The Most Important Skill in Your Life

The Most Important Skill in Your Life

   January 18, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

---

---

Humans have a tendency to overweight surface-level benefits.

Everybody wants to be more productive. Everybody wants to learn the hard skills that will make them more successful. Everybody wants to know how they can build smarter habits and cultivate better routines.

These skills have a visible reward that’s very apparent once they’re mastered, and as a result, they get a lot of attention and resources dedicated to them.

If you learn how to manage your time better, you’ll be more equipped to do something useful with it. If you learn to code or to write, you may have a career ahead of you that you can pursue beyond an office. If you build better habits, you can make a lot of difficult tasks easier.

These rewards are clearly valuable. That said, they’re ultimately not the highest leverage skills that you can nurture in yourself. In fact, the skill that is perhaps the most potent of all is also the most neglected.

It’s one that we all already engage with, but it’s also one that very few us of have truly mastered. It’s both easy and difficult at the same time.

The most important skill in your life is knowing how to think.

The Fundamental Meta-Skill

Much of western philosophy can be traced back to the mind of Socrates.

The only problem is that Socrates never wrote anything. The only record we have of the man comes from other writers and philosophers who knew him and engaged with him, most notably Plato.

In Plato’s work, much of the writing is presented in the form of dialogue, and a good portion of the dialogues are of Socrates engaged in conversation with others, which generally end with him out-reasoning them.

He is known to modern society for his Socratic method, which is essentially just a process of asking “Why?” over and over again until you have broken the argument down to its core. In a way, this simple method helps us get to the core promise made by philosophy.

The promise being that it will teach you more than just how to live well. It will teach you how to think, a skill perhaps even more important.

Unfortunately, however, this skill while responsible for everything from how you make decisions to how you face challenges is becoming increasingly disconnected from the institutions that are supposed to teach it to you.

Although the internet has helped by democratizing knowledge, there are few places that provide you with processes for making sense of it.

More than ever, it’s on us to hone this ability. Fortunately, there are ways you can do that. Here are three methods to improve your mental processing.

1. De-Habituate Yourself From Instinct

Most of the responses that we give to our surroundings are habitual.

We sense a cue in our environment, this cue is associated with something in our memory, and whatever is in our memory produces an automatic response.

Although this is efficient when it comes to tasks that don’t require a thought out response, it can be detrimental when applied to other situations.

Psychologists often differentiate between fast thinking and slow thinking, and fast thinking, while convenient, isn’t always completely optimal.

Whether it’s trying to control your anger or it’s making a deliberate effort to better evaluate an important decision at work, it’s worth reminding yourself to look at things like you’re seeing them for the first time.

A beginners mind, coupled with detached experience, produces a far better result than just an instinctual reaction to an event. It forces you to slow down and ask questions before proceeding to a final solution.

This not only works as a way to second-guess an otherwise rushed reaction, but looking at things like a beginner also helps you see and think about different outcomes from a unique and, sometimes, better angle.

2. Take Time to Think About Thinking

What is the core mental representation that you have of the world? How do your thinking patterns connect and interact with each other? What’s the process you go through when you make a decision?

These are important questions, and very few people take time to actually think about them. It’s worth creating some space to do that.

The relationship between the different mental models you have in your mind and how they interact with the world shapes everything else that occurs in your life. It’s the lens through which you make sense of reality.

It’s not something that should be happening in the background of your mind.

It’s something you should actively take time to understand and connect. It’s something you should deliberately manipulate by reading things of value and learning from people who are smarter than you.

As Warren Buffett says, “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business.”

You should know how your brain works so you can better influence it.

3. Routinely Reflect on Your Decisions

Your day to day decisions are ultimately the core product of your thinking.

You can judge the quality of someone’s mind by the track record of their decisions over an extended period of time. If the record is consistent, then their mind is likely sharp. If it’s inconsistent, they have work to do.

Naturally, context matters, and so does their perception of the world, but generally speaking, your decisions tell you a lot of about yourself.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to record every single choice you make, but you should routinely take moments to reflect on how the big things in your life turned out relative to your intention.

If things went well, you should trace back to see why they did so and how you can replicate that in the future. If they went poorly, the dissection of that decision will teach you about a blind-spot that you can avoid in the future.

It creates a feedback loop which, if approached well, self-corrects over time.

The best thing about the past is the wisdom it gives you to improve yourself for the future. That said, for it to do so, you have to actually seek it out.

Why Is It So Important?

While things like productivity and habit building can take you pretty far in life, alone by themselves, there is a limit to what they can do for you.

No matter how you spin it, everything in your life begins in your mind.

The personal outlook you have is shaped by how you think about the situations that you’re engaged with on a daily basis.

The choices you make are influenced by the thinking patterns that guide your attention when you’re deeply lost in thought.

The skills you learn are influenced at their core by what you currently understand about the world and how you reason with it.

In the words of Einstein,

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Every idea, ambition, and possibility in your life is directly connected to your ability to adequately make sense of your interactions with reality.

There is no set place that’s going to teach you how to think, and it’s not just something that’s restricted to a particular time period in your life. It’s a skill that demands ongoing effort and commitment.

Fortunately, if mastered, it changes everything.

Read More

How to Become More Passionate About the Work You Do

How to Become More Passionate About the Work You Do

   January 18, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

---

Photo Credit: http://www.indiewire.com/2017/12/the-greatest-showman-review-hugh-jackman-musical-1201906828/

What’s crazy is how this all began — with a simple YouTube comment.

I’d spent the weekend satiating my adolescent thirst for obnoxiously upbeat and positive music with The Greatest Showman soundtrack.

One particular video stopped me in my tracks.

Beneath that video, one particular comment jumped out.

In that comment, one particular word burned my brain.

“Passion.”

Someone was talking about Hugh Jackman’s passion.

After pandering to the Marvel comic lovers as a ripped, self-healing mutant, it seems Wolverine is now making the movies he wants to make.

It took passion to spend nearly 20 years playing a character the public wanted him to play. It took passion to make action flicks when he would rather sing. It took passion to see his current blockbuster to fulfillment, even though it took over 7 years to make.

But why should you care about Hugh’s sacrifice?

Because today, we believe passion can be developed in a few days (maybe hours!). It is often treated like a light switch — is it ON or OFF?

Unfortunately, that is rarely the case.

I can’t tell you the science behind it. I can’t give you a formula.

All I can tell you is this:

The strength of your passion is almost directly related to the number of sacrifices you make.

It is nearly impossible to develop a burning passion without first setting aside other creature comforts. These desire-building choices are not between what “should” or “shouldn’t” be done, but between what “could” and what “must” be done.

In college, I quit sleeping in on Sunday in exchange for spending time in the computer lab to write. Later that year, I got my first viral hit.

In 2015, I quit fiction writing (something I loved dearly) to focus on non-fiction. Almost 15 days later, my following online grew from 3,000 to 15K in 48 hours.

In 2016, I stopped playing video games. Then wrote a post which grew to #1 in the world on CNBC (a news channel my parents actually knew!)

And now, in 2018, instead of taking what should have been $40,000 in cash for a project, I took equity in a company.

At first, giving up things for my art was hard.

Now, it’s less so.

Why?

Because I know what is on the other end of sacrifice.

And it’s worth it.

Much love,

— Todd B

---

Passion + Ideas = The Future

In today’s world, creative people hold the keys to the future.

More often than not, those keys take the form of ideas.

If you’re a creative person looking for a way to excel, I think you’ll like my free book — The Ultimate Guide to Infinite Ideas. You can get it for the price of an email address.

Grab your copy right here

Read More

Winning The War Of Depression.

Winning The War Of Depression.

   January 16, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

---

Photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash

We are born to disappointments. All of us meet them. Some are more sensitive to their point and bitter than others. We are often lofty in our wish, or sanguine in our expectation, that disappointments cannot but come. They come from foes and friends. They come in prosperity and adversity.

There are two sides to the events which occur and which seem so discouraging to us a dark side and a bright side. We are prone to look only on the dark side, to see only what is gloomy and discouraging. We find a melancholy satisfaction in being miserable, and in making ourselves more unhappy, as if we had been wronged, and as if there were a kind of virtue in dejection and gloom — in refusing, to be comforted. We keep chewing some bitter morsel and rolling it under our tongues so as to suck all the bitterness out of it that we can. Many of us are in great darkness, without knowing, or being able to discover the reason.

A bee has an eye, for I do not know how many facets, which multiply the one thing it looks at into an enormous number. Some of us have eyes made on that fashion, or rather we manufacture for our eyes spectacles on that plan, by which we look at our griefs or our depressing circumstances, and see them multiplied and nothing but them.

We are not merely burdened, we are possessed by a feverish uncertainty. We no longer look at things calmly and therefore truly, and everything appears to us in monstrous and distorted guise. There is no more fatal minister in human life than the disquieted eye. So long as the eye can gaze at things with a cool and quiet vision we see things in their true perspective and proportion. But when the eye is shaken into restlessness its focus is perverted, and everything is seen awry. The disquieted soul is not only possessed of a restless eye, it is the possessor of a nerveless hand.

Nothing is so bad as a continued and allowed downheartedness. The conviction that the circumstances around us are stronger than we can handle. There are times when life itself becomes burdensome and is often shortened, by excessive grief. It magnifies troubles. It drags at and prevents work. It shadows blessings, making the hard things in life prominent rather than the ameliorating things. By recognition of the fact that downheartedness is worst for us, we ought to esteem it as bad for us as malignant tumour and do all we can to cure it before it grows and becomes fatal.

Some people constantly depreciate themselves, and they are thought sincere and humble persons. The truth is it is nothing more than a habit, or worse, an affected self-depreciation. The feeling of self-depreciation pervades the soul in the presence or recollection of some higher examples in matters of life and ambition. An artist of sensitive appreciation of superiority in the presence of a genuine piece of art depreciates to the dust his own performances. A poet with a true poetic sense, when they read or hear some grand poetry, feel very low in their own view. So is it in other things in life.

We Are Human. We Can’t Do Everything. We Can’t Control Everything. We Can’t Be Everywhere. We Can’t Understand Everything. We Can’t Be Someone Else. We Can Be What We Are. We Can Be The Best Of What We Are.

Learnings

1. We cannot control our thoughts nor our moods directly. We can do a great deal to regulate, modify and diminish those of them that need diminishing. Increase those thoughts that need to be increased, by looking at the reasons for them.
2. Question yourselves about your moods, and especially about your sad moods, and you will have gone a long way to make yourselves bigger and happier people than you have ever been before.
3. Heaviness of heart is often caused by bringing the future into the present. We go out to meet the cares and difficulties of tomorrow, while we are bearing and battling with those of today. Planning is good. Over-anxiety is a pain. Sorrow in prospect is much more bitter and grievous than it is in actual experience.
4. We are worth very little unless there is a tribunal in us to which we bring up our feelings and make them justify their existence and tell us what they mean by their noise and their complaining.
5. Everything has two handles. The aspect of any event depends largely on the beholder’s point of view. There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
6. Despondency must have a cause. If we can discover it, in any case, the old proverb holds good that a knowledge of the disease is half its cure.
7. What can your anxiety do for you? Can it avert what you dread? No. But it hastens it. In many respects, our health, our outward well-being, and that of our household are committed to our own keeping and can be safely kept only by a self-collected mind and a quiet heart.
8. Look at the past and it will answer. The vast preponderance with us has always been on the side of happiness. If we have been long of this foreboding habit, not one in a hundred of the sorrows that we have apprehended has reached us. Those, also, that have overtaken us have been lighter than we feared.
9. No effort at tranquilizing our hearts is wholly lost. Did you ever see a child upon a swing? Each oscillation goes a little higher. Each starts from the same lowest point, but the elevation on either side increases with each renewed effort until at last the destined height is reached. So we may if I might so say, by degrees, by reiterated efforts, swing ourselves and stand high above all that breeds agitation and gloom.
10. Outward trouble will not hurt us much so long as it keeps to the outward. The sailor cares not because the green waves with crested heads curl over and dash against the ship, shaking it from stem to stern. Trouble for the sailor is when from one to another the whisper passes through the ship, “We have sprung a leak.” The water in the hold is more dreaded than all the ocean without. Let not what is outside and temporal affect you on the inside.

Read More

10 Pieces of Advice for My Future Self

10 Pieces of Advice for My Future Self

   January 16, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

---

This seems as good an occasion as any to memorialize some learnings from the past three decades.

Since thirty trips around the sun doesn’t qualify me as wise enough to tell anyone else how to live, I’ll address this to my future self.

That said, I hope you’ll find a few gems in here that will bring you more of whatever you’re seeking.

---

1. Control your environment

Don’t trust yourself to make good decisions. Instead, design your environment so the right decision requires the least amount of effort. This might mean you avoid bringing unhealthy food into your home or you turn down a job offer where you may be pressured to compromise your morals. Whatever the case, you’ll have a better chance of making a good decision by setting up the right inputs rather than relying on yourself to create the right outputs.

2. Cure your ignorance

Whenever you’re embarrassed by your own ignorance in a certain subject, resist the urge to convince yourself that it doesn’t matter. Instead, try reading a book about it. Then you can decide whether it’s important.

3. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind

This comes from a quote I like by Maria Popova. History is littered with examples of seemingly smart people who ended up doing or saying dumb things because they were too attached to obsolete mental models. Even for beliefs that have served you well in the past, don’t hold on to any so tightly that they can’t be abandoned in the light of better evidence.

4. Align yourself with those who matter to you

The foundation of any valuable relationship is alignment. This goes for romantic relationships, professional ones, friendships or any other type. You want her to achieve her goals. She wants you to achieve yours. Your relationship works because, together, you both have a better shot at getting what you want. As soon as that that changes (e.g. her professional success damages your ego) the relationship will start to deteriorate. Make sure that you stay aligned with the people who matter to you. Thanks to Russ Klusas for teaching me this one.

5. Create more value than you capture

This quote by Tim O'Reilly encapsulates a great operating principle for businesses and individuals alike. The market typically forces companies to create products that customers value more than the money they offer in exchange. Businesses that can’t accomplish this usually cease to exist. Individuals, however, can hang on for quite a bit longer extracting resources from their relationships without offering much in return. Rarely, however, does this lead to happiness. Eventually, those who extract value without giving to back, end up alone.

When meeting new people, it may be tempting to ask yourself: what can I get out of this encounter? Instead try asking: what might this other person want from our encounter, and how might I deliver it? Whether this impulse strikes you as altruistic or ultimately self-serving, it tends to be a great way to build long-lasting relationships. Put another way, I’ve rarely met anyone who focused on creating value for others that didn’t reap their fair share in return.

6. Use humor wisely

Humor has always served as my defense to keep unimportant things (politics, relationship drama) from taking on too much significance. I’ve found it to be a great way to turn mountains into molehills. Unfortunately, I’ve also used it to prematurely diminish things (like eating healthy, personal finance, exercise, etc.) that later turned out to be hugely valuable. In those situations I used humor to justify my own lazy choices. Ultimately, embracing humor has made for a richer, happier life. Just don’t use it as a way to delude yourself out of trying things that are hard.

7. The obstacle is the way

Few great stories concern a hero who wants something and has an easy time getting it. We instinctually admire those who must overcome massive odds to achieve their goals. Yet, when obstacles show up in our own life, it’s easy to fall into self pity. While I can’t claim to have been tested by truly overwhelming obstacles, I like to challenge myself to take what problems I do encounter and try to identify the opportunity. I’ve found that each time I do this, the next problem feels less weighty. I hope this practice will keep me antifragile in the case that I end up facing something that truly tests me.

8. Don’t react. Respond.

There’s a story I read somewhere that’s always stuck with me. It involves two dining companions at a fancy restaurant. Suddenly, one of the guests screams at the sight of a cockroach in her salad. She swats at the bug which flies off her salad and lands on her dining companion’s jacket. As the bug scrambles around his jacket the man starts furiously smacking himself in an attempt to squash it. Meanwhile, the waiter, alerted by the commotion grabs a wine glass and napkin, scoops the bug off the diner’s jacket with the napkin and traps it under the wine glass. He carries the roach outside and lets it free on the sidewalk.

The diners reacted and created chaos. The waiter responded and fixed the problem. I can’t tell you how many problems in my life could have been better solved by taking 5 minutes to formulate a strategy rather than reacting impulsively.

9. Expand your internal locus of control

Crappy genes. Bad parents. Poorly designed policies. There are all sorts of forces outside your control that can cause you to suffer. Ultimately though, the final layer that reality has to pass through is your own interpretation. You have the ability to reframe whether you feel like you can make your life better or whether you’re at the whim of oppressive external forces. While choosing the latter may feel good, and may even be justified sometimes, it will not better your life. Developing a strong internal locus of control allows you to believe you have the ability to control your circumstances.

While I’m unsure to the extent which I believe in free will, I have seen first hand that those who have a strong internal locus of control tend to fare much better than those who fixate on external forces (regardless of how many problems they are facing). So, while there’s a chance this belief may be rooted in self delusion, it certainly seems to be a useful one.

10. Time is your most precious resource. Spend it well.

If you want to understand what someone truly values, look at how they spend their time. It’s a telling indicator because time is everyone’s most limited resource. Sometimes it may make sense to spend your time doing things you don’t like in exchange for other assets like money or information. However, this is a risky strategy as no one can tell you how much time you have left and there’s no way to get any more of it. I try to spend my days as if I’m going to make it to 100 while still remembering that a satellite chunk could fall on my head at any moment. Balancing respect of death and hope for a long and happy life, seems to have incentivized me to make good decisions about my time, thus far.

While you may not be able to get more time, you can slow down how fast it passes (at least in your mind). To illustrate, have you ever gone on vacation and noticed how the first day in a new place seems to last a long time? This has to do with a theory about how the brain processes novelty. When you encounter new things your brain recruits more cognitive resources to make sense of it and capture details. This extra expenditure of brain power makes the encounter seem longer. Conversely, when you’ve repeated the same commute a few dozen times, your brain doesn’t need to expend much energy capturing details, making the time seem to fly by. I’ve taken this as a license to try new things as often as possible. Traveling to new places or just taking a slightly different route on my walk to work.

I hope next time you read this, you’re still trying new things. At best, it may give you the feeling of just a bit more time and at worst it will make your life all the richer for trying.

Read More

Why Being Your Own Boss Is Probably A Bad Idea

Why Being Your Own Boss Is Probably A Bad Idea

   January 15, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

---

For most people, it’s the equivalent of being lost.

You can be very busy, and yet do nothing substantial.

In my experience, that is the reality for most people who are self-employed. They work super hard, but their work isn’t directed into a direction that has the potential of ever getting them anywhere.

Most of my adult life has been like that.

I got excited about something, and I put all my heart and mind into that.

For a while.

I worked very hard on getting as much stuff done as possible with whatever little resources I had other than my own time.

I got myself engulfed in tactics.

Doing. Executing. Working my ass off.

The result? I had done a lot of stuff, but I wasn’t any step closer towards my real goals.

Instead of a good product, I had a nice-looking website.

Instead of real customer understanding, I had a social media account with x followers.

Instead of profitability, I had spent my money on some nice-looking business cards.

---

… and then the next “exciting” opportunity came along

What was the result of this? New website, new social media accounts, new business-cards.

Yes, I know. I was stupid.

But I really don’t think that this behavior is so uncommon in the start-up/freelance world.

Most ‘entrepreneurs’ simply don’t know what they are doing. They are without plan. Without accountability. Without any business-sense.

They are either professionals in a particular field, or they basically have nothing tangible except for their own youth and enthusiasm. Regardless of which of these two it is, they have zero experience in building a real business.

You know, one of these things that actually get money flowing in.

A business with a real, actionable business-plan. Not a fluffy, cute little thing that exists only in somebody’s dreams.

Do you even know what you are selling?

Do you even have a clear plan how to make money?

Do you even know who needs that stuff you are selling?

Do you even know how much money you need to cover your expenses, and whether or not a big-enough market exists for that?

If we’re honest to ourselves, most ‘entrepreneurs’ can not even answer the most basic questions around their ‘business’ or whatever that thing is they are hoping to build.

---

Busyness without purpose

Photo by Oliver Wendel on Unsplash

The day has come. You have finally decided to take that step. You are now officially un-empoye… ehh, self-employed. Congratulations! You now have what you always dreamed of.

Finally, you can decide whatever you want to do. You can decide when you want to work and when you want to take a break. You can decide how much money you want to pay yourself.

You stare at your computer.

“Now what?”, you think to yourself.

Well, I could… start by building a website! Yes, that way I can clarify in my head what exactly it is I am trying to sell. And, anyways, don’t all the experts say that as an entrepreneur I should always be willing to learn new skills?

So you start working on the website and oops!… before you know it, one week has passed.

Congratulations. You have now spent a week’s worth of time and $100 on building that website.

Now, what are you gonna do with that?

Hmm, okay. So now I have a website. So maybe I could… try to bring on some people who are interested in my product?

(which product, by the way?)

The problem is that very few people who are ‘self-employed’ are actually capable of directing their attention on the most central issues that are actually involved in building a business.

Their mind is simply jumping back and forth between different things that could be done, without any clear plan and sense of direction.

With all the new things that are constantly coming up, in this way it is easy to get caught up in a never-ending spiral of busyness without purpose.

---

Going through years of struggle

A business-sense.

Self-control.

Accountability.

Market knowledge.

Dealing with uncertainty.

Making a clear plan and sticking with it.

These, and many more characteristics, are essential to have for successful entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately, none of them can be developed in short periods of time. They are all a result of years and years of making mistakes, learning from them, and re-applying these lessons learned in new situations.

As a result, the large majority of first-time entrepreneurs or freelancers are most likely going to fail.

What does this mean in reality?

Yes, that’s right. Years of struggle. Years of living without a decent income. Years of being scared about whether or not you’re going to be able to pay the bills next month.

Please, live with the reality:

Being self-employed is really fucking hard.

It is definitely not what the media are promising us. All this stuff about being in control of your own life. Having the freedom to make your decisions. Being able to work from wherever you want.

In the beginning, and for quite a long time to come, being self-employed means not being able to think about anything else but your work.

It means spending almost all of your time on your business, often without making any money at all. It means being anxious all the time, without any clear idea of whether or not you are ever going to succeed. It means devoting all your life to a dream, which may or may never come true.

---

Are you really one of the few?

According to the global entrepreneurship monitor, 27 million Americans are currently either starting- or running a business. This makes up for about 14 percent of the working population.

70% of all business ventures fail.

Finally, this means that there are about 8 million Americans are actually going to be able to live from their entrepreneurial venture on the long run.

Not only is this less than 2% of the total population, but many of them are also going to run their business in a way that is hardly better than survival from a financial perspective.

But please, don’t get me wrong here.

It may sound as if I am trying to discourage you from becoming an entrepreneur. That is not the case at all.

Society definitely needs people who are producing rather than consuming, creating job opportunities for others, and push the development of humanity forward with their inventions.

But what I really want is for you to be aware of the consequences what it means for your life if you are deciding to walk that route.

Gary Vaynerchuk has often said that if you have ever been able to stand working on a job as an employee for longer than a year or so, then you are most probably not going to make it as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs are people who can’t stand living their life in any other way. People who can’t stand working for others. People who love the dirt of working hard and pushing through all odds. People who embrace the pain, instead of running away from it. People who thrive in uncertainty and are pushed forward by it. People who are willing to sacrifice everything in order to make their dream come true.

Before you make that decision to become self-employed, please do yourself a favor and think through all these issues carefully.

Are you really willing to sacrifice almost everything for your dream of being your own boss? And, if yes, do you have the patience to commit to years of eating dirt before you see any results?

If your answer is no, then please be honest with yourself and don’t commit yourself to something that will only make you unhappy. The world needs you the way you are, not the way that the world is glorified by the media.

If your answer is yes, then please build something awesome. And hey, don’t starve in the process.

Read More