Personal Development

I have been pouring over my spending habits for the last few months but especially in the past few weeks. In the last week, I have really tightened the reigns on my spending, as a way to save money and eliminate debt for good. One of the areas where I had the most wiggle room was of course, food. I can’t opt out of paying off other bills, though, I can reduce to an extant. However, I found that I was spending stupid amounts of money on food for months on end and I wanted to cut that down by a large margin. Now, as a man in my twenties, I like to eat and can eat a ton of food. I’m also 6 foot 2 and even when I’m ripped still weigh in at 180-185, so I definitely need more calories than most other people. I wanted to write a post documenting how I have gone about slashing my food bill by more than half.

Stop Eating Take Out or Restaurants

This one kind of crept up on me as the months went by. I started to look at my bank statement and realized how much I had either gone out to eat or had ordered lunch while at work. Even an inexpensive lunch at most places will still run $5-6 and do that enough and you can quickly be looking at $50 no problem. Also, I was for some reason ( cough, cough: laziness) eating fast food at least once a week. That fact was one of the major issues I needed to correct, as crappy fast food nutrition needs to have no place in my life. Even if I only spent $12 a week eating out somewhere, that still adds up to $624 a year!

Stop with the Drinks and the Snacks

I needed to cut out spending on drinks such as coffee, during my early morning shifts, as well as buying some snacks during the day to keep my energy levels up. One change was to simply buy a box of green tea bags and use one for days I have to be up really early and go to work. One box costs $2.99 and lasts me 3-4 weeks versus buying a cup of coffee or other caffeinated beverage which usually costs at least $2 each. To combat snacking, I planned my meals out more carefully and decided to eat more at breakfast time and earlier in the day, then  taper off at night. I’m usually not very hungry during the evening so even something low carb like chicken and veggies will keep me satisfied through the night. However, I need to eat more during the day, otherwise my productivity and mood plummet.

Start thinking about the long terms cost

It is easy to justify in your head that something costs two bucks and is no big deal to purchase. That is, until you start adding up all those little costs and extrapolating it out for an entire year. Even at $2 a day, that’s $720 each year, and $7200 over a decade. Yes, that is a huge total and long time period but through the power of compound interest that $7200 could be invested much more wisely and end up yielding a 6-8% each year. This is not to say you have to be completely frugal all the time but really cutting back can have huge impacts on the future, even in small amounts.

Have Staple Foods to Buy at the Grocery Store and Eat Some of the Same Things

Learning to control cravings and eat some of the same staple meals each day can go a long way to saving a ton of money each month. You can take the time to learn how to cook and prepare things in different ways so that boredom doesn’t become a factor. I try to focus on buying foods that I enjoy, could eat daily, and have nutritional value.

Some staples that I buy and the price

Whole Grain Bread- $1.99 a loaf

Whole Grain Spaghetti- 0.98 for 13.25 oz.

Light Pasta Sauce- $1.69

Bag of Stir Fry Veggies- $1.50

Eggs- $2.89 for 18 count

Oats- $2.29 for 42 oz.

Natural Peanut Butter- $4.50 for 28 oz.

Frozen Skinless Chicken Breast Tenders: $8.39 for 2.5 pounds. (Usually on sale for $6.65)

Bag of Potatoes- I forget the price on a 5lb bag of red or russet potatoes but I think it’s like 2.99 or 3.99. Either way potatoes can be a great addition to help keep you full.

A sample day for me building off this template might be, with possible additions in parenthesis:

3 Scrambled Eggs (add cheese and/or salsa) and 1 cup of oats (add raisins)

2 PBJ Sandwiches

Whole Grain Pasta with 6-10 oz chicken and a whole lotta veggies

1 cup of oats (add raisins)

That is essentially it. I could go cheaper but I elect to eat whole grains instead of processed white breads and the like. I opt for natural peanut butter which is less processed and has less sugar. I may also buy whey protein powder for extra protein for lifting weights. Apples and/or bananas also find their way onto my menu, for further vitamins and antioxidants.

Oats are a great way to add calories for cheap. 1 cup of oats has 280 calories and 20% of a daily value of Iron. Plus, a little bit of fat and plenty of fiber. I can eat 2 cups per day and it’ll only cost $2.29 for the week. Buying a canister of raisins costs me about $3.99, when I do so, but it does add some great flavor to the cooked oats.

There are plenty of other meals such as rice and beans that can also be made for dirt cheap.  Veggies are always important to include and can be done so in a really inexpensive manner. Shopping this way I can eat for as low as $130 a month and usually around $150-160 if I add some more variety. That works out to $4-6 a day which really isn’t much, probably less than most fast food meals, while being more nutritious and lasts the entire day not just one meal. I know that this way will save me a couple thousand dollars in a year’s time and that is money that can be spent on anything else of value. Hell, it can pay off a credit card and still have enough left over to invest in my portfolio. I’ve seen other experiments, where people live off like $1 a day or like $100 a month, and that’s great but it’s not my goal to eat that restrictive. Maybe the $100 a month is doable and I’ll work my way down to it but if I’m not in grinding poverty I don’t want to eat like it. I want simple, whole foods that maintain my health and don’t break the bank.

One of the things that I have always been pretty terrible at is organization. Not the simple tasks, of putting things away in some semblance of order or keeping track of where I put things. Rather, I have always been bad at sticking with things because I’ve never kept track of my progress or taken the steps each day to make something new a habit. Now, this doesn’t really hold you back in tasks which only require you to answer a basic yes or no question to determine whether something got done that day.

For instance, in high school I one day decided that I was going to stop drinking soda all together. I never planned anything out or marked on a calendar how many days into this process I was. Yet, I was successful in quitting my daily soda drinking habits. Why? I made one change in lieu of drinking soda and that was replacing it with water. Thus, I could easily ask myself whether or not I had drank soda that day and know the answer. After 30 days of “No” in a row, there’s really no point in asking. (As a side note, I dropped 15 pounds within months by dropping that habit completely).

The downside to this cold turkey method of just quitting soda ended up having a negative effect on me and how I approached more complex changes I needed to make. What happened when I needed to track my finances or my diet or what work I had done for the month? That simplistic method no longer yielded good results and the bad part of it is that it sort of became ingrained in me that this approach worked well. I could maintain changes in these more complex areas of my life for days or perhaps even a few weeks before I lost track of my progress or why I had even started in the first place.

Keeping track of multiple variables over a middling or lengthy amount of time is way too much to focus on. Can you remember off of the top of your head exactly what you ate on a Thursday three weeks ago? Maybe, but could you do every other day? Probably not. It’s crucial to understand in life that big changes are precipitated by smaller changes carried out over a long period of time. So, it is these smaller changes that are perhaps the most important thing to master in your life in order to see results. They serve as sort of a beachhead from which you can build up your force and push forward towards attaining a larger goal.

I have found that the easiest habit that I can do in order to create major change in my life is to simply write things down. It is one thing to know that you ate terribly last Wednesday but to actually have to write it out piece by piece, kind of sets it in stone how much you’re screwing up your fitness goals. Also, you start to see patterns emerge in your behaviors which you can then remedy and correct.  Many people tend to think that writing out what you eat for the day is sort of overkill or obsessive. However, when you start to do it, you realize how much it can keep you on track.

“Oh, I ate tons of pizza four days ago. Probably shouldn’t pig out today.” These simple corrections in behavior help to break down bad habits and replace them with better ones. I like to write down my workout routine, what I eat, and the amount of money I spend on food. I stopped tracking what I ate and how much I spent on food for more than a few months and it astounded me how out of whack my budget and diet became. My brain will not simply keep track of these things on its own, most likely because I’m always thinking about other things I feel are more important to me.

Even though online banking exists and I can track my purchases digitally, writing it out forces me to confront my daily choices, and I have to read and add up any receipt for the day. This way, I cannot hide from any impulse buys or foods that I know I shouldn’t be eating and since it’s a daily habit I have to think about making these changes daily and think of ways I can avoid falling into the trap. Just in the first week of starting my spending log back up again, I have saved a humongous amount of money and am on pace to spend probably 60% less on food within the next month. Yes, I am that bad at keeping track of this stuff on my own, I need structure to keep myself in line.

It seems like each day now I think of a new thing to tell myself in order to keep me on track or I find a new thing to cut out. For instance:

• I stopped thinking of small purchases in the immediate and started thinking more about their larger implication. That $2 drink each day could be $60 a month. That’s $60 I could invest in my Sharebuilder account or pay off some debt. Really makes me second guess impulse buys.
• That $2 drink isn’t water, so why are you drinking it and making your workouts less effective?
• Cancelled Netflix and Amazon Prime, saving about $200 a year. Both can be cool to have, but did I really need either of them?
• $200 on a $1000 debt is 20%, is either of them worth that? Why not pay things down instead?
• I’ve got plenty of books that need reading instead of watching some random movie. As such, I’ve finished two books I was in the middle of, almost done with another, and about half way through another. Boom! Productivity.
• Started running again and can track each entry to motivate myself to go for another run.

This one little change of writing more things down and keeping my brain in the loop of what I’m really spending my day doing is spurring so many more changes to take hold. Plus, it is simplifying just about everything in my life and it will continue to get better as these newer habits take hold and start to run more on auto-pilot. It becomes easier to make changes in life when they don’t all have to be wholesale changes. Starting a new way of eating from scratch can be hard because food addiction and the behavioral patterns that have become ingrained. However, making smaller changes and tracking areas you need to improve upon over the long haul makes it a smooth process and all of the areas in your life become more aligned to how you want them to be.

You don’t necessarily have to keep a diary of long drawn out passages to keep yourself on track and your goals in clear view. Just by writing down the food you eat, exercise you did, and the money you spent, so much of your life can start to fall into line. It’s one place you can start building from today to reach a goal somewhere in the future.

In the past few weeks, there have been a few experiences which have kind of ‘reawakened’ me and have gotten me to reconsider the paths I was close to undertaking. Towards the end of April, I had a series of interviews with a company, about a job opportunity. I went through the usual corporate battery of three interviews with various HR and management types, as well as a panel of my would-be peers. In the end, everything seemed to be going well, and a friend on the inside of the company told me that I basically had the job. It wasn’t a dream job or anything of the sort but the pay was much better than I am currently receiving and could add another solid experience to my resume for the future.

For a few days I coasted, thinking that I was about to embark on a new path with a new company, and I’ll admit I felt rather excited at the prospect. It was all a matter of time, of course, before I would leave my current gig and start anew. However, a few days after I had been assured that the position was mine, I received an email telling me that the position had been eliminated due to some change involving one of their corporate customers. At first, I was pissed. All of that time and effort (literally, the last interview was two hours), was down the drain with nothing to show for it.

The second event (well, series of events) involves my work online. I had been during this past month, focused almost solely on money. I wanted the new job because of money and all of my efforts in writing seemed to be about the bottom line rather than creating something that I had wanted to. It was during this barrage of efforts to make more money that I got smacked down by Google. My rankings in the search engine began to plummet and ultimately I have lost about 80% of my traffic within a week, thanks to an ‘algorithm penalty’ of some sort.  Maybe these old pages will recover to their proper spots at some point but who knows. The funny part, to me, was Google notified me that my revenues were 98% below estimates and that I should look into the reasons why, as if they weren’t the sole cause! Anyways, it pulled me away from this site and y other ventures for a few days, as I questioned the point of it all.

It seemed that another financial misfortune would overtake me, when some reconfiguration at my current workplace was taking place. I had turned down one offer from them when I had thought that I pretty much had the new job locked up. Now, it seemed that my role was going to be redefined and my hours possibly cut by 25%. At this point, I really said enough is enough and decided to take action.

I made the case to my bosses that I should only work three days a week because it would entail less driving to and from for me and I could focus more on my work in larger blocks of time. They were receptive to this idea, as they wanted to cut my hours anyway, and figured this would be the perfect way to do so. For a few days, it was like this, before I hit them with the second piece of my plan to secure more hours, more money, and a three day per week schedule. Their marketing efforts have been haphazard for the longest time and mostly abandoned but online marketing and website building is something that I happen to have plenty of experience with. In the end, I basically created my own job title, got my schedule condensed into to three days per week, and can essentially control my own destiny and pay based on how my plans perform.

All of these experiences this month got me thinking about gaining and losing opportunities and how much of an effect making decisions can have on your life. These experiences are all neutral experiences in reality; it’s just that at the time they happened I may have interpreted them as positive or negative. Had I gotten the new job, I would have had to drive to another city each morning and be stuck in some office cubicle from 8 to 5 doing work that I have zero interest in. What kind of ramifications would that have had on my life? Gotten out of shape? Lost my interest in writing? Lacked the time to pursue things that I am passionate in? When I really think about it, not getting hired there was kind of a blessing in disguise. I didn’t really feel comfortable in such a place and was only really in it for the money.

Also, I now have the opportunity to compress my work schedule into three days out of the week and have the other four off to explore my own interests. Beyond summer vacation and whatnot as a child, I’ve never had the majority of a week to simply explore my own interests without work or school getting in the way. I have decided to use this time to increase my reading and writing and also start a new carb cycling diet. Personal development is now my main focus and doesn’t feel like something that I have to squeeze in between certain hours of the day or weekends.

Sometimes in life, things seem like they are working against you, and it feels like you’re stuck in a really bad place. However, not every opportunity is the correct one for you or your plans. I can imagine had I gotten that job how unhappy I would be by this time next year. I would be stagnating and probably slip further and further into some existential despair. This didn’t happen and things started to seem as if they would fall apart in many ways, so I decided to get creative. You want to cut my hours? Good. Let’s give me three days per week. Wait. You guys are having problems with marketing? It just so happens I have a ton of experience with that but I’ll need to keep a full-time schedule in order to fix things. When things get bad, get creative.

I’m pretty excited about the opportunity that I have now and am trying my hardest not to squander my time and actually pursue things which will help me to improve and develop. Starting with my 30-day super trial, I hope to implement many positive habits over the next month and get more done than I ever have before. Disappointment strikes in many forms, work related, personal, relationships, etc. The key thing to remember is that not all missed opportunities or failings are necessarily bad. There is usually a greater opportunity or challenge which you can find among the wreckage of your failures and you’ll never see it if you keep focusing on what you ‘missed out’ on.

Fear of rejection, social anxiety, approach anxiety, or whatever else you want to call it, that feeling of fear you get when you approach women in a bar or club or wherever, is one thing that holds many guys back from success. There are plenty of guys out there who could be getting many more women than they currently do, if they could simply get past the anxiety they feel when initially approach women. If they could just skip that step and get into a conversational flow they’d be good. How does one get past these intense feelings of fear and anxiety in the heat of the moment? The prescription is quite straightforward, so in this post I’m going to break it down to the basics of getting past approach anxiety, so that talking to women is no longer a dreadful thing to experience. It does take some work but once things start to click you can have some amazing experiences.

Frame of Mind

The first step towards reducing approach anxiety comes by working on your own mind. The anxiety and fear stems from being so far in your own head that everything seems like a life or death situation, even though it is just a basic social interaction. In my own interpretation of these fears, I feel that I am at most selfish and eco-centric, when I am feeling this way. It sounds weird to put it like that. After all, the cause of your fear seems to stem from outside of you (the girl, the other people around). However, the fear stems from your own perception of the situation. When I feel approach anxiety, I know that my perception of the situation is completely self-absorbed.

There is a stage of life that people go through, often around their middle or high school years, in which they think that their own problems are the most important things in the world. There is very little awareness of the outside world and their role within it. This phase usually passes as a person matures and people begin to think outside of themselves. The problem is we can often slip back into this kind of thinking when we are put in certain situations and it becomes tough to see the forest from the trees. For instance, when we approach a woman who we do not know, in a club or bar, we feel like she will reject us and everyone will laugh (this can be a completely subconscious fear). Will that all actually happen? Probably not.

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Rejection may or may not happen. It doesn’t matter either way, in the correct context, and only matters if your ego is in control and trying to protect itself. This means that if you place value on the outcome of the interaction, you will feel fear no matter what. If she reacts positively, you feel good. If she reacts negatively, you feel bad. Either way you are placing the way you feel about yourself in someone else’s hands, so of course your ego will want to protect itself, as there is no control over your sense of self.  In order to remove the dependence on outcome, you need to stop seeking validation from those external sources.

How I began to do this was to begin thinking about what my reality consisted of. I started to see perception as like looking through a microscope with different lenses. When I was fearful and seeking validation from others, it was like being zoomed in 1000x, and I was completely absorbed in myself and my societal conditioning. I couldn’t see the world around me because I was too zoomed in my own perceived problems. When I ‘change the lens’ and begin to look at my situation in a greater universal context and don’t place a judgment on it, I feel much more centered and the fear is simply not there.

In the zoomed out context, I see the world around me more clearly and I am less involved in my own narrative about my life. I start to understand that I am one of around seven billion people on this planet and my own interpretation of what rejection is isn’t that important. How many other people have experienced the same feelings that I have? So, what is all that unique about my situation? Nothing. Ego and feeling are simply taking over for rationality. If I talk to a girl, and she yells at me and tells me to go away, will people be talking about it in 5 years? 10 years? 500 years? Highly unlikely and if they are what does it really matter?

I also liked to contrast how I was feeling in different situations. I remember going camping when I was a kid and looking at all of the stars in the night sky. I was in awe of the beauty and how much more there was than just my life in the universe. Why could I feel this way in nature, but when I was older and went to a club, I felt complete anxiety because I wanted to have a conversation? The difference was my perception of the situations. In the first instance, I was completely in the moment and centered in my sense of self. In the second, I was projecting into the future (how she would reject me) and into the past (how other girls had rejected me, what other people had thought of me) and ignoring the moment.

Once I began to think really deeply on perception, and how it was screwing me up, things started to change. When I started to approach girls with this new mindset, I gave up on pursuing certain outcomes (making out, phone numbers, sex) and instead focused on expressing myself fully and exploring who she is. That’s it. Initially, I was still using a lot of ‘gaming’ techniques, but it became clear that it was incongruent with who I was. For instance, I would start having great conversations with girls and then try to do some pick-up technique and completely lose her interest. However, when I was expressing and exploring, I would get girls who would be completely into me within a short period of time.

I didn’t need to press her for sex because I viewed it as something that would simply happen. I am a man and she is a woman, we’re kind of built for that. I realized that the best game was to have no game. I became more open and stopped putting up fronts and as a result they began to do the same. The girl starts feeling safe to express her true self, thus becomes more comfortable, and thus becomes more attracted to you as a man. That’s it. That is what interaction looks like when social conditioning is cast aside. It really is that basic, if you can stop the anxiety, fear, and constant judging of situations, and just learn to be in the moment.

Here are some further posts that explore these ideas:

• How to Have Confidence
• How to Talk to Girls if You’re Shy/Awkward
• How to Deal with Loneliness
• Changing the Perceptions About You
• Attract Women Main Page

The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace. You no longer depend on the future for fulfillment and satisfaction—you don’t look to it for salvation. Therefore, you are not attached to the results. Neither failure nor success has the power to change your inner state of being. You have found the life underneath your life situation. – Eckhart Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now

Frame of Reference

It is one thing to read about this kind of thinking but it is another thing to actually apply it to your day to day life. I know how difficult it can be. I still struggle with maintaining my more centered approach towards life and will often slip into the really socially conditioned frame of mind for weeks at a time, before pulling myself out of it. It’s hard to interact with a completely conditioned society and try not to fall into old habits, sort of like trying to lose weight but being surrounded by your favorite junk food constantly. The good news is that, I have gotten better at it by practicing more and more, and a lot of the beliefs I used to have about myself and my situation no longer exists in my mind. So, it is possible to shift into this mode of perception.

Reading books on philosophy, psychology, history, and the like has helped to shape my world view in a rather unique way. After 10 years of reading consistently, my brain and my behavior have continually evolved into new outlooks and viewpoints. This is a reason why I recommend reading on a daily basis so much, because it will completely flip how you think about and interact with the reality around you. It helps to open you up to new ideas and experiences. However, reading alone is often not enough to concretely change certain aspects of your reality, experience is a necessary ingredient to help break old conditioned patterns. This is especially true for those things where fear and anxiety tend to be the highest, such as public speaking or approaching women. In those situations, the understanding of a shift in consciousness has to be backed up by experience in order for it to truly take hold and run as a sort of default.

Simply put, if you want to get over approach anxiety you have to talk to women. This doesn’t mean you necessarily have to approach 1,000 random women in the street, though you could, but when you are in social situations such as a bar or club, you need to socialize and learn to interact without caring about how it turns out. You have to work on expressing yourself in a natural way that isn’t forced or a scripted part of your social mask. I wrote about this here, How to Talk to Girls at College Parties, and gave examples from my own life as sort of a demo of what I am talking about.

The cool thing is that you can begin to use a new perspective on reality in any situation in your day to day life and it translates over to talking to women. It’s sort of like shooting hoops in your driveway prepares you somewhat for running a full court game, you’re still not in game shape, but you might at least have a wicked jump shot. Recently, I have been interviewing for a bunch of new job opportunities, and I honestly felt more anxiety about those than I ever did trying to pick up chicks. Meanwhile, I have been experimenting with a more complete implementation of being more present in the moment and getting rid of social conditioning and it has helped tremendously in interviews. I find myself more relaxed, engaging, and aware of my behaviors in the moment, which has allowed me to garner better responses from employers while getting positive reinforcement that this perception of reality is the most beneficial for me…which means I’m more likely to run it as a default setting.

In order to break your conditioning and move past the intense feelings of anxiety and doubt, you have to push your boundaries and do what is uncomfortable and even painful. True growth lies on the edge of your comfort zone and hence that’s what you must approach in order to help shift your mind. Getting rid of this anxiety is like any other growth exercise, such as lifting weights, you aren’t going to gain more muscle by lifting 10 pounds forever and you won’t get any better with women by being too afraid to talk to them.

So, how do you go about reinforcing this new view on your reality? For me, the growth started before I had really gotten deeper into reading philosophy and whatnot. It started when I just got fed up with how things were going. I didn’t have a girlfriend in high school and felt like everyone else was passing me by (wasn’t as true as I thought, lots of guys are in the same boat). I felt as if I needed to rectify this and get some girls in my life, so that I could gain some experience and see exactly what I had been missing out on. I was drawing most of my confidence from making changes to my physical body (working out and dressing nicer) and started to notice some girls holding eye contact for longer and smiling at me…though I was still too much of a bitch to do anything about it.

Then, I started going out to bars and clubs, by myself most of the time, to force myself to confront my anxieties head on. Also, I started talking to more girls in my classes and develop some kind of ‘game’. You know what? I started getting better and better at it, which made me care less and less about getting rejected by a girl (it happened a lot). While I did get better, my confidence and sense of self was all over the place. Sometimes I’d be on a roll with women and feel like the man and then I’d hit a cold streak and felt rejected. Going through that period led me to believing that I needed to shift my perspective and to stop seeking external validation, which has helped to accelerate my results in every aspect of my life.

If I were starting from scratch again and needed to get past approach anxiety on the same level I had when I was younger, I would go about it a bit differently.  I would set it up as a daily program of sorts. I would read some relevant books for an hour a day and listen to audio on personal development while working out. Thus, I could be constantly bombarded with messages to reinforce the changes I want to make. Also, meditation helps to clear all of the negative thought patterns and puts me into a completely open and aware state of being.

Secondly, I would go into complete social overdrive. Talking to as many people as I could each day. A great trick for this is getting a job in face to face sales or in a call center that requires you to make 100 phone calls a day. At some point, talking to people becomes just an everyday occurrence. Also, joining social, athletic, or charitable groups will allow you to expand your social circle and get way more comfortable in talking to people without worrying about the outcome. Plus, there are always some cute girls around, that you can just get to know over a longer period of time. Then, whether you go out alone or with a group of people, when enjoying the nightlife, start conversations with as many people as you can. Focus on expressing your true self and not putting on a social mask, this will help to further stretch your comfort zone and break through all of that anxiety you may be feeling.

That’s really all it takes. You question where you fears are coming from, identify and become aware of those fears, explore a new way to perceive the world around you, and implement it by pushing your comfort zone and reinforcing your new outlook. Remember, that the outcome of your conversations with girls isn’t as important as exploring who she is and making yourself comfortable in expressing yourself fully. It took me months to start learning how to talk to girls and even when I had a few interested in me it was still a process to improve on all the things I was still lacking. Approach anxiety can be gotten rid of but it does require taking action on a consistent basis but doing so will open up your world to a great deal of new experiences.

Maintaining a long term relationship to put it mildly, ain’t no joke. Two people can often meet and during their initial time together, their lives can be almost perfectly in sync in terms of their goals, personalities, and temperaments. However, people do change over time and sometimes, that change leads them away from their friends, family, and even their relationship partner. In other situations, you may have gotten involved with someone who is perfectly nice and attractive but isn’t completely the right fit for you or what you want your lifestyle to be. In still other cases, you have become involved with a hidden disaster, someone who played the part until she got her claws into you and you now realize is borderline psychotic. In any situation you may find yourself in, knowing when to end a relationship with a girl, is a highly important skill to have. Sticking around for longer than the expiration date on a relationship, rarely turns out well and often just drains you of time, energy, and resources. It can be highly difficult to let go and say goodbye once emotions are running so deep but taking the best action for your own well-being is always the right move even if it doesn’t feel that way. Here are a few of the signs you should be on the lookout for when considering exiting a relationship.

Too Much Fighting

All relationships have disagreements and occasional spats, it’s just the nature of the game. However, constant argument and possible physical escalation leads to a toxic coexistence that is better to be rid of than to try and mend broken fences. You might think that because things didn’t used to be this way, it can be resolved, and things will be how they were. Yes, the fighting may calm down a bit but things don’t revert back to how they were in the past. Bottom line, if she is driving you up a wall with the constant bickering, consider that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are other girls who tensions won’t be so high with and that it might be best for the both of you two go your separate ways.

She’s not a Project Home, Don’t Invest in “Fixer Uppers”

I’ve been involved in a few of these myself. Relationships with girls who are physically good enough for your tastes and are cool to hang out with BUT beyond that there are glaring problems. Real change in behavior and/or personality can be a challenge to undertake, when it’s your own behavior and personality. Trying to get someone else to change for your own benefit? Good luck. It can be something as simple as not having the same underlying goals as your girl has, different ambitions lead to different places. Don’t settle just because you have someone decent and then try to fix them up later or make huge concessions in your life to accommodate her because she’s your ‘best option’. Bad choices can be costly to your future well-being and it’s best to separate now before things go any further.

The Attraction and Passion is Lacking

Things tend to cool off some as a relationship matures and familiarity sets in but if things are getting so bad you’re constantly looking towards other girls then you might want to move on. Don’t stick around just to keep going through the motions of the relationship, if you think deeply on it and decide that you’re not happy, then you should leave.

***I’m against staying in a faltering relationship in most cases but if you still want her,  here is a program to help you with that.***

Respect Shall Be Paid

Respect is the foundation of all relationships, without it, they’re doomed to failure. If your girlfriend is seriously lacking in this department and isn’t supporting you or respecting you like she should then you should strongly consider moving on. How does she treat you, your career, what you like, your personal time? Is she constantly belittling you? Disrespecting what you work on? Trying to treat you like a lap dog or little boy instead of a man? Don’t accept such nonsense in the person you’re supposed to have such a close relationship with. Even you guys reading this who have very low self-esteem, you deserve respect! If she isn’t capable of giving it, then she’s not worth it. Also, if you don’t respect her for whatever reason, that another sign it’s time to end it.

Some Other Helpful Posts:

How to get Over Your Ex-Girlfriend

Following the No Contact Rule After a Break Up

Do You Really Want Your Ex-Girlfriend Back?

Dealing with Loneliness

How to Pick Up Girls 

No, I don’t want to spend time with you….really, just go away.

Some relationships get to the point where you simply cannot stand to be around her on a regular basis. It’s not that you’ve been fighting or anything and on the surface everything seems completely fine. It’s when she texts you, you curse. When she asks to hang out, you would do anything to avoid it. Frankily, it’s just being annoyed and over with the whole process. I remember dating one girl in particular, who towards the end of our relationship, I just couldn’t stand anymore. She would call, I would try to end the conversation as quickly as possible. She’d ask to hang out, I’d decline. It got to the point where she wanted to see some chick flick movie, and I walked out of the theater, because I had a moment of clarity of me having better things to do with my time. Dick move, right? Maybe, but if things get to this point of annoyance with them, just end the relationship quickly because it’s a sinking ship.

No Trust

You need to be able to trust your girlfriend on a deep level. That’s just part of the deal of being together. Sure, girls who are just hookups, you don’t need too much trust invested in them but once she steps up to the girlfriend level, you’d better be able to rely on her. An honest relationship is a healthy relationship and constant trust issues undermine it. If you cannot trust her on a very deep level, don’t keep her around because she hot or she’s cool to hang out with, there are like 4 billion women…you can do better than settling. Also, if your girlfriend cheated on you there are two steps you need to take.

1. Slap yourself for staying with her.
2. Dump her ass immediately.

Cheating is always grounds for breaking up, no excuses. If she violates your trust, then she doesn’t respect you, which we’ve already gone over as a sign to break up. She’s making this a really easy decision at this point, isn’t she?

All of these signs are things that should be considered when deciding whether or not to dump your girlfriend. Take the time to analyze your relationship and decide whether or not she is really worth hanging on to. This is a really important decision to make, you don’t want to spend years with or even marry the wrong person when you simply don’t have to. If your needs aren’t being met in a relationship then it is perfectly fine to move on with your life. You cannot feel guilty about breaking up with someone, even if it is really tough to do. This is your life and you should decide who you want to really be a part of it.

Christian Bale takes his roles very seriously, as can be heard on the tape of his famous rant on the set of one of his movies.  As a part of the serious nature of his craft, Bale will often have to undergo serious physical changes to get into the role of a character. In the Batman movies, he bulked up to a more muscular weight in order to play the superhero. What is interesting is that before the first Batman movie he had a role in The Machinist that required him to get down to a dangerously low weight and he then had to pack a ton of mass on for the role of Bruce Wayne. In 2000, Bale starred as Patrick Bateman, in the movie American Psycho. American Psycho was a novel by the writer Bret Easton Ellis about a wealthy serial killer.  In that film, Bale had a physique that was quite impressive, though smaller than he had to be in the later Batman movies. To get a body like Christian Bale in American Psycho, it takes plenty of work but following the right workout routine and diet it is very doable.

Hollywood actors when preparing for a role have all of the advantages at their disposal. First, they have the time to train hard and recover. They have access to fantastic trainers and they also can eat whatever food is prepared for them by a chef. While yes, that is the ideal training circumstances, most of us don’t have that luxury so it will take a bit longer and a bit more dedication to get the Patrick Bateman look than it did for Mr. Bale. So how can we get an American Psycho physique?

Diet

The absolute most important aspect of changing your body whether you are trying to shed extra far or pack on muscle mass is diet.  Exercise alone will produce some results, especially if you currently don’t do any, BUT your results in the medium to long run will suffer. Simply put, if you’re diet isn’t on point you will not achieve the body you want. Especially, not one like Mr. Bale’s.

If you’re like me, you’ve been bombarded by so many different crazy diet ideas and various do’s and don’ts of getting into shape, that it just gets confusing. What I eventually started doing and what got me the best results, was to break things down to the basics. I came to understand that I didn’t always have to eat perfect but I did have to change the way I ate. Here is a cool video from trainer Rusty Moore on changing the way you think about calories to lose weight:

 

 

Like I said above, I like to keep my diet basic and simply alter certain things to help meet my goals. If I want to gain muscle, I add more calories (slowly) and more protein to my daily intake. If I want to lose fat, I will cut calories (again, slowly, by a few hundred each week and adjust as needed) and I will also cycle my carbohydrates.

There have been a lot of advocates over the years for following a strictly low carb diet to get into shape or lose fat fast. You can shed a lot of weight going low carb and it’s a method bodybuilders use to ‘cut’ before contests (very special cirumstances) Going low carb does produce results, however, it does have some drawbacks that I absolutely hated when I tried this method:

• Completely tired for the first week and feel hungry because of the lack of carbs.
• Ended up losing too much muscle mass.
• The weight came back fast as soon as I stopped.
• Looked skinny and flat, not muscular and ripped.

Not cool, right?

Experimenting with low carb diets did however lead me to the idea of carb cycling for fat loss. Essentially, on certain days you eat more carbs and on other days you go low carb. For me, the best method was to go higher carbohydrates on workout days and low carb on my two rest days each week. That way, I could match my carbohydrates to my activity level and have all the energy I needed to get through the tough workouts.

I laid my complete diet out in this post, with sample meal plans for both high carb and low carb days.

Keep it basic, basic, basic! Here are the simple diet rules I follow any time I need to burn fat:

-No Fast food or sweets

-Low Sugar

-On low carb days substitute grains for greens. Also, bump up the protein and fat intake.

-Stay away from liquid calories. Water and skim milk (on high carb days for protein shakes) are what I will be drinking.

-Stay away from heavily processed foods

That’s it. Pretty simple stuff. Those rules alone gets the ball rolling and from there I only need to adjust certain things, if I feel my results are getting stagnant. Diet doesn’t have to be a miserable experience!

Workout

How you will train depends on your current physique. There are at the most basic level, two paths you can follow, bulking (gaining muscle mass) or cutting (losing fat).

If you’re currently skinny: You should put on muscle mass and then cut down the bit of fat you will gain. More weight lifting, less cardio, More calories.

If you’re currently overweight: You should work on shedding that fat. Of course, you would still lift weights and gain muscle (to some extent) but ramp up the cardio and change the diet.

Weights

Weight training is essential for building muscle, if you just do cardiovascular workouts, you will lose fat but just up being skinny. Remember, in American Psycho, Christian Bale had a muscular foundation and a low body fat percentage.

I like to do 3-5 days per week of weight training. Scheduling each muscle group to ensure the maximum amount of rest and recovery. Remember, that more isn’t always better, your muscles need to rest in order to grow.

Here are some great resources for weight lifting:

• bodybuilding.com
• Visual Impact Muscle Building (Complete Program)

Cardio

When you have a significant amount of fat to lose, diet is a major factor in trimming down. Sometimes, though, diet isn’t enough and cardio exercise is needed to get really sharp. It can take a lot of experimentation to figure out what kind of cardio works best for fat loss.

Some people advocate doing slow, steady-state cardio exercise. This would be walking on the treadmill for an hour. Or doing 30 minutes on an elliptical machine at a moderate pace. Is it good for fat loss? Sure. Is it optimal? Well, not every day.

Other people swear by doing high intensity interval training (HIIT). I’ve had success with this method as well but it wasn’t always enough to completely shed all the fat for me.

Nowadays, my cardio workouts come from three options:

1. Basketball

2. Gym Cardio

3. Home Workouts

I have to admit, basketball is my favorite of the bunch but it is hell on the joints. Now, you might be asking isn’t gym cardio, just a treadmill? Well, yes, a treadmill and any other piece of gym equipment you prefer (I like the elliptical and exercise bike, myself). The difference is the specific program I use to help melt the fat off of my body as quickly as possible. When I don’t have access to a gym, I use another program for my workout purposes that I have found to be completely effective as well. Just two different methods depending on what equipment I have at my disposal.

The Best Cardio Workout Plan for the Gym

Rusty Moore (the guy from the video I posted above), has an awesome cardio workout program called, Visual Impact Cardio. It is designed to teach people how to ‘master the skill of losing body fat’. It’s a pretty neat skill to have as well. Included in the ebook are three separate programs for beginners, advanced, and one for special occasions when you really want to be ripped (beach trips, photo shoots).

In this program, you get to use whatever piece of cardio equipment you prefer, the difference is Rusty lays out specifically how long, how intense, and what to do differently in each workout. Let me tell you, it can get pretty damned intense at times. I have reviewed the program here but I’ll give you the benefits in bullet points:

• No more guess work. Specific workouts you can tailor to your own fitness level.

• Intense workout to help build stamina and endurance.

• 3 separate, 8 week cycles, which can be repeated and modified as you get stronger.

• The reasoning behind everything is explained in simple, easy to understand terms.

• Can be downloaded instantly, you start right away.

• Fairly inexpensive at $47. Hell, that’s about what it costs for one measly session with many personal trainers.

Click Here to Check Out Visual Impact Cardio

 

Best at Home Cardio Workout

I own Insanity: The Asylum from Beachbody and actually just got done with a workout prior to writing this post (Vertical Plyo is no joke).  Asylum is more than a mere cardio workout and is best suited for those with a solid workout experience. Beginners would best be served by the original Insanity.

Asylum is an athletic training program that includes jumping, cardio, speed, agility, and strength training. Quite frankily, it’s a great overall workout program. I just happen to mostly use it as an extra cardio resource since I like to lift at the gym on most days. However, if you’re the type who like to workout at home, Asylum is worth a look. Here are some of the benefits:

• Step by step instruction and motivation from Shaun T.
• Program is laid out and easy to follow.
• Challenging and can be really fun once you’re into it.
• Save a bunch of money versus a gym membership each month.
• Minimal equipment needed. Dumbbells or resistance bands is it. Everything else is included.

Click Here to Try Asylum with a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee

 

Getting a body like Christian Bale in American Psycho is most definitely a challenge for the average guy. However, if you have a plan of attack and focus on diet, weights, and cardio, the results will come. Adjust things as progression occurs and keep challenging your body in different ways. There are plenty of resources available online to help guide you along but having a plan laid out can save you a lot of time, energy, and lackluster results towards getting the body you want. Whatever path you choose, learn to be consistent and not give up after a few weeks. Results in fitness are mostly about sticking with it over time, you don’t have to be perfect and you shouldn’t expect to be but you can most certainly. keep at it.

Over the past decade there has been a proliferation in the marketplace for energy drinks, shots, strips, and chewable tablets. Coffee has been the long-time staple for those who want a boost and eventually become addicted to the caffeine it contains.  Caffeine can be useful in some instances when you need to stave of fatigue and sleepiness but most of the time it is simply unnecessary. Caffeine is also a drug, a stimulant, and even if it is a mild addiction compared to other drugs, it can still have negative impact on both your life and your wallet. If you’ve taken caffeine before you know all about its effects on sleep, the racing thoughts, feelings of stress or anxiety, etc. There are plenty of reasons to kick this habit but like any addiction it requires some work and planning to do so successfully. For our purposes, I wanted to go over a few methods for quitting your caffeine addiction and try to minimize the withdrawal symptoms if those are something that you cannot handle.

In the past two years or so, I have been drinking energy drinks for months at a time before giving them up for a stretch and then returning to them again. It’s weird because in my teenage years, I actually gave up soda completely and went essentially caffeine and sugar free for multiple years. At some point, maybe it was during school in order to keep up, I started to consume those energy drinks. It wasn’t an everyday thing at first but it quickly became a habit and I found myself craving caffeine when I got out of bed. When I logically thought about that fact, I realized how pathetic that was and knew that I needed to quit energy drinks for good.

Why Do You Want to Quit?

The first thing that I did in this process of kicking this addiction was to clearly identify and write down my reasons for doing so. After all, the energy drinks weren’t all bad. I liked the boost of energy and heightened alertness at times so if I am going to quit, I had to identify reasons that were stronger than my enjoyment. Here was my list of reasons:

Erratic sleeping patterns

The sleeping problems were a huge motivation for me to crack this problem. Caffeine and the other stimulants found in energy drinks can wreak havoc on your ability to get to bed on time or will have you waking up intermittently throughout the night.  It became a reinforcing cycle, couldn’t sleep well which resulted in me waking up later or not getting enough sleep, which in turn made me have to rush through my day, drink another energy drink to ‘wake’ myself up, and also affected my ability to stick with my diet plans and undertake other goals.

For me at least, my sleeping pattern is the number one factor that I have identified for getting things done in my life. When it gets out of whack, I eat worse, I exercise less, I read less, I write less, and it goes on down the line like an infection. Even if I had no other problems with energy drinks and caffeine, this factor alone is reason enough to quit because it is hindering my goals for personal growth (see: How to Wake Up Early for Night Owls).

Money

How much money do you spend on your addiction each day? Energy drinks cost between two and four dollars each, so with taxes you could be spending $100 a month just for that extra unnatural pep. Extrapolate that over a whole year and you might be over $1,000 spent, depending on how much you consume.

Think about all of the money you waste by drinking energy drinks or coffee and what you could do with that extra cash. For example, if you have a $20,000 student loan debt, then that $1,000 you spend a year on caffeine drinks accounts for 5% of that loan! $1,000 could be invested for a nice return or used to pay rent or take a vacation. This money is just being wasted on a purchase you really don’t need in the first place.

In addition, I’ve noticed that my spending overall increases when I’m hopped up on an energy drink, I seem to have more impulse buys. Not only that, but because my sleep patterns get out of line, I tend to order out at restaurants for lunch because I didn’t have time to prepare anything before work. That is a big cost over time and only further solidifies my moving away from caffeine.

Health

I really don’t like how my brain and body have been craving caffeine just to get me through the day. Sure, it’s a mild physical dependence that isn’t too bad to get over but I just don’t like the idea of a drink having some psychological power over me. Also, caffeine raises blood pressure, so long term energy drink consumption probably isn’t a great idea. Stress and anxiety levels also tend to be higher on caffeine and stress is one of the biggest health problems in the modern world. Add to the fact, that I make poorer food choices when on caffeine, and it just makes sense for my health’s sake to get rid of them. If you have any type of digestive issue or condition like colitis or IBS, then caffeine consumption is only making things worse for you, so getting off of it would be a great idea.

Get in Shape with the right program: Visual Impact Cardio

Mental Clarity

On caffeine and these similar stimulants, my mind is noticeably alert and I have feelings of being pumped up and ready to go. However, this does not translate well to getting tasks done. While I am alert, I have a hard time focusing on what I need to get done or developing ideas and organizing them. Also, my creativity seems to have dark periods that directly correlate with my energy drink usage as my brain is jumping from thing to thing and never really having much depth to my thoughts at all.

Finding the Root Cause

I also think that it is important to figure out a root cause for the dependency on caffeine. Feeling tired or run down all the time can have its roots in a poor diet, bad sleeping habits, and a lack of exercise. Maybe it was simply a habit that was picked up during a time where you needed that extra energy but now only consume energy drinks because that’s just sort of what you do now.  Whatever the reasoning behind the consumption, if you can identify the underlying factors, it can make the transition away from caffeine and stimulants that much easier.

How to Kick the Habit

There seems to be two methods for quitting caffeine. The first is obviously just stopping your consumption cold turkey. This method is the quickest way but also the most difficult in terms of habit change and withdrawal symptoms. The second is to gradually reduce and eventually eliminate. This method makes it a transition into going without caffeine and energy drinks and not an abrupt stop, which is helpful because it isn’t very difficult and the withdrawals are minimized but it does take planning.

Cold Turkey

This is the method which I utilized the first few days. I felt extremely tired and had a minor headache with cloudy thoughts. It was doable but unfortunately it also coincided with a busy work week and interviews for other jobs. So, I switched to a minor amount of caffeine just to manage the fatigue and get through those few days. I think the cold turkey method is a good choice if you have the time and not much to do, so that you can get in the extra sleep you’ll want and not have to be so irritable.

The Gradual Method

This is the easiest way to kick a caffeine habit. The first step is to determine how much you consume each day. If you have two energy drinks a day, the just giving them up would be a rough go on your body for a week or two. I usually had one energy drink a day in the 16 oz. size, so I wanted to cut that dramatically. I determined that a 16 oz. usually contains 140-160 mg of caffeine and that I wanted to cut that amount significantly to wean myself off of it but still have enough to get through that first week.

I chose to replace an energy drink with a Mountain Dew which contains 91mg of caffeine in a 20 oz. bottle. I only drank half of this bottle and poured the rest of it out, so I ended up consuming roughly 45mg of caffeine. Lipton Green Tea is also a good choice because it has way less caffeine than an energy drink and a different taste, so that you aren’t reinforcing that energy drink flavor.

The goal for me was to keep the total mg of caffeine low so that it didn’t interrupt my sleeping habits but I wasn’t going through with the withdrawals to the same extent.  45 mg of caffeine in the morning on one day and then the next either reduce that amount or just not consume any for that day. It was a good idea for me to schedule the reduction towards the start of the week, so that, by the weekend (my days off work) I could just go without and be able to deal with the rundown feelings by taking naps, eating more fruits and veggies, and not have any stress make the feelings worse.

If you have a major caffeine habit, you simply have to stretch out the time line and slowly reduce the amount of energy drinks, soda, or coffee you drink each day. If you currently consume two 16 oz. energy drinks per day for example, try to reduce that initially to one 16 oz. and one 8 oz. for a few days, then perhaps drop that further to two 8 oz. energy drinks, then to one 8 oz., then to a bottle of green tea, and then eliminate caffeine completely. This is something that needs to be planned out to be most effective. So grab a calendar or a sheet of paper and keep track of how many mg of caffeine you consume and then start reducing it until you can kick the habit completely. It is a very good idea to consume more water during this process and I find that eating healthy foods and satisfying meals throughout the day helps with the cloudy mind somewhat.

Energy drinks, coffee, and other sources of caffeine and stimulants can cause quite an addiction that can cost you money, sleep, and your health but with the right plan you can kick the habit. Quitting caffeine can be one of the best decisions you make in your life because of all the direct and indirect impacts it can have on your behavior and spending habits. Make the choice now to free yourself from this habit and learn to find your natural balance again.

Hustle is a word that has a variety of meanings based on its usage. In the street vernacular, hustle is often associated with selling drugs but it can be applied to any other money making venture. Selling t-shirts is a hustle, buying a product low wholesale and then flipping it from the back of your trunk for a higher price is a hustle, etc. Hustle is also used in the world of sports, usually someone chasing down a loose ball for instance or not giving up on a play defensively. In either case, hustle is essentially buckling down and putting in work, even if you have to make something out of nothing or go a unique route to accomplish it. I want to use the term to explore some concepts that will help you not only to make money with a side hustle but that can also be applied to any other goals or ventures that you may have in your life, from picking up girls to pursuing an education. These aren’t necessarily hard and fast rules on how to hustle but if you bring them into your own life, your success rate in whatever you do will probably climb a lot.

Have a Greater Goal in Mind

If you’re a student, you may have some idea of what you want to do after you finish school. For example, if your dream is to become a doctor that might be your greater goal or it might be a step on the path. Either way, it is really easy to get bogged down and lose sight of what you wanted to accomplish in the first place. You want to be a doctor, but you forget why you want to pursue that profession while you’re sitting in the library studying for an English exam. Having a greater goal propels you forward during the dark times or simply during the times when your focus is lacking.

Wanting to be a doctor is great but that can often be too vague for your mind to be inspired by. Maybe you really want to be chief or surgery or use the skills you learn as a doctor to treat those who lack access to proper medicine. Whatever the case may be, visualize and revisit each day what that underlying motivation is and how you’re going to get there from where you are now. You won’t want to put in the extra hours that it takes or fight through the pain, if you don’t have a clear sense of where you want to end up.

Break Down that Greater Goal into Smaller Steps

Having a greater goal in mind can point you in the direction you want to head but how will you actually get there? It’s kind of like standing on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean and saying Europe’s over there…great, but what steps would you need to take to make it there? Greater goals give us hope but the smaller steps are what make our dreams a reality. Having smaller goals within the framework of your larger path helps to keep the dream alive and also gives you smaller checkpoints along the way that can help to measure if you’re on the right path.

If your goal is to create a successful website, that you can make a full-time income from, that could be considered a greater goal. However, you will need to break that greater goal down into things like marketing, generating revenue, creating content, etc. Those more general ideas can be broken down further and further until you get down to something like, “I will write one new article each day this week and email 10 other websites to ask if I could do a guest post to help build traffic.” That is something more specific and measurable. You can measure whether or not you wrote one new post each day this week and that is something that can help springboard you to a higher level towards accomplishing your major goal.

Always Learn More

Learning more and more about the world around you and whatever specific topic your specific goal pertains you will help keep you grounded and open you up to new ideas. For example, when I first started to try and get dates or pick up girls I was utterly clueless towards what I should do. I started reading a lot of advice put forth by various pick up artists and other guys and this helped me a lot. However, had I just stopped there I never would have made the identity-level shift, that allowed my confidence to grow ever higher. It was only when I started reading more philosophy, that things really fell into place for me, and I never looked back.

Too often we get caught up in fantasies and then these fantasies creep in to our mind, presenting themselves as our expectations as to how things should go. By constantly learning more, you have to revise your perspective on things, which helps you to be more fluid and open to the possibility that you have been doing things wrong. Learning more also helps to see the world as it really is, which allows you to solve your problems honestly.

Reading books, articles, and the like, will lead to your experimentation and exploration of new ideas and methods. Learn to stop completely pre-judging things based on how you believe it really is and try to learn how it actually is. Experiment with the ideas you pick-up, so that you can learn first-hand whether or not they are truly valuable to your cause or if you were wrong about that idea the whole time. Try to create connections between the things you read and experience and apply these new synthesized ideas to your life and how you will operate in the future.

Solve Problems by Getting to the Root Cause

There are many variables that lie just below the surface if you are willing to dig for them. Don’t misjudge a situation or a problem by concluding that what you initially suspect is anything more than a surface problem. For instance, if you feel lonely it isn’t because you are alone. It probably has to do with your ego and fears and the loneliness is just how it manifests itself. There are always deeper reasons and meanings behind why things happen and if you’re honest with yourself you can get closer to the truth. The more often you dig to the depths of situations, the stronger your mind will become and you can keep yourself aligned with the truth and keep yourself from deceiving yourself.

Take an Indirect Route toward Your Goal

Sometimes taking something head on can be disastrous. If you are out of shape and have a poor diet, the most direct path would be to overhaul your diet and start working out more. However, this is the path that most people take and it often fails. An indirect approach in that situation might be to work on your mind first, eliminating the triggers which cause you to overeat and building discipline so that working out just becomes a habit. Know that going direct isn’t always the most effective method in every situation. There are times when something is so entrenched and has so much power the only way to defeat it is by taking an indirect route and slowly encircling it. If you are not ready to face a certain challenge head-on yet, give yourself options and ways that you can slowly erode its power until you have the means to break down that last step towards your goal.

Learn How to Be Bored

Outside of work or school we often find ourselves with idle time that usually gets eaten up by distraction. It’s easy to get done with an eight hour shift and simply turn on the TV and zone out for the rest of the night. But where is that going to get you? There are plenty of distractions
that will take away our free time, if we let them. Take this time back and turn towards fulfilling one of the steps of your goals.  Use TV and movies as a treat for a job well-done. For instance, if you’ve gotten home from your day job all week long and then put in work on your goals afterwards, take one night out of the week the reward yourself and clear your mind. Just don’t sit there like a slug every night.

Let go of things and keep your mind clear of petty ego based problems. Emotions and negative thought patterns can wreak havoc on your life if you don’t recognize them for what they are and learn to move past them. Hanging on to these emotions and patterns will make you feel as if you need to escape from reality and hence look to distraction. For instance, if you try to get a girl’s number and she rejects you, let it go and don’t take it as a sign that you’re hopeless or no woman will ever love you. Instead, brush off the rejection but take a look at your approach, appearance, or even the words you spoke. Use what you learn for the next time you find yourself in such a situation. Don’t in that situation, fall back into drinking or entertainment to hide your wounds and never have to face rejection ever again, that’s a punk move.

Develop your focus. Focus is what will allow you to get through the boring steps necessary to reach your ultimate goal. Not everything can be fun or glorious. Goals take work and it isn’t always the most interesting thing in the world. If your focus is terrible, learn how to harness it over time. You may need to study a lot of books to accomplish your goal for example, but you can’t make yourself sit down and read. Why not start out with 15 minutes a day at first and work your way up to a heavier load? Remember, that small progressions are still progress so don’t discount these little steps along the way.

Everyone who wants to accomplish a goal needs some hustle in order to get it done. The problem is people get set on the wrong path or don’t have the clarity needed to make their hustle turn into something fruitful. By applying these principles to your own hustle you can increase your rate of success and use each victory as a stepping stone towards that ultimate goal you have.