We try time and again to pick ourselves up, rebuild our habits, improve old ones — only to find that we lose track once we’ve achieved our goals.

Runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. When all of your hard work is focused on a certain goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it?

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game.

The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.

If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your…

Let’s face it, in this digital age, our influences affect who we are and what we are becoming. To manage them, we first have to identify them.

There are mainly three types of influences that affect us:

1. Input (What you feed your mind)

Your brain is programmed to seek out the negative — dwindling resources, destructive weather, whatever’s out to hurt you. (This is why Television and News is so appealing.)

Work — an idea that is so familiar, but at best still abstract to all of us. It is a place we spend most of our lives in, something that provides, how we define ourselves, an output to be achieved. But to ask ourselves, “What is work, really?”, not merely as a philosophical question, could create an incredible potential of value.

What did work use to be in the past? What is work now? What will the future of work be? Exploring these questions would help us to be better prepared for the evolution of work.

1. What did work used to be?

In the preindustrial economy…

The new year often calls for a period of self-reflection and re-evaluation of our life purposes and goals. Not to be cliché, but the unexamined life is seriously not worth living. I don’t think resolutions ought to be a yearly affair, in fact, I guess the more often we re-evaluate our strategies and goals, the better we get at it. Of course, we’ve got to give our strategies a chance for experimentation.

I learned a lot from 2018. I would say it was a year where my personal development took an accelerated path, not really by choice, but by the…

Reading Mark Manson’s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck” has changed my life, mainly because it reinforced the perspectives and values I have cultivated in my life. One of the many important ideas that have shaped my thinking and something I’ve learnt to better express after reading it was the idea that this world is full of entitled little brats. I strongly feel it in every bone of my body that everybody on this planet needs to read the following excerpt and probably the whole book to make the world a better place.

“Most people want to have…

I’ll admit it, I am a lazy person. I am that person who’ll go under the barricades at airport immigration lines just so I don’t have to make a big U-turn. I visit the office restroom with my water bottle so I can refill it in the pantry beside because I don’t want to make two trips down. I am so lazy that I want to know all the shortcuts in life.

Some people treat laziness as a disease. But could it actually be something that could be leveraged on as a strength? Laziness is not some fatal flaw you…

1. Negotiation is coaxing, not overcoming; co-opting, not defeating; successful negotiation involves getting your opponent to do the work for you and suggest the solution himself. It gives him the illusion of control when you are in fact the one defining the conversation.
2. Mirror your opponent.
3. Show empathy.
4. Label the negative feeling.
5. Use deadlines — this entices people to rush.
6. “No” is the start of a negotiation — to understand why and gather more information. Ask “no”-oriented questions. “No” helps to reduce defensiveness.
7. Work in the positive use of the word “fair” — it put the others on a defensive.
8. Emotionally…

We often think of the possibilities of an idea before we expand on it. If it’s too small, it sounds boring, unexciting — we think: this won’t work, I’ll probably only have 10 customers. I need something bigger.

I recently listened to a Tim Ferris podcast episode by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Brian Chesky of Airbnb and here are the really useful insights I gained.

The truth is, it’s really hard to get even 10 people to love something.

But if you spend enough time with them, it’s not that hard. So, learn what people love. Sit in the…