in your heart.

What does it mean?

First, it means that you should think about money and treat it in a rational way. You should think about how to make money. More importantly, however, you should think about how to manage it. There are many people who make a lot of money but live in a financial mess because they can’t manage it.

Second, it means that money shouldn’t be your main motivation. It shouldn’t be the main thing that drives your decisions. If it does, you might be wealthy on the outside, but feel empty on the inside. There is only one way to live a meaningful life: by contributing to a cause that you care about.

Here are four tips to help you apply the principle:

1. Find your cause.

What dissatisfaction do you have about the world that you can do something about? What is the place where you want to and can make a difference?

In my case, it bothers me to see people (including myself) live below their full potential. That’s my cause in starting this blog. I want to help people reach their full potential. This gives me a sense of purpose.

You can apply this to your work. Ask yourself: what can I contribute? How can I make a difference?

2. Make your cause your motivation.

After finding your cause, make it your motivation. Make it your main reason for doing things. I can assure you: this will make you excited because you have a sense of purpose.

3. Educate yourself in personal finance.

When it comes to dealing with money, the first thing you should do is educate yourself. A good resource for this is Investopedia. Read the articles there and you will have a good foundation.

4. Build a system for your personal finance.

Based on what you learn in personal finance, you should then build a system to manage your money. The system will help you manage your money in a rational way.

Your system should include tracking your expenses. This is important to help you make rational decisions. Do you know how much money you spent last month? And do you know exactly what you spent it on? Start tracking your expenses if you haven’t.

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You should put money in your head, but not in your heart. By applying the tips above, you will get the best of both worlds: you will live a meaningful life without money worries.

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I’m a curious person with a wide range of interests. I’m interested in computer programming, writing, personal development, and business. I’m also interested in a few other fields that I haven’t mentioned.

A question that often arises in my mind is this: how should I manage these different interests?

I recently found an answer by reading a summary of The Da Vinci Curse. The goal of the book is to help those who have many interests but can’t determine which ones to focus on. It includes a framework to help them manage their interests and the corresponding opportunities.

The framework—called the BCG matrix—was originally created by Boston Consulting Group to help companies allocate their resources, but the book adapted it to individuals as well.

The framework classifies your activities into four groups based on their financial and fulfillment potential:

• Dogs: activities that can give you neither wealth nor fulfillment.
• Cows: activities that can give you wealth but not fulfillment.
• Question Marks: activities that can give you fulfillment but not wealth.
• Stars: activities that can give you both wealth and fulfillment.

Let’s take a look at what you should do with each of them. Here are the recommended actions:

• Eliminate Dogs. Activities in this category are the worst ones because they give you nothing. So obviously you must eliminate them.
• Prioritize Stars. Activities in this category are the best ones because they give you both wealth and fulfillment. So you should invest most of your resources here.
• Eliminate Cows. This might be surprising, but the book recommends you to eliminate them. They may give you money, but if they are not fulfilling, then they aren’t worth spending your time on.
  I know this is not easy to do, especially if you need the money from these activities. My recommendation is to not eliminate them right away. Instead, I recommend you to first build a side project out of your Star activities. Then, when the side project becomes mature, you can eliminate the Cows.
• Nurture Question Marks. This recommendation is also a bit surprising to me. It means that you shouldn’t neglect certain interests just because they aren’t profitable. Instead, you should still develop them while looking for ways to make them profitable.

I like this framework. In my opinion, it’s a good framework for maximizing your happiness at work. If your goal is just maximizing your income, however, it’s not optimal since it recommends that Cows should be eliminated.

The BCG Matrix framework helps me classify my interests. Since I’m already interested in these things, there are only two possible categories for them: Question Marks or Stars.

I’m lucky because I have two Stars: blogging and app development. I started this blog as a side project because I’m passionate about it, but it has also allowed me to quit my day job. I also love developing apps, and it has given me some income as well.

What’s eye opening for me is the book’s suggestion on Question Marks. Don’t eliminate them. Instead, keep working on them while looking for ways to make them profitable.

This suggestion makes me think again about game development. Game development is something I’m passionate about that I have put on the shelf because it’s not profitable. I loved making games in my high school and college years. And—after not making games for years—I built and released an iPhone game in 2014. It wasn’t profitable though, so I no longer make games.

I’m now thinking about it again. Maybe I should do game development just for fun while looking for ways to make it profitable.

What about you? Have you found your Stars? What about your Question Marks? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

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Many people want to live a successful life. Not many, however, are willing to pay the price.

I have read the stories of many great people, and they all share common characteristics. In particular, there is one principle that I believe they all follow, whether they realize it or not. The principle is this:

Choose the hard way

Yes, choose the hard way. When given the choice between the easy way and the hard way, great people consistently choose the hard way.

A good example is Colonel Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He once had a successful restaurant. Life was good for him. But one day the government moved the highway junction in front of his restaurant to another site. As a result, the traffic to his restaurant plummeted. It went so bad that he eventually had to sell his restaurant. Worse, he was already 66 years old at that time.

The easy way for him was to just blame the situation and do nothing. The hard way was to go selling his fried chicken door-to-door, even if that means sleeping in his car.

He chose the hard way. He kept knocking on doors despite many rejections. He endured having to sleep in his car. He paid the price and eventually built Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Another example is Theodore Roosevelt. In fact, there are so many examples in his life that it’s difficult for me to choose. But I’ll choose this one: his bravery in the Spanish-American War.

In 1898, the Spanish-American War broke out. Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy at that time. That means he didn’t need to go to the front line; he could just sit behind his desk and do his duties. But he felt compelled to go to the front line. So he did; he led the Rough Riders into battles and almost got killed for that.

One more example is the story of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They saw the magazine cover of Altair microcomputer in 1975. Microcomputer was new at that time. The easy way was to just read the magazine and talk about it. But they chose the hard way: they worked day and night for three months to create a programming language for Altair. That product launched Microsoft.

Everywhere I look, I see that successful people live by this principle. They choose the hard way. They pay the price for success.

Michelangelo put it well: “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

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Do you want to become more productive? There are many methods and tools you can use for that. Some of them, however, are pretty complicated and take time to apply.

But what if you want to become more productive today, not tomorrow or next week? Then you need something that’s simple and practical – something that you can apply right away.

Here are nine practical ways to become more productive today.

1. Exercise

Here is a fact: your productivity depends more on your energy management than time management.

Time management gets a lot of attention, but energy management is actually more important. Why? Because if your energy level is high, then you can get many things done in a small amount of time.

Have you ever felt like you don’t make enough progress despite spending significant time on a task? A likely reason for that is a low energy level, which makes it difficult for you to focus.

A good way to increase your energy level is to exercise in the morning. Even a 15-minute exercise will do. I didn’t have this habit years ago, so I can attest to the difference it makes. It gives me the energy to go through the day with focus and enthusiasm.

2. Prioritize

You might want to accomplish a lot in your day, but the fact is that your resources are limited. So you need to prioritize. You need to choose the few things that can make the most difference.

Ask yourself: what are the few things that – if I accomplish them – will make me feel productive today? Do them, and then delegate or eliminate the rest.

As Rick Warren once said, “You should say to no to good opportunities so that you can say yes to the great ones.”

3. Allocate an Uninterrupted Block of Time

One important factor for productivity is flow, a state where you get absorbed in the task at hand and lose your sense of time. But flow can only happen if you have a large amount of uninterrupted time.

So make sure that you have such a time. Allocate uninterrupted blocks of time for serious work.

4. Turn Off Notifications

To prevent yourself from getting interrupted, turn off notifications before your work sessions. This includes phone notifications, email notifications, etc.

In my case, I turn off all notifications from instant messaging apps. I check them only when I’m not working. This helps me focus on my tasks.

5. Use a Timer

This might not work for everyone, but my favorite way to help myself focus is using a timer.

The rule is this: when the timer runs, I must work on the task at hand. I may not do other things. Whenever I switch to something else (such as checking emails), I must stop the timer first. This requirement makes me aware of the distraction, and I can usually get back to the task quickly.

An added benefit is that I can measure my productivity. I can see how much productive time I have in a day by looking at the timer.

6. Use a White Noise App

If you are in an environment that has distracting sounds, it’s helpful to use a white noise app. It blocks out the noise in your environment. It has ambient sounds that can help you focus, such as the sounds of rain or sea.

Using such an app can also give you the feeling of being in a new environment. You can feel like you’re in a jungle, boat, or some other place. This can help you feel fresh.

7. Use a Checklist

For routine tasks that you do again and again, it’s a good idea to use a checklist.

Using a checklist has many benefits. For instance, you don’t need to remember all the steps to finish a task so your mind is free for creative thinking.

8. Do the Next Simple Thing

One thing that can prevent you from being productive is feeling overwhelmed. If that happens to you, you might become paralyzed and end up taking no action at all.

To avoid that, you should focus on the next simple thing. Ask yourself: what is the next simple thing I can do to move this project forward? Do it and then ask the question again. With this habit of persistent starting, you will eventually finish the big project.

Remember, the way to eat an elephant is to eat it one bite at a time.

9. Write Down Your Ideas

You may have a lot of ideas during the day. But if you don’t write them down, you might lose them forever. That’s why it’s important that you write down your ideas. Writing down your ideas can help you become more productive.

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These tips are simple, but they can increase your productivity. Choose the ones that work for you and apply them. I’m sure you will be happy with the results.

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