• Exercise: Describe yourself honestly.  Great, now go through the list, and begin working on the ones you want to, one by one.  Beware, there is no simple answer to anything–you must make a judgment call based on the context.
  • Bad traits to have: unorganized, unfocused, uncommitted, inconsistent.
• Mindset and Logic
  • Excuses only have power if you give it to them. It is a defeatist mentality, and a denial of the reality that you can do something about it. Find out what you can do about it and do it.  Something you can’t do anything about isn’t an excuse, it’s an obstacle to overcome.
  • Blame: I used to place blame on external forces outside of my control, since if I didn’t play a part in causing them, what responsibility do I have over it?  However, I have since learned that it is to my advantage to learn how to predict, respond to and manage external forces.  Furthermore, I have learned that some external forces, I can actually make them go away by ignoring or denying their influence because for some, it’s my choice to let them in.  Figuring out which you can do that for, takes life experience.  Try saying no, and if the external factor forces its way back in, then you know you can’t ignore it.
  • If you always make an exception, then it’s no longer an exception but a habit.
  • “First thing tomorrow” never works unless you are actually someone who is productive in the morning.  Do it now, or schedule it for when you personally are most productive–afternoon, evening, night, etc.
  • Teamwork
    • Learning this is going to be one of the most important lessons of your life: When and how to delegate and ask for help, so you have a team support you rather than go solo.  “If you want to go quickly, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”
      • Practice.  Resources to be written later.
  • Patience
    • Sometimes we become frustrated when we see ourselves repeating a bad habit we want to change.  However, it is important to understand that even if you make the same decision as before, being aware of it is the first step towards fixing the problem.  Being aware in the moment of the decision is the next step.  Then being aware, and sometimes making the right decision is the next step.  Then, with continued focus and experience, you build the habit that you want to have. The key to it all is to be conscious of your reality, and what you can do about it. That is what this section is about. Once you become self aware, then you can choose to change or stay the same.  (The Stages of Correcting a Bad Habit)
    • You also need to realize that the world changes slowly, and no matter how hard you try, or how much time and resources you spend on something in the short term, there are many things that can only achieved over a long period of time, so you must wait and be patient.
  • Corrections
    • When you make corrections, do so at the schedule level.  You should be thinking about commitments and habits within the long term, not about each particular incident of a commitment or habit–that’s inaccurate.  From statistics, we know that anecdotal evidence can skew reality and having too few data points makes the data unreliable and our decisions made on that unreliable data, risky.
    • When you do think about each particular incident, be sure to include sufficient context: what were all the events and factors leading up to the incident that might have played a role?  If you’re good at tennis in the afternoon, but bad at it in the evening, it might be because you get drunk during dinner, not because you’re not good in the evening.
    • Again: don’t mistake an individual event for a cause of a particular outcome: it was the entire process leading up to it.  So deal with chunks, a schedule, and make revisions to the whole schedule when appropriate.
  • Quality
    • Quality does not necessarily go up with [investment of] time.  A professional chef or tennis player can do something extremely difficult, very quickly.  Quality goes up with a combination of skill and time.  Don’t fall into the trap of throwing time at a problem or task, thinking that will increase the quality: if you don’t have the skills, you could take forever and never finish.  Instead, know when you’ve reached your limit, and move on to another task to get more experience and practice, which translates into greater skill.  http://attemptedliving.com/2014/02/04/what-is-skill-talent-potential-smart-intelligence/
    • Sprints – Burst based investments strategy of time and energy
      • Pro: You get a lot of work done in a short amount of time.  Con: you miss out on compound interest if you space it out too far.  A little bit every week for 10 weeks pays dividends with less effort, headache, and stress than 1 week of overkill work.
      • Skills decay.  Unlike in stocks, where compound interest can grow without your input, skills must be maintained and kept sharp–you must feed it like a plant.  Neglect will kill it.  After the 1 week of overkill, your skills will decay over the next 9 weeks so that when you start again on the 11th week, you won’t be as good as someone who worked weekly.
  • Focus
    • The reality is, you can’t have everything.  Trying to fit 20 ounces into a 16 ounce bottle is futile: you’re playing a game that you’re guaranteed to lose.  Don’t waste your life.  Instead, pick a focus, and you’ll at least get that one thing done.
    • On quantity: From a strategy point of view: Strategy A is to try to get too many things, say 10 things, done and fail.  Strategy B is to try to do a reasonable amount of things, say 5, and succeed.  Repeating Strategy A will be repeating failure.  Repeat Strategy B twice and you will have achieved the 10 things.
    • On Quality: Don’t get distracted by other things–you need to get all your frequent flier miles on the same airline.  If you practice a year of tennis, a year of violin, a year of science, you probably won’t achieve the quality of someone who put all three years into one activity.

This post is part of AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.

Self Improvement:  Part 2: Planning and Part 3: Decision Making

To find out when those posts, and other life education writing, are released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.

• This website (https://tosdr.org/) has short simplified summaries of Terms of Service and Private Policy agreements for websites and allows you to easily compare them with each other.
• Basic Knowledge for Self Defense
• 9 Tips for Staying Safe (mainly for women, but also for men)
• How to Set Your Car Mirrors to Remove the Blind Spot
• Correlation isn’t Causation
• Know Your Rights when Dealing with the Police and Say Nothing Even when You are the Good Guy
• Habit (1887) by American Psychologist William James or my Notes on Habit by William James

This post is part of AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.  Look under “Understanding Yourself – Self Improvement”

To find out when those posts, and other life education writing, are released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.

A habit is what you repeatedly do when faced with a triggering event, or trigger for short. Today we will learn about some properties about these triggers and events.  1. Habits can be time triggered or event triggered.  2. Each trigger is programmed into a different muscle’s memory.  3. A habit has three parts.  (a) The trigger happening, (b) you recognizing that the trigger is present, (c) you responding to the trigger.

Here are 4 examples

• Ex.1 – Your habit to get sleepy around 11PM is a time triggered event that has been programmed into your human body.  (a) 11PM comes, (b) [your body’s internal] clock tells you, (c) your body changes its body chemistry in preparation for sleep.
• Ex.2 – Your habit to flinch at sudden, extremely loud noises is an event triggered habit built into your body’s muscles.  (a) your ears receive the signal of a loud noise, (b) your mind determines that this is not an expected noise, (c) your muscles are told to flinch.
• Ex.3 – Your habit to wipe your nose with a kleenex is an event triggered habit built into your conscious mind.  (a) you sneeze, (b) your mind tells you this was a sneeze and you sense snot, (c) your mind tells you to go wipe it with a kleenex.
• Ex.4 – Your habit to associate cats with dogs is an event triggered habit built into your subconscious mind (memory).  (a) you see a cat, (b) you think about what you know about cats, (c) attached to your memories of cats are memories of dogs.

Everyone is born with default habits, biologically set.  You yawn when tired, your stomach growls when hungry, etc.  As you grow up, (a) you encounter different things that you didn’t know existed, like a red apple to eat, or an iPhone to play with, or situations you didn’t know existed like meeting a stranger, or hearing an ice cream truck song.  As you are exposed to these triggers, (b) your environment, childhood, background circumstances all serve to determine how you think and therefore how you recognize the situation.  Perhaps you recognize red apples because they’re always in the same place in your home, or you get them from the same store, or you pick them from the same tree, or you see apples in a variety of contexts and learn to recognize them objectively.  (c) Whatever it is, after you recognize something, you then form your response to it.  You could respond to a sneeze with getting tissue paper, toilet paper, rubbing it on your shirt, your friend’s shirt, etc.  You could respond to seeing apples with happiness because you like the taste of apples and they’re always available on the shelf in your home, or with a cringe because you once found a worm in an apple you ate, or with sadness because you can’t afford apples unless they’re on sale at the store so it reminds you of your relative poverty, or with happiness because you like climbing the tree to pick apples.

Because your environment, childhood, background circumstance, and life experiences are out of your control and different for each person, everyone forms drastically different methods for recognizing triggers, and drastically different responses to triggers.  This accounts for the diversity of humanity.  A problem you may face if you don’t have sufficient guidance from peers and mentors is you may take your own anecdotal evidence and life experiences and extrapolate it to describe the world at large: because apples cause you happiness and taste good to you, you assume that for all people, apples cause happiness because they taste good to all people.  You mistake describing yourself and your own world to describing the entire world.  However, this is inaccurate because there are people who don’t like apples or respond very differently to apples.  Thus, it is important to recognize the scope of your beliefs: that they extend no further than yourself, and those who agree with you.

If you have traveled, or learned about history or culture, you will realize that depending on the context, different things become socially acceptable and unacceptable.  Growing up, whoever is in charge of you will give you your default values for what is socially acceptable and not. Furthermore, depending on what values society has at that time and place, your happiness towards apples might be socially acceptable, and it might not be.  If you’re in country/location A where it’s acceptable, reacting with happiness is unpunished.  If you’re in country/location B where it is not acceptable, when you travel there, you might end up punished.  However, it is important to, as you mature, stop blindly following what circumstance has taught, and instead think through and understand the implications behind certain social standards, and to therefore be aware and in control of your responses.  To be self aware, you should know trigger A results in response D for you, and to be able to do something about it in the event when you want to change it to response C.

Resources

• The Stages of Correcting a Bad Habit
• Daily Circadian Rhythm and Biological Clock
• Habit (1887) by American Psychologist William James and my Notes on Habit by William James
• Built the Habit on Android

To find out when more Life Education Curriculum is released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.  Please share your comments to this post below.