School very often forces people to learn for tests and forget everything afterwards. That’s not only bad, it’s the totally wrong approach towards learning. Just to make people comparable to each other does not give someone else the right to judge whatever you are doing. Here are some important principles that school usually undervalues throughout your education.

improve your strength, quit fixing the weakness

The most important lesson in life is to quit running after your weakness. Every human has loads of strengths, it’s important to build on those. You can always be something else, but it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get through stuff that you don’t want to do, or are simply not your strong sides, than going for what your skills tell you to do. Some people are great at math, others rock as artists. It’s not important to be perfect at everything, just do what you do and focus on it. And even if your biggest skill is to multitask, simply focus on that

Positive Psychology these days tries to fix people up with improving their life rather through positive feedback rather than simply fixing flaws that are not necessarily worth fixing at all. To lead a happy & fullfilled life we have to be challenged, which is perfectly proven through the flow effect, how else is it explained that we don’t recognize time when we are perfectly challenged?

the Pareto Principle & Batching

Pareto’s Prinicple just tells us that most of the time when we work, we are simply not productive and that everything boils down to a 80/20 rule. This means basically 80 percent of the value you receive will come from 20 percent of your activities, friends, co-works, training habits, basically everything can be reduced to this. At least when it comes to productivity.

Most of the stuff we are doing each day is usually not as productive as it could be, leaving us doing either a lot of stuff we don’t have to do and could cut out, or that is simply put a leisure of us.

We can drop – or rather decrease time we spend on – almost everything, whether it be through outsourcing, batching or optimizing your time. Tim Ferriss and his 4 hour workweek concept are a good example for this whole idea of reducing your workload to do something fun. It’s important though, that not everything is wasting time, a lot of stuff is simply not being productive. Never forget we are all only human and don’t have to be perfect, it’s ok to not get everything done perfectly.

Batching is simply doing things that you are doing far to often and take some time each day to cut down the actual time you spend on it. Rather than check stats or email 50 times a day create automated systems for email telling everyone that you only check at a special time. Check stats every week, as you can’t influence them that much anyways and it’s just an ego trip.

Parkinson’s Law

We can do things quicker than we think.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson’s Law says that a task will expand in time and seeming complexity depending on the time you set aside for it. The more time you give yourself to complete a task, the more difficult it will become.

Reduce the time you spend, the level of your output might drop a bit, but your Cost-benefit will allow you to work more effective. The less time you have available the more your mind has to focus on the solutions and action, instead of doing more research and cluttering.

Whenever you think “Productivity instead of Activity” remember Parkinson’s Law and add the perfect addition of Pareto’s Principle with the 80:20 rule to the mix, 20% of your actions determine 80% of the results.

be aggressive, not passive

We are all living a more or less passive life, television or internet surfing, wasting hours away without really doing nothing. At least when we are passive consumers. Step out of this vicious cycle and start being aggressive about what you are doing. If everyone is passive and only reacts when someone approaches him, very little will get done. Simply do what you have to do instead of relying on others to help you. Don’t be passive aggressive, be actively aggressive

Trying to be an alpha male/female and making decisions while taking actions will help you in several ways….

1. You don’t have to wait for others to make a decision.

2. People look at you in a different way, as there are far less people taking action and responsibility.

3. You can determine your life how you want it to be.

4. You are rarely at the fate of others who will tell you what to do.

As you can see, it can really be hard to be an alpha male/female and take a stand. It takes an opinion, you have to be settled and know what you want to achieve. It’s far easier to be passive, but it’s less rewarding and will only get you to a certain point.

failure counts as done

Mistakes are good.

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
—Wayne Gretzky

Eighty percent of success is showing up.
—Woody Allen

If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.
—Frank Wilczek

No matter what we do, we usually make mistakes and fail every once in a while. There are so many empty phrases around this whole idea, it’s better to use less of them. Just remember, first of all failure means learning and try to avoid making the same mistake over and over again. Usually it does not matter if you fail, it should not prevent us from doing something, it’s part of a learning curve and where we simply have to adjust what we are doing. It’s far worse to never fail, because you have probably never really tested yourself and your skills.

positive feedback loops are everything

Stimulate your inner demons and learn to talk in the right way with yourself. Don’t ask yourself how you could fail, ask yourself how you can improve, which steps can help you to clean up with life. You can file this under some wussy bollocks and go to the next step, but the mind is one of the strongest tools we can access and use to our advantage. Imagine yourself how you want to be, write down how to improve yourself. I am by no means I shrink, but if you are interested in evolving your inner game you should check out the whole NLP movement, pick up some books and maybe find a coach.

“You live in your own reality”, this may sound like some joke phrase, but the one who has the strongest reality is either insane or someone very powerful

don’t fear the fear

Fear is something natural and it’s probably far too easy to say that we should not care about it too much, but actually it’s important to learn to accept that fear is just a chemical process and social conditioning. Nowadays most fear is overrated, it’s not that we are a the brink of death every time it pops up. It can be everything from failing a test, to talking to a women or something else, that’s actually not that dangerous at all once we come to think of it.
The first step to mastering fear is to be rational about it. What can be the worst outcome of what is causing us fear? What will happen if we fail this test? What will happen if we get burned by approaching someone we don’t know? How will it change our life? After all life will be pretty much the same and we will adapt. Our society fuels all those fears and tries to sell us illusions of safety, but be real about it, life will never be save and that is a good thing. Just as George Carlin or Tyler Durden said we give up far too much and get attached too just as much, “and all for the illusion of safety”. Let the chips fall where they may and let’s evolve.

don’t wait for things to happen, make them happen

In pretty much any experience there are always things that you can learn from it and things within the experience that can help you to grow. Negative experiences, mistakes and failure can sometimes be even better than a success because it teaches you something totally new, something that another success could never teach you.

Whenever you have a “negative experience” ask yourself: where is the opportunity in this? What is good about this situation? One negative experience can – with time – help you create many very positive experiences.