Outcome Attachment Kills Performance: Relax Instead

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BY Brett

Want to know a fantastic way to sabotage your performance?

Be dependent on success. Attach everything to the success of your performance. Say, “If I don’t come through here, I’m a failure. I suck. I’m not good at what I do.”

If you do that, watch yourself tense up. Watch your performance go downhill. Watch yourself get even more tense as you try to save yourself from failure.

More often than not, your tension will end up being your downfall. At the end of your performance, you’ll look at yourself and think, “Well, I lost. I failed. Now I’m not good at anything, and I’m just a failure,” and so on, until you end up shredding your self-concept into a million pieces and think of yourself as the most incompetent human being to ever walk the earth.

Attachment to the outcome – staking your self-esteem on your performance – did you in.

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Slow Down, Please

BY Brett

One of my biggest flaws as a person is that I’m always trying to move fast. Being a productivity junkie will do that to you: I’m always trying to do things as efficiently as possible so I can move onto the next thing. The logic is, of course, that the faster I do things, the more I’ll be able to do, and the more I do, the happier I’ll be. Getting a lot of things done just feels good.

Of course, by perpetually focusing on getting the thing I’m doing done so I can move onto the next thing, I’m never really focused on or enjoying the thing I’m doing in the present – for example, writing this post. I’m worried about reading Infinite Jest later (which is an awesome, awesome book, by the way), and after that, working out, and after that, meditating, and after that, cleaning up my RSS feeds, my twitter feed, and realigning my life on the Internet so I can do what I need to do in order to make this blog grow more and enjoy myself along the way...

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How to Kill Burn Out

BY Brett

How many times have you been bogged down in the middle of a project, feeling like giving up because there’s no light at the end of the tunnel? The project feels as if it’ll never get done, everything you do takes forever, you’re starting to get frustrated with the process, and the best option – the option that will seemingly free you – is to quit.

Unfortunately, quitting renders all the time you spent and all the frustration you had meaningless. All those sleepless nights, cringe-worthy meetings, and the tens or hundreds of hours dedicated to getting things done? All gone. Don’t mean anything.

So, of course, you have to press on in spite of your growing sense of frustration and hopelessness. But, in order to do so and keep yourself sane, you have to change the way that you’re doing your project. If you keep doing what you’re doing and press on valiantly, sure – you’ll get the project done. But, by the end, you...

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Going From Good to Great

BY Brett

Inspired by two awesome posts – one by Jonathan Fields and one by Seth Godin – I’ve had yet another epiphany.

At its core, it’s this: always be willing to go the extra mile, to do what others might deem ‘unreasonable’, to do the right thing.

Why? Because, my friends, that’s just what you do. Doing what’s right and spending the extra energy to make sure it gets done should be a part of you, something that’s just part of your identity. It should be automatic.

Now – getting to that point isn’t easy. In fact, it’s incredibly difficult, since you’ll be fighting the temptation to give in and only give what’s deemed “good enough”.

But you have to tell yourself that being “good enough” just isn’t...

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Total Self-Improvement: How to Become a Complete Human

BY Brett

I’ve always tried to be great at everything I’ve put my mind to. School, athletics, even writing this blog – I’ve always tried to reach my best, in every facet of my life.

Why? I believe in becoming a complete human being. One that has strengths in every area, and weaknesses in as few as possible.

Becoming a complete human is the end of all self-improvement. It is the goal that we are always striving for – to become a balanced, good person across every aspect of our lives. A true jack-of-all-trades or the archetypal Renaissance man is what I’ve tried to become – and I think everyone in the self-improvement game will trend towards becoming one themselves. It’s part of the natural process.

Becoming a complete human being requires being very good in every ‘sphere’ of life – it requires having integrity and being an honest person; having diverse knowledge of a wide range of subjects; being...

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How (And Why) To Transform Inaction Into Action

BY Brett

It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking that I hold tremendous power, writing for this blog, which thousands of people read per day.

It’s easy to think that I’m some guru (I’m not) with the ability to change people for the better.

It’s easy to think that I hold all the responsibility for changing you, that my content is what will cause you to change yourself over time so you can live a better and easier life.

It’s easy to think all of this because it deflects responsibility from yourself. Since the job of changing yourself is in my hands, you don’t need to put any effort in; you figure that whenever you get the ideas in your head that you need in order to live better, you’ll automatically change, with no extra effort. You think it’ll be as simple and as effortless as flicking a switch.

Wrong. I can only show you what is possible, what ideas work, and what practices we can use to improve ourselves....

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The Simplest Way To Build a Habit

BY Brett

Building a habit, no matter what anyone tells you, is much, much easier than you think. People tend to overthink it, making it into something more complex than it is. It’s not that difficult. And I’m someone who used to have some serious trouble in developing and keeping good habits.

Ready?

You just have to do it once.

And then do it once more.

And then again. And again. And again. Eventually, it’ll become automatic.

That’s how you build a habit – all you have to do is do something once, then repeat it. But the key here is that you realize that you only really have to do that thing once. Once you do it once, all you have to do after that is do it again. And again.

Basically – if you call a behavior a “habit” when you do it automatically, you can hack the habit-building paradigm by making yourself do it automatically, no matter what. As you do that thing over and over again,...

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Ask the Readers: Goal-Setting

BY Brett

Over time, as I’ve delved into the awesome texts of productivity and achievement, I’ve seen conflicting views on goal-setting.

The dilemma is: should you even set them?

On one hand, setting goals lets you hone in on what you want to get done, and creates a reward mechanism that lets you feel great after you accomplish your goals. It allows you to focus on what truly needs to get done, and provides a structure by which you can make your dreams come true. I’ll call this the Chris Guillebeau school of goal-setting, since he has a fairly structured model for goal-setting via his annual review.

On the other hand, setting goals comes with a cost – the damaged feeling of self-esteem whenever you do not complete them. Also, if you become obsessed with goal-setting and achieving your goals, you’ll do nothing except...

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Why You Should Stop Being “Productive”

BY Brett

Disclaimer: I don’t like “productivity”.

I think that people misunderstand what it means to be “productive” so much that chasing the holy grail of “productivity” ends up being destructive rather than beneficial. That’s because we, in our over-reliance on measurement and logic as human beings, have decided to deliberately change the meaning of what it means to be “productive”.

What we know as “productivity” is actually faux-productivity. It’s fake productivity. It’s no good. It’s just about useless as a concept. And, yet, when we try and determine how “productive” we are, we almost always resort to using faux-productivity as a way to gauge how efficiently we get our work done.

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How to Be a Productive Goal Achiever + Special Offer

BY Adam

7 Steps for Turning Inefficiency into Goal Achievement

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while now because I began taking note of something interesting about myself this summer. It seems that I and many others have a bit of trouble focusing and being productive during the hot summer months or what is known as the summer doldrums. This is not merely a summer phenomenon. Many times during the year I am my own worst enemy when it comes to accomplishing what I’ve set out to do because I get sidetracked easily and I enjoy being engrossed in busy-ness of working in my business that I often forget to work on my business. I am speaking of my particular case and business goals but you can apply this to any goals or aspirations in your life.

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