Symptoms Of Missing Excitement

It’s really disturbing what a lack of excitement affects me. Here are some of the effects insufficient excitement can have on me:

• Difficulty getting out of bed.
• Tiredness
• Increased need for sleep
• Sleeping way too long, but still feeling tired and without energy
• Reduced level of fitness and energy
• Increased susceptibility to diseases
• Lack of motivation
• Procrastination
• Difficulty concentrating
• Diminished productivity
• Anhedonia: Inability to experience pleasure from activities formerly found enjoyable
• Decreased libido
• Continuously progressing reduction of self-control
• Diffuse terrible feelings which appear spontaneously for no apparent reason
• Feeling anxious for no apparent reason
• Negative outlook on life and reality.
• Urges to engage in addictive behavior, like playing games excessively or drug (ab)use
• Feeling lonely, no matter how my social reality looks like
• Feelings of helplessness
• Depression
• Burnout
• Suicidal thoughts

Pretty scary, huh? Well, the lack of excitement seems to be the common theme that lies behind these problems of mine. It might look like a lack of excitement is the result of the symptoms above, but the symptoms only appear after I experienced an enduring lack of excitement in my life. At any time in my life in which I felt really excited I felt rather the opposite of those symptoms.

Why Is Excitement So Important?

I want to write a more thorough article on excitement, but first I would like you to come up with some ideas and answer the question form the title:

Why is excitement the existential psychological need?

Here, existential really means that you can’t exist for too long without at least some excitement. I assume that this is the case. Why? Think about it. There are some intriguing phenomena which might indicate that we really need some excitement for our survival (or at the very least for our good functioning). What are these? Got any ideas?

Often, I face this problem with my writing projects. At first, I start with huge enthusiasm. Then things get slightly less exciting. Finally, the writer’s block hits me. My productivity dies and the project is put on ice. It’s a pretty consistent pattern for all my ambitious projects. And almost all my projects are ambitious to some degree.

Why Perfectionism Sucks

Perfectionism is the arch-enemy of my motivation and productivity. Perhaps it’s even my absolutely biggest problem. Unfortunately, it doesn’t suffice to identify it as problem. As life-long bad habit it is too deeply rooted inside of me, so I need to fight it actively. And that’s pretty hard, because intuitively perfectionism sounds like a good thing in theory. It would be great if we could do everything perfectly. But we can’t.

Absolute Perfection Doesn’t Exist, So Perfectionism Doesn’t Work

We can avoid certain mistakes, but we can’t avoid making mistakes at all. Nothing we do is really absolutely perfect. There’s always something that could be better. Always. If you think otherwise, you aren’t just looking critically enough.

For every real world object there’s a set of quality standards that this object doesn’t come up to. Are smartphones perfect? No, their performance is weaker than those of desktop PCs, and they shut down once the battery is empty. Are Goethe’s literary works perfect? No, they are too difficult to understand. Are these examples perfect? Heck no, lots of people could come up with better ones after giving it some thought.

On the other hand, perfection regarding to a single quality can very well be achieved. There are products that are perfectly cheap: Freebies. Documents can be perfect in the sense that they contain no errors. Programs can be simplified so much that they can’t be simplified further.

Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery [found at Quotes For Software Engineers]

Let’s call the first type of (unattainable) perfection absolute perfection and the second type specific perfection. What is usually called perfection is more or less perfection regarding to some not necessarily clearly specified criteria, and takes place between absolute and specific perfection. While absolute perfection is impossible, and specific perfection often can be attained, it cannot be clearly determined whether colloquial perfection is possible, or not.

Defining Perfectionism

Let’s see how Wikipedia defines perfectionism in philosophy

In ethics and value theory, perfectionism is the persistence of will in obtaining the optimal quality of spiritual, mental, physical, and material being. [...] The perfectionist does not believe that one can attain a perfect life or state of living. Rather, a perfectionist practices steadfast perseverance in obtaining the best possible life or state of living.

and perfectionism in psychology (emphasis by me)

Perfectionism, in psychology, is a belief that perfection can and should be attained. In its pathological form, perfectionism is a belief that work or output that is anything less than perfect is unacceptable. At such levels, this is considered an unhealthy belief, and psychologists typically refer to such individuals as maladaptive perfectionists.

Philosophical perfectionism could also be circumscribed as determination to approximate perfection is areas that actually matter. It’s a viable, although quite challenging, way of life which I personally subscribe to (if you didn’t already guess that from the title of this blog). The practically interesting question is how you approximate perfection – and this is where the psychological kind of perfectionism comes into play.

If you want every single project of yours to yield perfect results instantly, you have a problem. Before you can create something even just specifically perfect you need to produce lots of junk first. Otherwise you won’t get the necessary experience to even come close to perfection. I’ve read that even the most successful authors produce first drafts of their novels which are pretty bad. I really don’t have the desire to verify that claim, but I guess it’s true.

Believing that you can produce perfect results on your first try is totally wrong and maladaptive. Instead, you just get something done, no matter how bad the results, and do it better the next time. That’s called training. Or you get something done and improve it afterwards in several steps. That’s incremental improvement. It’s what programmers do if they want to do a good job (otherwise there wouldn’t be any need for version numbers).

Actually, the kind of perfectionism that this post is mostly is about is just consists in having ambitions which are so high that they threaten the success of a project. How does being too ambitious sabotage your success? For reaching really great results you need to put of lot of time and energy into that project – often more than you are able or willing to pay. Perfectionists tend to overestimate their own abilities to produce super-high-quality results in no time and show unrealistic optimism. Conversely, they are unrealistically pessimistic about the negative results of doing something less than perfectly.

Effects Of Perfectionism On Motivation And Productivity

Yeah, I might be preaching to myself here. When I started this blog I felt a drastic decrease of motivation. I was rather confused by that phenomenon and couldn’t explain it. Now I have a plausible explanation: I wanted this blog to be a really high quality blog – at least compared to my former personal blog which didn’t really aim at quality and usefulness. But that ambition turned blogging into something resembling hard work. Thus, my motivation dropped and I haven’t written nearly as much as I intended to do.

The higher your quality standards are, the harder it is to satisfy those standards. Usually, the large amount of effort required to meet ambitious goals decreases the fun you have on the way. Less fun means less motivation means less dedicated work (and more procrastination) means less productivity. In turn, a decrease in productivity is frustrating and destroys fun. Therefore, perfectionism can initiate a vicious circle which can only be stopped by abandoning perfectionism.

Healthy Alternatives To Perfectionism

But which level of quality standards is good? Let’s begin with following observation: If your quality standards are so high that they make you want to quit, then they are obviously too high! Aim for a baseline level of performance which you are really comfortable with even if you are not at your best and feel pretty tired. Intersperse sprints of high intensity work, but don’t expect that you will be able to sprint all the time without crashing badly afterwards.

Optimalism

You still can be ambitious without falling in the trap of perfectionism. Optimalism is a concept that is presented in Tal Ben-Shahar’s book The Pursuit of Perfect. A book review of The Pursuit Of Perfect mentions the key concepts of optimalism:

• Optimalists value the journey, expect detours, and seek to learn from (not fear) failure: “learn to fail or fail to learn”.
• They set high standards and ambitious goals that are attainable and grounded in reality.
• Optimalists appreciate and savor success, and can find satisfaction in a less than perfect performance.
• The “good enough” mindset results in more energy. Coping and learning increases self-confidence, encouraging optimalists to take on more challenges.
• A rich emotional life of high self-esteem and self acceptance is the reward for being an optimalist.

What distinguishes perfectionism and optimalism is that optimalists are more realistic and ready to accept results which aren’t as good as possible. Perfect results require so much effort that it’s economically inefficient to pursue them.

Another formulation of optimalism comes from the post Optimalism: The Ism That Will Change Your Life:

Pursuing the best course of action, that gets maximum output from minimal input, to achieve optimal results.
1. Ascertain the BEST course of action
2. Ascertain how you can get the maximum results for the smallest amount of effort (think: pulley, delegation, 80/20)

Instead of requiring perfect results, optimalists seek for the methods that yields the highest output per unit of effort. Focusing on the essentials and minimizing the rest is the way to go.

Satisficing

Alternatively you could just go for “good enough”. That’s basically the idea behind satisficing:

Satisficing, a portmanteau “combining satisfy with suffice”, is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution. A satisficing strategy may often be (near) optimal if the costs of the decision-making process itself, such as the cost of obtaining complete information, are considered in the outcome calculus.

Perhaps it would be the best for me to apply a satisficing approach to blogging. I could set up basic requirements for blog posts like:

• Has an interesting and descriptive title.
• It is useful in some sense.
• Is so interesting that I would share it on social media if it was written by someone else.
• Uses headers for structuring.
• Contains at least one image.
• Is proofread at least once.

What’s the point of writing a post here if I wasn’t even willing to share it on Facebook or Twitter? Of course, I could go further and require that my posts are really original, cover a topic in-depth, feature scientific results, and deliver a powerful emotional experience. But trying to satisfy all these conditions at once would require an unreasonable amount of time and effort. It’s important to draw a clear line between basic requirements and optional extras.

How To Defeat Perfectionism

Knowing about healthier alternatives might not be enough to stop perfectionism. After all, the idea of doing something really really well is so attractive that it’s hard to go for “ok” and build on that incrementally. So, what does the Bloggosphere have to offer in the war against perfectionism?

In the post Perfectionism: How To Defeat It, And How Not To Pass It On some potential causes for perfectionism are mentioned: Fear and lack of self-confidence due to the experience of inappropriate criticism in childhood.

Ultimately, in my mission to defeat my own perfectionism, the key was this: I resolved to do new things even when I was scared. I allowed myself to make mistakes. I recognized that mistakes don’t change who I am as a person. I admitted my mistakes to others and asked for help.

Penelope Trunk offers a really interesting solution for perfectionism in her post Perfectionism Is a Disease. Here’s How to Beat It.

Allow yourself to be wrong in front of others.
Try having an opinion that is wrong. Tell a story that is stupid. Wear clothes that don’t match. Turn in a project that you can’t fully explain. People will not think you’re stupid. People will think you spent your time and energy doing something else — something that meant more to you.

A very surprising suggestion comes from Jessica Stillman and her post 5 Ways to Beat Perfectionism:

Compare yourself to others. This probably sounds surprising when the prevailing wisdom says not to. But we perfectionists need frequent reality checks. Think about whatever has you firing on all cylinders and what you’re hoping to achieve. Now notice how many people are doing quite well, thankyouverymuch, without raising the bar so high.

Five habits that defeat perfectionism and procrastination contains lots of good advice. For example this effective method:

In most cases, regardless of our specific “work product”, we can produce an SFD [shitty first draft]. Write a rambling, confused legal brief. Code up a short program that breaks easily. Create an incomplete document outline that helps structure our ideas. Some “all or nothing” cases exist, where it might appear that the rule doesn’t apply – flying aircraft or performing surgery, for example. In these cases, however, practitioners still complete SFDs. They just do them in a safe environment, using a cadaver, or a flight simulator.

Do I have something to add to all those suggestions? Yes: This blog post is good enough now.

What helped you to overcome perfectionism? Of course, your comments don’t need to be perfect.

Definitions

The following aren’t common definitions of the following terms, but I think they are rather useful and enlightening:

• Optimism means that you expect a situation to have a definite good outcome.
• Positivity means that you think any outcome of a situation can be used in a good way.
• Pessimism means that you expect a situation to have a definite bad outcome.
• Negativity means that you find a bad aspect of any outcome of a situation and focus on that.
• Realism means that you have accurate expectations about the probability of good, neutral, or bad outcomes of a situation.
• Indifference means that you don’t care about the outcome of a situation.
• Neutrality means that you think the good and bad aspects of any outcome of a situation will balance out each other.

Note that these are pretty granular definitions as they all depend on a given situation; like doing a test, working on a project, or going to a party. In reality, people are optimists in some situations while they are pessimists in others. You can be optimistic about your career outlook and pessimistic about your weight, or the other way around.

Optimism, realism, and pessimism are about expectations. Positivity, negativity, indifference, and neutrality, on the other hand, are about perspective.

The Power Of Positivity

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

The Difference Between Optimism And Positivity

As optimist you hope that things will turn out fine. As positive person you make things work out fine in the very end, due to your positive attitude. What does that mean? You don’t need to hope for a “good” outcome, if you want to be positive. Instead, you realize that you have the power to interpret any outcome as “good” in some way.

For example, being refused a job can be interpreted in a positive way. Being rejected implies that you have applied for a job in the first case. And the more jobs you apply to the better your chances to finally get a job! You might even get some information about why you have been rejected, so that you can learn from that experiences and be better prepared for the next application.

I didn’t come up with that line of thinking myself, but have read about it in the self help book Feeling Good by David D. Burns. In that book he magnificently explains the art of realistic positive thinking, and the skill of identifying and dissolving negative cognitive distortions that keep you from thinking positive. Feeling Good is not just any book, but the number one bestseller which is surprisingly effective for treating depression, and which is based on the principles of cognitive therapy.

Proactive Positivity

Actually, it’s not any kind of positivity that will help you make the best out of the situation. There’s what I call passive positivity. If something bad happens, you are just happy that your situation isn’t worse, or that you are in an exhilarating adventure now. But that doesn’t suffice to use the situation for personal growth.

Only by being proactive you can make real personal progress. Reach out for your goals and interpret any experience which you make on your way to your goal as stepping stone towards your dreams. If you fail in some way, stand up and try again (and optimize your strategy in the meanwhile). Be positive by thinking that every active step you take will bring you closer to your goal, regardless whether you are lucky and everything runs perfectly, or not.

Tactical Retreat Can Be A Good Thing

After I finished school I wanted to write a book about some philosophical thoughts I had, which were inspired by an awesome spiritual experience that hit me at the end of my high school time. I was optimistic and thought I could write a great book. But after a year I still didn’t have more than a few notes. Even worse: I realized that my thoughts were flawed, because they were based on assumptions which couldn’t withstand a critical analysis.

So, I gave up for the moment, and decided not to write such a book. This experience helped me to learn that it’s very hard to create a meaningful philosophy which isn’t terribly flawed (meanwhile I know that the best you can hope for is something that’s only mildly flawed). And I learned that writing a book is a surprisingly difficult project. Nevertheless, I’m happy that I attempted to finish that project, because otherwise I wouldn’t have realized just how much I still have to learn. I gained a more realistic view about my ideas and my abilities, which helped me to stay calm and focus on learning more.

In fact, positivity was one of the ideas I wanted to write about, but my old ideas about positivity were based on faulty assumptions and couldn’t cope with the realities of real reality.

The Perspective That Enables Proactive Positivity

How would you evaluate your life or the world? Is it good or bad or neutral? If you think your life is bad, you will just make yourself unhappy. If you just think your life is good, you might be positive, but still stay passive. These general evaluations aren’t practical. Don’t ask: “Is it good or is it bad?” Instead, ask yourself:

"What can I improve? And how?"

The present situation is as it is. Nothing can change the current state, because you can only influence the future. Therefore it doesn’t make sense to worry about the present. It only makes sense to consider the future and to take the right action to make the best out of it. Worrying is not required. You can’t do more than to improve the future in the best way you are able to. There’s no need to care about anything else.

Positivity And Happiness

Knowing that you can use virtually any situation to your advantage is a great source of continuous happiness. If you are positive, you focus on the possible gains instead of your possible losses. You will see life as chance or as adventure. By being grateful for what you are, what you have, and what you can do, you unleash the power of positivity within you. Carried by a flow of happiness, you don’t give in to the depressing aspects of reality, but use your power for facilitating positive change.

Why Positive People Always Win

It’s not like you would win every contest and every challenge if you are positive. But at least you always win some experience and information, regardless what happens. Now, don’t you gain experience anyway, regardless whether you are positive or not? Well, yes, but if you are not positive you won’t be aware of that fact, so you will be less inclined to leverage the experience you gained. As positive thinking person you can use your experience and your knowledge consciously to improve your situation. And that’s a real advantage that can make quite a difference.

Is Optimism Optimal?

I’ve been pondering for some time about the question whether it makes sense to be unrealistically optimistic or even pessimistic. Are there cases in which do you better if you deliberately deviate from pure realism? I don’t know. At the moment, I think the best way is to be really realistic and not fudge your own expectation in one way or another. Being realistic doesn’t put you at a disadvantage. It’s just that people generally aren’t very good at being realistic, and rather err on the side of unreasonable optimism or pessimism.

Often, people overestimate what can be done in the short-tern while they underestimate what can be done in the long-term. Can you reach your most ambitious goals in one month? Pretty unlikely. Can you reach your goals if you invest 30 years of hard and intelligent work into those goals? Probably yes.

Realism Works Fine, If You Are Realistic

I’d say it’s better to be realistic, if you are really good at predicting the future. In which areas of your life have you been too optimistic? (I certainly have been too optimistic about my studies.) You might consider to adjust your expectations a bit and be less optimistic. And where have you been too pessimistic? (I’ve been too pessimistic about the chance of getting rid of depression.) Be happy if you can identify such an area, because it means you can (and need to) be more optimistic about it now.

Being realistic is important, because it helps you to make the right decisions. If you often fail at something, you do well to be pessimistic about your chances – unless you work hard at improving yourself! The negative feelings associated with failure are just messages which tell you that you need to rethink your approach and optimize your strategy. Don’t try to suppress unpleasant feelings, but fix the problems that cause them.

Wait, doesn’t that contradict positivity? Not really. You need to assess suboptimal aspects of reality realistically in order to identify potential for positive change. In order words: Find out about your weaknesses and be positive about the fact that you can improve.

Conclusion

Being positive and realistic unites the best of both worlds: You can have accurate expectations, and always feel great about the possibilities of improvement. In contrast to optimism, positivity is always compatible with realism. Therefore, positive people always win.

Related External Articles

• Too Much Optimism Can Be a Problem
• Realism and Optimism: Do You Need Both?

Would you regret how you live your current life? Would you even regret living your future life the way you currently plan living it? If your life ran along the lines you are currently having in mind, would you – at the very end of your life – come to the conclusion that it was really good?

If not, you are doing something wrong, and it’s time to reboot your existence! Even if you think you would have positive thoughts about your life at the very end, you will probably profit from examining it more thoroughly. Let’s go!

The Status Quo

You might live your life not fully consciously. That’s actually quite normal. After all, you strongly depend on habits guiding yourself through the day. Without habits you would have to make a decision every fraction of a second. And making decisions is hard work! Making too many decisions on one day can thoroughly drain your energy reserves. That’s why we need to reduce the number of decisions we make daily. Habits are one of the main tools for doing so.

Also, doing what others tell you to do is another method for reducing the decisions you need to make. If you don’t have to think about what you need to do, then you can save your brain juice for the task at hand, instead of pondering which task to attack.

What’s The Problem?

Unfortunately, neither your habits nor that what others tell you to do will be optimal. So, relying on those sources too much will decrease the quality of your life. Sometimes you actually need to rethink it completely. But how do you do that? How can you reboot your existence?

You would simply need to decide to change your life thoroughly – and then actually do it! Changing your life is not an easy task. What are the things you need to change? And how can you change?

Phew, those are difficult questions! Let’ start with examining your idea of your ideal life. I will show you some really thought-provoking techniques that might thoroughly change the way you think about your existence. Here we go:

What If You Only Had One More Year To Live?

How would it feel like if you only had one more year to live? What would that change? What would you want to do with the rest of your life? Would you sink into depression or would you try to make the best out of the time you still have?

You might notice that you need to focus on that what is truly important to you. There’s not much time left for wasting the rest of your life with meaningless activities. So, this thought experiment will help you to live more intensely, and to focus on the essentials.

What would you do exactly? Would you write a book? Would you spend more of your time with someone you really love? Would you donate to charities? Would you do some kind of extreme sports? Those are real possibilities you have. Why don’t you do all these things already?

That’s not just a rhetorical question! A likely reason why you shy back from doing what you really want is that you are stuck in your everyday life and its rather automatic routines.

Well, how can do you get unstuck? You can apply the "What if I only had one more year to live" technique to find out what is really most important to you. This technique involves really thinking hard about what you would do if you only had 365 days left to live. Write down what you would (want to) do in this remaining time. Make a list, or a mind-map, or write a short essay about your plans for your remaining lifetime.

Depending on how much you have already thought about the purpose of life or not, this exercise will be more or less difficult and discomforting. Do it nevertheless! Do it now; or if you really prefer not to do it right now, write down a fixed date at which you will do that exercise.

…

After you have finished writing down what you would do with the rest of your life, you probably have identified what’s really important to you. If you are not already doing what’s written on the document you have just created, you aren’t living according to the purpose of your life, but spend your time with distractions from it! That may be a bitter insight that’s hard to swallow, but it’s a fact!

What you need to do with your new insights is to align your life more to your true values which you have just revealed. Make time for that what’s important to you – everything else is just a waste of time and life! I’m not suggesting that you really need to finish everything on your document within a single year and neglect everything else. But please make sure that you are going to spend enough time on the projects that truly matter to you.

Regardless how hard it is, you really need to find a way to create time and space for the projects that really give meaning to your life. Be aggressive about that! Protect your time as if it was your life, because your time essentially is your life – it’s that what your life is made of. Be vigilant about not getting distracted or being talked into traveling a path that has nothing to do with the meaning of your life!

Yeah, I know that it’s much easier to write down than to put into practice. Nevertheless, it’s very important to keep in mind what you are ideally supposed to do. It will help you to live your life with more focus and energy.

Alternative Versions Of This Exercise

Instead of one year you could take other time spans, for example 10 years, three months, a week, or even a single day. Of course, the results for each variant of this exercise will vary.

After you have finished those exercises, you can use their results as source of inspiration for how you spend your next day, week, months, or 10 years. Instead of deferring your most important projects into an unsure future, you can attack them as soon as possible. That way your life will gain intensity.

Nevertheless, I think the version with the time span of one year is the most useful exercise. One year is a lot of time, but not so much that you would want to waste any significant fraction of that time on less important activities. Compressing the biggest projects into one single year is certainly a daunting task, but not impossible. If you knew you only had that amount of time left, you would find a way to make it possible!

You can try to live every year of your life as if it was the last one. That would certainly make your life more interesting and exciting. On the other hand, you still can hope for living for many more years afterwards. And you certainly can make some plans that actually require you living longer than just a single year.

However, for rebooting your life completely these exercises might not be enough. Perhaps you need more power to pursue all your most important projects. While there are many ways to start living with more energy and courage, I found that the following is an exceedingly effective one:

Contemplating Suicide

What’s the point of contemplating suicide – even if just within a hypothetical thought experiment – if you feel okay? Well, it may sound totally counter-intuitive, but this exercise might help you put things into the right perspective. Once you think about leaving your life behind, you need to contemplate its worth, your values, and what to do with your life!

Most people don’t realize the power they actually have. They adapt to the patterns of living that society defines for them. Breaking out seems neither possible nor preferable to them. Even if those societal patterns are nonsensical, anachronistic, or even harmful, they defend them as traditions, mainstream consensus, or common sense. However, they usually don’t do so out of a deeply rooted conviction that these patterns are right, but rather because they are the mainstream. Therefore it’s dangerous to put those mainstream patterns them into question. Hey, you could be ostracized for doing so!

What keeps people from realizing the highest potential of their lives, and of the world as whole, is not so much a pure lack of thinking, but rather a lack of thinking the right way – courageously and without restrictions. Fear is the force that keeps them in check. Fear from hypothetical dangerous consequences of not doing what everyone is supposed to do. I’m not saying that these fears are totally unreasonable, but most of the time they are dramatically exaggerated.

Even though fear sometimes has positive consequences, in our present world it rather acts as a force that limits us and prevents healthy change in our lives. So, let’s overcome that fear and live freely. You might need to use the best tools available for defeating your fear, so why not give radical and unconventional ones a try?

But Why?

Why do some people contemplate suicide after all? It’s because they have a negative view of life. They think there’s just too much crap going on. If they don’t see any realistic chance of fixing things, and the pressure becomes too high to bear anymore, their might finally think that suicide sounds like a solution.

A long time ago I have been at that point. But then something curious happened: I realized that I don’t have to put up with my problems, but can fight them directly and aggressively instead. All dangers and possible damage this confrontation causes are still less than the final damage of death. Essentially, I could give myself the licence to do whatever I like, because almost everything else would still be better than not living at all.

This realization helped me to overcome my fears. I had more courage to do rather crazy things which helped me to enjoy my life again. After this experience I felt much stronger and self-confident.

YOU Define The Terms Of Your Life!

It’s true. Having the option of suicide gives you the power to define the terms on which you live your life! I mean, if you’re not happy with your life you can just leave. It’s a real possibility, even though there are serious legal and ethical issues; but if you really contemplate leaving this world behind they aren’t really what it’s all about. De facto, your life belongs to your self and you are free to use it in any way you please.

Without question, that’s a rather extreme point of view. It may sound like an invitation to a crazy level of egocentric behavior, and it actually is, in a certain way! Your life is the center of your life! If you aren’t willing to do everything for your center, you will also be too weak to do anything else with your full potential power.

If you live on your own terms, you can still decide to devote your life to others, or even to the whole world. But then it’s your own deliberate choice to do so. You don’t need to feel indebted to help others. Instead, you are free to realize it as the best thing to do (or not) and simply do it (or not).

Fighting For Your Own Values

You don’t need to be content with the systems and restrictions built around you. Why not shape them on your own and turn them into something better? Too difficult? Too dangerous? Well, it’s your decision. Compared to ending your life forcefully everything else bears virtually no real risk at all. Break out and spread your wings!

Be the change you want to see in the world!

Do you think anyone here would know who Mahatma Gandhi was if he was too afraid of provoking the anger of authorities and landing in jail? He didn’t accept the terms others set up for him, but stayed true to his own values. You can do the same! It’s a real possibility!

Of course, you don’t need to do exactly the same as Gandhi has done. But you can start improving your own life and the world around you without giving in to your fear. If you see life as a chance to do things your own way, rather than as a strictly regulated process, you can find the courage to live freely.

You don’t live your life to follow laws and rules! If you would set that as the purpose of your life, your life would be quite hollow and devoid of enthusiasm and meaning. Create or find your own purpose! You are free to do so!

Because the article is just too long to comment on it extensively, I will just take the most important passages and add my own reflections. (Emphasis is always by me.)

A Matter Of Perspective

First, Steve delineates two different perspectives. For this purpose, he uses the human body as metaphor:

The Cellular Perspective

From the cellular perspective, you can see yourself as an individual person interacting with other individuals. You’re like a single cell in the larger body of humanity, which is composed of billions of other people-cells.

For example, I could say that I’m a guy (a cell) who’s dedicated to helping people (other cells) live more consciously. I may communicate with many people during my lifetime, but each person is a unique individual, so the impact is different for everyone. We may all be part of some larger body of humanity, but our interactions mainly occur at the individual cellular level.

This is similar to one of the cells in your body noticing the other cells around it and deciding to do what it can to be of service to those cells. It may help a lot of cells, but it still regards itself as an individual cell helping other individual cells. And it won’t help all cells equally, nor could it do so even if it tried.

The Holistic Perspective

From the holistic perspective, you see yourself as an integral part of the universe as a whole. The overall intent is to help universal consciousness grow and evolve, particularly the human consciousness of which you’re a part.

This would be like one of the cells in your body recognizing that it’s part of a larger physical body, whereby it stops thinking of itself primarily as an individual cell and begins to see itself as being of potential service to the greater whole. Its fate isn’t as important as the fate of the larger body.

So with this perspective, instead of thinking of myself as a guy who helps people live more consciously, I can see myself as a servant of humanity helping to create a more conscious humanity, or as a servant of universal consciousness itself. My primary role here is to serve conscious evolution, which isn’t necessarily what’s best for any particular individual human in the short-term.

[...] I’m not suggesting that any one perspective is best. All of these perspectives are valid. But I will suggest that it’s important to integrate the holistic perspective more fully into your life if you wish to experience a healthier flow of abundance.

“Waking up” basically means that you consider and integrate the holistic perspective as part of your daily life.

Universal Consciousness

What is this universal consciousness Steve writes about here? At first, it’s just a metaphor for a consciousness on a higher, all connecting level. But then you could ask whether such a thing might actually exist or not. And if it exists, what can it do? Basically, there are two different ways in which such a global consciousness could exist.

In the first possibility it’s some kind of external force like a divine being. As second possibility it could be something that emerges from the interactions of all life of Earth, just like the human consciousness emerges from the interactions of single neurons in the brains.

Let’s stay with the latter option, because the first one is too speculative. We don’t know how consciousness arises, so it’s a valid question to ask whether something like a meta-consciousness on planetary scale can already be present. It might consist of atomic simple consciousness working together so that they form the patterns which give rise to consciousness in general. In his book Gödel, Escher, Bach Douglas Hofstadter speculated that the interactions of single ants in an ant colony might bring forth a holistic ant colony consciousness. Could the same be claimed for the relation between humans and the whole of humanity?

As the case may be, this global consciousness of humanity or of nature doesn’t seem to be terribly sophisticated. Otherwise it would do a much better job at organizing life of this planet in a clearly purposeful way. Excessive violence and wars wouldn’t exist if this consciousness was sane and high-functioning.

On the other hand, this shortcoming of a hypothetical planetary consciousness could be interpreted as predicament that we need to overcome together. Our mission would be to shape this consciousness so that it gains the ability to solve problems on a planetary scale. Some attempts into this direction already have been made:

• Praying to imaginary deities in the hope that they are real and will turn the world into a better place (for you).
• Creating a planetary empire. (Every time this was tried it didn’t work as well as hoped.)
• The United Nations. (Without real supranational power they can’t work effectively.)
• Esoteric planetary sub/super-consciousness (quantum) mumbo jumbo.

A really unified world consists of 0s and 1s

In more recent times, some people (mostly the guys around the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence) have thought about creating an artificial intelligence which could establish a new (better) world order. Eventually, in some decades perhaps, that might actually work. Depending on who really programs/builds/educates that artificial intelligence the outcome might be very good – or very bad.

A more organic way to awaken a planetary consciousness would be to amplify the interconnectedness of us all through means of technology. Some technologies, like the telegraph, the telephone, the internet, and smartphones already helped us to go into that direction quite a bit. Increasingly immersive communication technologies like augmented/virtual reality and neural interfaces will widen the bandwidth and scope of our planetary social interactions. Finally that might lead to a Singularity Of Connectedness, which could really result in a collective planetary hypermind.

Of course, both notions of facilitating a powerful global mind by technology could be combined. A planetary artificial intelligence could help a globally connected humanity to find unity and organize the world in a better way.

How Fairness Might Look Like

At the individual level, fairness seems to be about equality. But of course we don’t see that much genuine equality in the world. It’s quite obvious that some individuals have more resources than others. Some people seem to be luckier too.

Does your own human body care about fairness when it doles out resources like oxygen and sugar to its individual cells? To an extent, sure. When resources are abundant, there’s plenty for all, but even then the distribution isn’t perfectly equal. And when resources become scarce, the body will starve cells that are less important to its survival to divert more resources to the most crucial cells.

So the question is, are you an essential cell in the larger body of consciousness? Or are you superfluous? Well… look at the resources that life sends your way. Do you feel all your needs are well met — your physical needs, emotional needs, social needs, self esteem needs, etc? Are you a highly self-actualized individual? Or do you have strong unfulfilled cravings for things that are important to you? Have you possibly given up on meeting some of your needs? Are you flourishing or are you stuck?

If you’re struggling to get your needs met, that’s a hint and a half that life itself isn’t particularly concerned with your well-being. Don’t fret though if this describes your situation. It’s a problem that can be fixed. Just don’t try to fix it by clamoring and complaining — that doesn’t work and will often backfire.

This may not seem fair, but in a way it is reasonable. You may be a very nice, kind, and generous person, but if your focus is at the cellular level, you’re probably missing so much of the big picture that in the grand scheme of things, your contribution just doesn’t matter that much, at least not from the perspective of universal consciousness.

You may be doing what could just as easily be done by someone else, which means you’re highly expendable. You may be playing follow the follower. You may be genuinely helping, but only at the cellular level. You may be doing nothing much, which makes it easy to ignore you.

If you live in such a way that doesn’t really contribute much, don’t be too surprised if it seems like life is starving you for resources. After all, life doesn’t need you as much if you aren’t actively helping with its expansion and growth.

Consider the cells in your own body. You may scratch an itch on your arm and kill lots of cells in the process without even thinking about it. Individual skin cells just aren’t that important to your overall survival. But you’re less likely to scratch off a patch of critical brain cells. A cut on your finger is no cause for alarm, but a cut on your eyeball is something you’d do more to avoid. Your body is even designed to protect some parts more than others. If something flies at your face, you’ll automatically throw up your arms to protect your head. But you won’t normally use your head to protect your arms.

If the world was really fair, it would work the way that Steve describes here. People doing globally important things would not have to worry about getting enough food, and all the things they need to do to serve a greater purpose. Does that happen? Yes, if there is an established support structure (organizations which care about their important members), it really works. But if you do something terribly important and there’s no good way to monetize your activity, you are out of luck. And that’s not just a hypothetical situation. There are lots of people who are confronted with this issue.

How successful you are depends on whether you are good at selling yourself as being important. It’s all a question of self-marketing! If you can convince a sufficient number of wealthy people that you have something valuable to contribute, then you don’t need to worry about where your next meal comes from.

Certainly, if you are powerful enough you could get what you want by illegitimate or illegal means like blackmail, theft, or fraud. Your position of power makes successful counter-measures against your actions less likely, so why bother with playing the nice guy? Well, once you are out of luck and you lose your power, others will take revenge, and that won’t be nice for you. When you use unethical means, you are playing Russian roulette with your future chances!

Unfortunately, all these dynamics are hard to fit into the human body metaphor. This shows that it’s not a really truthful representation of reality.

What Does Consciousness Want?

[...] Universal consciousness is more concerned with the evolution of consciousness itself (our collective consciousness) as opposed to the fate of any individual human or even of humanity itself. Now the loss of humanity would probably be a setback, but consciousness may eventually recover in other forms.

What does consciousness really want? Like you and like your individual cells, it wants to get its needs met, and it wants to grow and evolve. But the level on which it’s capable of doing this goes way beyond what you’re capable of as an individual.

Look around at all the amazing — and accelerating — achievements of consciousness. It’s expanding in many directions simultaneously. Consider what’s evolving on earth. Humanity itself is becoming smarter and faster and more connected. And it’s having some health issues to deal with as well. And consciousness wants to keep going.

Every sequence of changes can be interpreted as some kind of evolution. Therefore, it’s rather problematic to claim that someone or something just wants to evolve. What does that mean exactly?

One way to interpret the “desire” of universal consciousness is that it aims at maximizing negentropy, which means a local decrease of entropy or chaos (that’s roughly what life tries to do all the time). Some degree of negentropy is required for life to emerge and to sustain itself. When considering the evolution of life on this planet it looks like there is a tendency to increased order over time – especially since technology and complex social structures were established by mankind.

Whether such a personification of a trend in nature is justified or not, it’s interesting to ask which forces facilitate this trend. In an evolutionary setting lifeforms and structures with high order seem to have a competitive advantage. Those who are better organized (on the cellular, individual, and social levels) win:

• Being well-organized on a cellular and intercellular level means being healthy.
• A high level of organization in your personal life makes it easier to be successful as individual.
• Being organized on a societal level means working for something bigger and more important than you.

Living Small or Living Large

[...] Imagine if a cell in your body said, I just want to eat food and reproduce like crazy. That might seem fun from his perspective, but then the larger body has a tumor to deal with. Send in the white blood cells.

If you feel like some greater force keeps knocking you back down every time you try to get ahead, you’re not imagining it. It really is knocking you back down, and it will continue to do so until you stop trying to get ahead like a cancer cell would. Have you ever noticed, for instance, that as soon as you try to make progress on cancer-like projects, you keep getting distracted, so your attention has to turn somewhere else?

The force that is really holding your back if you work on cancer-like projects is the lack of purpose such projects suffer from. You might think your own gain is a sufficient purpose, but as social beings humans only flourish fully if they work for the greater good. At least on a subconscious level, you might feel that you are on the wrong track if you only think about yourself. That thought will distract you and diminish your motivation.

Besides autonomy and mastery, purpose is one of the pillars of intrinsic motivation – according to Daniel H. Pink’s book Drive. In most variants of Self-Determination Theory relatedness takes the place of purpose, but in the current setting it is possible to argue with both purpose and relatedness as missing in personal-scope projects. No wonder that you feel knocked back down if you can’t use 100% of your motivation and potential on your personal goal.

Now imagine if an individual cell in your body said to you, “Wait a minute. I get it. I may be just a tiny cell, but I’m a part of this whole body. That’s cool. Is there anything I can do to help?”

What would you say to it? You might wonder what one conscious cell could do for your whole body. Not much most likely. But then you might think, What if this cell could wake up many others, and what if those cells could awaken still more? Eventually you could have a body filled with cells that were aware of the whole body and seeking to serve it. This would fix a lot of your problems. You’d have much better health for starters. Cancer wouldn’t be able to take root. Most diseases would be eradicated easily. You’d always be able to maintain your ideal weight.

So you might tell that one conscious cell, “Go around and wake up more cells. Gather them together. Then we’ll talk.”

Yeah, the best thing you can do is to start and keep up a chain reaction of raised consciousness. That will enable us to tackle global problems effectively.

Being a Conscious Human

A conscious cell is aware of the whole body and realizes that the body matters more than any individual cell. The cells are there to serve the evolution of the body and mind, not merely themselves. There’s obviously a connection between the good of the cells and the good of the body, but it’s easier to have a healthy body if on some level, the cells are aware that the body’s health is more important than their own. A cell that works against the health of the body is a disease cell.

A conscious human being is aware of the larger body of humanity and has a sense of a greater consciousness that’s unfolding and evolving at a much higher level than any individual human can.

There is value in the lower level perspective. It’s not a perspective to ignore but rather to integrate with the holistic perspective. For example, through relaxed meditative breathing, we can connect with the lower level perspective of our own cells. Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re getting plenty of oxygen. Life is good. This cellular level perspective can help to ground us. Many meditations are essentially about tuning back in to this cellular perspective, while other meditations involve expanding to a more holistic perspective. The ideal is to be able to consider all of these perspectives as valid.

Similar thoughts finally ended a phase of my life in which I thought that enlightened egoism is the best way to go. But that just wasn’t enlightened enough! By leaving out the rest of the world in my value considerations, I just restricted myself too much. I wanted to have everything, and as single human being I couldn’t have everything, no matter how successful and powerful I would become. Only by embracing and identifying with the totality of consciousness, all consciousness, I could really become unrestricted.

Regarding the validity of different perspectives: Yes, they are all valid. And it’s useful to have access to many different perspectives, so that you can choose the best for the current goal at hand.

Living your life as a part of humanity will take your experience to a level that’s far beyond life as an individual human being. Even if your intention is to help people, try expanding it to a vision of helping humanity, as if humanity itself is a conscious entity. It’s a whole different level of being.

Now what I’m seeing is that the gathering phase is well underway. Many years ago, it seemed like conscious people were very isolated. Now they’re coming together in bigger and bigger groups. I’m involved in multiple groups of this nature, and it seems like every few months I’m hearing about new groups forming. The conscious humans are clustering, and these clusters are growing larger and more organized. It’s as if new organs are incubating with the larger body of humanity. Something is definitely happening, and it’s a wondrous thing to behold.

Consequently, while I know some people are worried about where humanity is headed, I’m not worried at all. In fact, I’m excited about it. I have the privilege of being able to see what many of these conscious people are up to, and they’re starting to create transformational ripples. If you’re reading this article, then these ripples have already reached you, and you’re being impacted by them.

We certainly live in interesting times. Thinking you help both, individuals, and all of humanity, or even all of life, at the same time is one of the best boosts for purpose and motivation.

While it's really good that new groups of conscious people are forming, there's one fundamental problem: Which group will really decide about where humanity is headed? Even if all agree on the principle of working for the whole cosmos, there's still the question what do to with it, and how to organize our affairs on this lovely planet we are currently living on. I call this the global coherence problem.

How that problem can be solved is far from clear. If we decide democratically, minorities might suffer from the decisions of the majority immensely. If all of us are required to agree unanimously, we might need to wait until the end of the universe before some decision is really made. And if we choose another modus of making decisions, the question arises which basic values and mechanisms to rely on, and whether they are fair or reasonable.

Perhaps the simplest way I can explain what’s happening is that humanity’s Power has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and now its alignment with Truth and Love desperately need to catch up. Otherwise humanity will eventually crash and burn. For instance, the first atomic bombs were dropped only 66 years ago, yet now we must somehow ensure that they’re never used on a global scale, not even 1000 years from now. One serious mistake or lapse during any minute that we have nukes, and it’s a major setback for us all. That’s a tall order that cannot be satisfied at the cellular level of consciousness. We’ve had too many close calls already (see the documentary Countdown to Zero for details on that). The larger body of humanity is aware of this challenge, and it recognizes that we need more people who are Truthful, Loving, and Powerful to deal with this existential threat.

Of course, the first nukes really showed that we need to keep a cool head as whole of humanity, if we don’t want to live in a post-apocalyptic desert. But what really made a huge difference to thinking about our role in this world were the first pictures of our planet which were taken from space! Seeing that single sphere surrounded by the blackness of outer space, only protected by an astonishingly thin atmosphere, popularized the notion that we have to care about the whole of our planet, and not just a single group we accidentally belong to.

Nuclear war is not the only existential threat. If a huge asteroid, a gamma ray burst, or a malevolent alien civilization hit us, we would be pretty dead, too. Terrorists using biotechnology, and in the future molecular nanotechnology, will pose a hard to control threat to all of us. Also, any superhuman artificial intelligence would be a potential threat to the continuation of classical biological life on this planet. While some of these threats are more likely than other, all of them need to be addressed. The Lifeboat Foundation is one of the first organizations which take those risks really seriously and tries to safeguard us from them. Surely, it could need some more cells and sugar

Crises That Can Wake Us Up

As I’ve seen in my own life, this higher level consciousness is clearly listening. Somehow it can perceive the level at which we’re thinking, and it responds in kind. If you keep thinking at the cellular level, this higher consciousness will keep trying to wake you up. You may lose your job and other possessions, for instance, until you finally realize that those things don’t matter. We have more important things to deal with right now.

[...] For those who are stuck at the cellular level of thinking, I suspect that life is going to become increasingly difficult for you. You’re going to see your worries, fears, and frustrations magnified. Life will seem to be getting worse. It may seem like important aspects of society are falling apart around you. This is happening for a reason though. These old systems are going to be dismantled. That’s actually a good thing. They’ll be replaced with better things.

For instance, you may be worried about debt, either your own or your country’s or someone else’s. But from the larger perspective of humanity, debt is meaningless. Humanity really doesn’t care if our financial system collapses or not. In fact, it may be better for it to collapse and be replaced by something else. So if you’re really attached to the current system and the money in your bank, you may get scared. But if you’re looking at the big picture, you’ll probably feel excited instead.

Can a higher consciousness make us lose our jobs and possessions? If it consists of the interactions of all us then certainly yes. I think our current day crises result from the dominance of cellular level thinking. Once we really arrive at holistic thinking, we clearly recognize the insufficiency and the problems of our current systems.

Our real challenge lies in imagining, creating, and living new systems which serve the purposes of the whole world well. Can we replace our money based economy with something more sophisticated? Can we update education to the next level? Can we overcome nationalistic thinking and see ourselves as united world citizens? Can we find good ways to respect and support non-human life? The answers to these questions will determine how our future will look like.

Be willing to lose what doesn’t matter, so we can all gain what does matter. Jobs don’t matter, but creativity does. Paying our bills doesn’t matter, but keeping our bodies healthy does. Getting good grades in school doesn’t matter, but preserving and passing on our collective knowledge does. Start reorganizing your life around what matters, and be willing to shed what doesn’t.

What keeps us from focusing on what really matters is fear, mostly. We fear that some of the other stuff really matter a lot, so we stick to it. Letting go seems like a risky endeavor, but it’s the only way to live our lives fully.

When you align yourself with this higher level consciousness, abundance will flow through your life with relative ease. However, this type of abundance will be universal level abundance, not human level abundance. It doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have more money, a more luxurious home, or more possessions. That kind of stuff just doesn’t matter and represents artificial needs, not real needs. This level of abundance means that you’ll be experiencing the benefits of being in a healthier body. You’ll get more of what really matters — more growth opportunities, more love, more joy, more inner peace.

When you align yourself with a global consciousness, some of your current friends might think you have gone nuts. Let them think what they want. Focus on that what really counts regardless.

Aligning With Higher Level Desires

In order to tap into this greater flow of abundance, you have to tap into higher level desires.

First, recognize that your human level goals are beginning to bore you. No matter how important you try to make them, you can’t get motivated to work on them. You just can’t get that worked up about making money beyond a certain point. People may tell you it’s important to have specific financial goals, but when you try to do this for yourself, it makes you feel yucky inside. You can’t get motivated to work on those kinds of goals. They don’t inspire you. And so you procrastinate and then beat yourself up. It’s time to end this cycle. It’s time to re-align your desires with something that actually matters to you. You can set better goals than the human equivalent of stockpiling oxygen and sugar.

That’s true. Whenever I’ve seen no greater purpose in what I’ve doing, I felt quite unmotivated. A lack of autonomy, mastery, or purpose can be thoroughly demotivating. It can make feel us like slaves. Even being a very well paid slave is still just a slave. To become free, we need to reorganize our lives so that they are more in alignment with the needs of the world and our personal needs for autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Stop thinking about what you want for yourself as an individual. Start thinking about what you want for humanity as a whole.

[...]What do you want for humanity itself? Where would you like to see this larger body go during your lifetime and beyond?

Do you want us to clean up the planet? Explore outer space? Improve our educational systems? Stop fighting wars?

Let yourself dream about what’s possible for humanity. Notice that these dreams are much more impressive than anything you could possibly do as an individual.

Become a billionaire? Who cares? Start a charity? Big deal. Discover a new planet? Nice try. When will you be ready to work on a real goal, a goal for humanity itself?

Now we are getting to the really interesting part! Think at the highest level possible and set a new course for all of this world! Friedrich Nietzsche bemoaned that humanity does not have a real goal. He was really fed up with cellular level thinking. What goal do you want humanity to have?

I want humanity to respect non-human animals, not to treat them as food or slaves. I want to cease pointless suffering, defeat disease and aging. I want life to evolve to a higher level and spread out to the whole cosmos to turn it into something that is truly alive. This is what counts to me! Actions which don't serve any of these purposes can't get me fully motivated.

Receiving Guidance

The best part is that you don’t even need to figure this out yourself. All you need to do is wake up to this higher level perspective, and then simply ping this universal consciousness to tell it you’re awake and ready to serve. Ask it for guidance, and guidance will come.

Just be aware that universal consciousness is frakkin powerful. It’s way more powerful than human level consciousness. When you tap into this resource and align yourself with it, your life is going to speed up. At first it may seem like drinking from a firehouse. It will take some time to get used to it.

If you feel that the flow is too much for you, you can ask it to slow down. I do this all the time. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I say to the universe aloud, “Okay… this is too fast. Let’s slow this down for a week or two and give me a chance to catch my breath.” Then when I’m ready, I ask it to speed up again.

It’s interesting that channeling a greater consciousness serves us well for getting in touch with our true and great desires, and for amplifying the intensity of life. Even if you don’t believe in some religion or esoteric stuff, “contacting” the universe is a good idea! Just think that you contact that subconscious part of your mind which is responsible for feeling connected with everything. Our subconscious is an incredibly great resource. It would be a waste not to use it properly. Nietzsche got it right: “There is more intelligence in your body than in your best wisdom.”

Lately I’ve been holding off on setting specific goals for myself. Instead I’ve been saying to the universe, “Bring me what you want me to work on, and also please bring me whatever you know I need for optimal health, happiness, and flow.” And then I do my best to remain open-minded and detached from outcomes. I let the universal consciousness guide me instead of having to set specific goals and intentions. I still have an intention, but it’s simply to do what’s best for humanity as a whole.

Partly I’m doing this because I’ve reached the point where any individual-level goal would bore me, and I wouldn’t be able to motivate myself to work on it. I just don’t care that much about oxygen and sugar to make it the central focus of my life. So I’m willing to risk things like losing my money, losing my home, having my relationships disrupted, etc. just for the opportunity to see where this flow leads. And yet somehow when I move past this fear of losing stuff, I seem to gain much more than I lose. As far as meeting my human needs goes, they’re all nicely satisfied and then some. Bloodstream Marketing just can’t compare.

That’s a pretty radical lifestyle, but I clearly see its merit. It sounds like a form of trance or ecstasy. It’s a no-compromise path to full life. Following it, even if just for a little while, can feel thoroughly exhilarating.

Holistic Level Business

Last year I uncopyrighted all my blog posts and podcasts, so you have just as much ownership of this article as I do. From a cellular level, that might seem like a foolish decision. But that isn’t the level at which I made the decision. What does a copyright mean to humanity? Of course it’s meaningless. What would you think if one of your cells tried to patent the Krebs Cycle? Silly cells…

[...] I think my business actually works better because I don’t manage it with a cellular mindset. Millions of people have been drawn to my work, and it’s been translated into more languages than I can track. People keep sharing it, with or without my permission. New opportunities keep showing up. Money keeps flowing. Everything works. Well, aside from my web server, which I may have to upgrade yet again due to traffic growth. But that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it?

Why does my business work? Because it’s not really a business. It’s a service, not primarily for individual humans, but for humanity itself. The purpose is to help enough people wake up and live more consciously, so that humanity itself may continue to survive and thrive. And by performing this service for humanity, it takes care of all my needs. It’s really good at it too. I barely have to lift a finger to attend to such things. I rather appreciate that.

[...] Recently I’ve been listening to an audiobook about the history of Google. Google began as a fairly idealistic company with the grand mission of organizing and providing access to all the world’s information. Does that sound like an individual level goal or a goal for humanity itself? Of course Google has since become a giant, besting all other search companies. Interestingly, one of the reasons it succeeded is because it attracted some of the brightest minds in the world, people who were inspired by its mission and who would not have worked for the company if it was just about the money. You could say that humanity diverted the best resources to Google because Google’s mission served the best interests of humanity. In fact, Google has helped to create a smarter, more self-aware humanity.

[...] The irony is that companies that care less about quarterly returns and more about service to humanity can often achieve amazing growth. Why? Because humanity wants those companies to succeed. It sends them whatever resources they need to succeed.

Notice which companies appear to be serving the expansion and evolution of humanity and which are only here to serve themselves and their stockholders. If you were a genius, which kind of company would you want to work for? If you were humanity itself, which companies would you support? Which would you ignore? Which would you wish to tear down or transform? Now what kind of company do you currently work for?

I really love these progressive enterprises. They are simply better for all. At this moment in history, the chances for awakened entrepreneurs are greater than ever. Why? It’s simple: The internet made it possible to translate holistic thinking into holistic business. And the internet gets more and more sophisticated while it still grows and stretches to reach every human being on this planet.

Wake up! There’s a new Renaissance going on out there! Be a part of it!

But will we finally be able to resolve our last remaining differences and turn this world into a great place to live for everyone? If life is a game, that might be its main story question.

So, I ask again: What goal do you want humanity to have?

No!

Life Gamification Is The Unique Key Approach To Become Unrestricted!

For most of my life I have been a passionate computer gamer. Whereas I could play computer games for whole days easily, I found it rather difficult to motivate myself to learn or work for more than a few hours – especially if there was no external pressure and I really didn’t have to do it. Although I really wanted to do more, I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get things done to improve my life in a proactive fashion. Even though I thought there’s nothing that could stop me from learning more and do more creative work, in reality it looked like was trying to do something that was just impossible to me.

After years of rather mediocre studying efforts, this failure to control my life even pulled me into a depressive crises – and then another one! What really rescued me from my last depression was reading self-help books – the right ones! I started with books like these:

1. Feeling Good by David D. Burns.
2. Getting Things Done by David Allen.
3. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris.

While reading those books helped me a lot and dissolved my crisis, I went further and adapted their systems to my own purposes. As relatively creative person I didn’t implement those systems exactly as they were described in the books, but took those ideas and created a rather fancy productivity system around them.

Game Mechanics in Kongregate and Chore Wars

To understand what I’ve done, you need to know that I was inspired by the flash game platform Kongregate and the browser game Chore Wars. On Kongregate you earn badges and points for completing certain achievements in games.

Badges in Kongregate

In Chore Wars you can define your own adventures or use predefined ones, like seen below. You can join a party or create one yourself. Within a party you can compete with other players. Chore Wars uses some game mechanics like experience points, character levels, player status, random events and random rewards to turn boring everyday activities into fun.

Some adventures in Chore Wars

Bringing It Down To The Achievement Point System

My system I devised out of all these inspirational sources was relatively simple: I simply granted myself 1 or 2 achievement points for every 15 minutes of doing productive activities. Then I just tried to increase my weekly achievement point scores over time. To get a better picture of my progress, I entered my data into a spreadsheet and created a graph from it:

Weekly Achievement Point graph from 2010-08 until 2011-04

As you can see, my scores were fluctuating a lot, but there was a clear upwards trend. Averaging over a period of 4 weeks each made this trend much better visible:

4 week average graph of my Achievement Points from 2010-08 until 2011-04

Not all of this increase in achievement points was due to increased activity. Later on, I’ve also given myself additional points for completing daily challenges and sticking to schedule. These bonus points made up between 10% and 50% of my whole weekly score. So, I use the achievement point system both as measure of my performance, as well as means to motivate myself.

Introducing: Life Gamification

Become Unrestricted is unique in that my approach to personal development is to turn life into a game which consists of challenges and experiments. I call that new paradigm life gamification. Applying that paradigm helped me to get motivated and increase my productivity where all other techniques I tried before have failed miserably!

One example for life gamification is my achievement point system. I use it to focus on that what is important to me, by attaching points to that what is important to me. This additional “game layer” works as a motivation hack, so that I feel driven to do even the hardest and most unpleasant tasks, instead of procrastinating until I go mad.

As seen above, my achievement point system is not the only way to add a game layer to life. Chore Wars does this, too. Life can be gamified in many different ways, so let’s take a look on what gamification actually is.

What Is Gamification?

Where do you look for when you want to learn about a new word? Google and Wikipedia are the canonical places to look for in our current age. Wikipedia writes this about gamification (emphasis by me):

Gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications (also known as “funware”), particularly consumer-oriented web and mobile sites, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, and by encouraging desired behaviors, taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, or reading web sites.

That’s a very abstract definition of what is meant by gamification. The term gets clearer if we take a look at some of the techniques for gamification that Wikipedia mentions (again emphasis by me):

• achievement “badges”
• achievement levels
• “leader boards”
• a progress bar or other visual meter to indicate how close people are to completing a task a company is trying to encourage, such as completing a social networking profile or earning a frequent shopper loyalty award.
• virtual currency
• systems for awarding, redeeming, trading, gifting, and otherwise exchanging points
• challenges between users
• embedding small casual games within other activities.

Gamification mainly seems to come down to implementing a system based on points given to players for clearly defined actions. Once you have that system, you can calculate a score for each player and compare those scores. Most of the rest is just additional motivational candy.

Take the bookmarking service Licorize, which I really recommend by the way, as example. Licorize rewards its users for all kinds of activity by increasing their score. There are two high score lists: A global one and one for the last 7 days. In theory, this setup grants additional motivation to use Licorize every day. At the very least, it shows that the makers of Licorize really appreciate users who use their service very actively.

A part of the 7 day high score on Licorize

More extensive information on gamification can be found on the wiki of gamification.org.

Why Gamify Life?

Now, normally the term gamification refers to services that are used my many different persons. But it’s also possible to apply gamification to a “single-player” setting. Gamifying your own life is possible, if you introduce a point system in which you grant yourself points for doing various activities you want or need to do. My achievement point system is one example for this.

But what’s the purpose of this form of life gamification? Well, the main purpose is to provide an external motivational framework that adds up to your usual motivation (if it already exists, that is). If you don’t have a sufficient level of motivation to do a task, you are likely to procrastinate. In that light, life gamification is an antidote to procrastination. Adding an extra layer of fun to something you don’t really like, turns it into an enjoyable action.

The key to gamifying life is to turn all your disliked activities into games. Once you have done that, it gets likely that you spend almost the whole day in a state of flow. Your productivity will increase dramatically as a result of doing the things that really move your forward in life, while living in the current moment.

So far, we could say that ideally life is a game. Why didn’t I use that as title for this post? Well, experimenting is a crucial aspect of personal development. This blog isn’t just about fun, but rather about personal development, spiced up with an additional layer of fun. But how does experimenting and life gamification fit together? Let me first show you how experimenting can help you to improve yourself.

The Experimental Method Applied To Personal Development

Suppose you want to be happier, more productive, or just want to get out of bed earlier. How would you try to reach your goal? This is an important question, as there are different methods for reaching your objective. First of all, let’s assume that you really want to change and also already have an idea about what to do get closer to your goal. Let’s call the technique, which you think might help, T. Now, you can formulate the following hypothesis: “If I do T, I will finally reach my goal.”

Starting from this point, there are basically two different methods to go on: There’s the experimental method, and there is another approach which I call the try harder method.

The Try Harder Method

No matter what you want to do, be it dieting, getting rid of addictions, exercising, or just trying to work harder; we all have to deal with the problem that it costs a lot of effort to reach those goals. Often, we simply fail, which shows that reaching our goals is really a difficult task. Too often, we might catch ourselves being just too lazy and not sticking to our strict self-chosen regimes. In those cases we are likely to attribute our failure to our “insufficient effort”. We think we will be more successful, if we just try harder.

Essentially, the result of this approach is the following method of trying to fix the problem:

1. According to your hypothesis, if you did T, you would have been successful. You also believe in your hypothesis for now.
2. You have tried T and failed. You have not been successful, so, according to your hypothesis, you didn’t really do T (but just attempted to do T). Otherwise you would have been successful after all, right?
3. The next conclusion is clear: You must try harder to do T!
4. You try harder to do T and possibly are really successful. But it’s very likely that you will fail again. In that case, go back to step 1.

As a result, you may try harder and harder, but not reach your goal regardless. During the whole process you never question your initial hypothesis. And exactly that’s the problem! Now, let’s see how the experimental method would work.

The Experimental Method

Characteristic for the experimental method is that you test your hypothesis! Classically, you would set up an experiment to see whether doing T is effective for reaching your goal, or not. If you want to be rigorous, you repeat the experiment many times to be on the safe side. If you even want to be scientific you make a study in which you select a group of people who are all supposed to try T to reach the same goal, measure their success, and check their compliance to doing T. Finally, you would do a statistic analysis of the data to make a statement like “with more than 95% probability the hypothesis is true”.

Studies are difficult and expensive, so most of us need to do single-person experiments. Quantified Self is a blog which is dedicated to such self-experiments. If you want to do your experiments the right way, check out that blog!

In the area of personal development, things may be especially difficult, because you might fail due to not doing T the way you intended to do it, mostly because of procrastination or general distractions. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to modify the initial hypothesis “If I do T, I will finally reach my goal.” It is replaced by “If I try to do T, I will finally reach my goal.” The new version of the hypothesis has the advantage that is can be tested reliably, and is not prone to what I call the try harder fallacy, which could leave you in the vicious cycle of the ineffective try harder method.

Here’s how this experimental method could look like in practice:

1. You start with the hypothesis “If I try to do T, I will finally reach my goal.” Good periods for testing this hypothesis are one week or 30 days, for example.
2. In case of success, you are happy. But if you fail, you need to admit that your hypothesis has been falsified. So, it’s time to come up with a different hypothesis.
3. You look for an alternative way to reach your goal. Say, you name your new technique T2, then you set up the hypothesis “If I try to do T2, I will finally reach my goal.”
4. Now, you need to test the new hypothesis. Go back to step one and replace T with T2.

In the end, the experimental method is much more likely to lead to final success than the try harder method. You might even need to go to T10000 before you finally reach your goal, but if you do it right, you will find something that works fine. Here, “doing it right” refers to the experimental method itself, rather than applying any kind of special technique. Keep in mind the famous words of Thomas Edison:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

But how to combine this form of experimentation with life gamification? Well, that’s not so easy. First of all, the above process of the experimental method is a bit simplified. So, let’s go more into depth here.

The Experimental Method For Personal Development Done Right

1. Goals

For applying the experimental method, your goals need to be measurable. You need to be able to tell whether you have already achieved your goal or not. If you want to become rich, define what you need in order to be rich. Do you need 100,000$ or 500,000$ to call yourself rich? Or do you rather want to be able to travel the world and own a yacht and a house with 7 bedrooms? Be specific about what you want exactly! Otherwise you will never know whether you have arrived at your destination, or not.

Ideally, you would be able to quantify what you want. If you want to lose weight, you can specify how much you want to lose, or what your desired target weight is. Happiness is harder to quantify. You would need to introduce a subjective happiness score. Even if it might seem strange, a happiness score is much better than nothing. And it’s usually more reliable than outward signs of happiness, like income, social status, number of friends, and so on.

For example, you can start with a very unspecific goal like “I want to be happy.” Then you need to think about what that actually means to you, so that you can set up a score, which you track daily or weekly. Every day I write down my achievement points, which are a rough measure of my personal performance. But the really relevant periods of time are weeks or months, because daily fluctuations are just too extreme, and can be quite distressing if taken too seriously.

2. Research How To Reach Your Goals

What can you do to reach your goals? First of all, you need to find out about methods which are likely to work. A first approach would be to use methods which have worked for others. There has been some research about how to reach your goals the best way. As starting point I would suggest reading the Less Wrong article Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge and the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Grant Halvorson – it’s seriously one of the very best books out there.

Depending on your goal, it is advisable to learn more about subjects that are related to your goal. If you want to be healthy and lose some weight, you could learn more about nutrition. A must-read book about nutrition is The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II. Reading it could save your life!

In general, it is a very good idea to read the very best books about your topic of interest. It’s not an easy task to identify those. If you have no clue which books could be the best ones, just check out the most popular ones. Other sources of information, though usually not as comprehensive and well presented as books, are Wikipedia, Google, and topic oriented blogs.

3. Write Down Your Experiment

Finally, you need to decide on your own which methods you want to try. Pick a popular method, or invent your own one. Now, you need to write down how that method works. Take a sheet of paper or a digital document, and write down what you want to do exactly. Also, it would be helpful to think about what you will do, if you run into specific problems. Will you adhere to your regime no matter what, or do you want to be flexible? If you decide to be flexible, in which way will you be flexible?

When will you end your experiment? Do you try it for a fixed period of time? Will you abort it, if you reach your goal before the end of that time? Or will you abort it, if something really nasty happens? These are important questions. Thinking about them in-depth could increase your chances of success.

Also, you need to decide what you want to measure exactly. If you want to gain more insights into yourself, you could measure several variables at once. For example, you could measure your income and your subjective happiness to find out whether there’s a relation between both. Once both values are quantified, you can calculate their correlation – for example with this online correlation calculator.

The correlation between two variables, say X and Y, is a number between -1 and 1 which may indicate that there’s some kind of relation between those variables. Expressed very sloppily, a positive correlation means the two variables “like” each other, while a negative correlation mean they “dislike” each other. A simple example for positive correlation is net income and gross income (if one of them is high, the other if probably high, too). The speed of your internet connection and the time your browser takes to load an average website are negatively correlated (a low loading time obviously means you have a fast connection).

By computing the correlation between my unhappiness (as measured with the Burns Depression Checklist) and the number of hours I used for productive activities, I found out that they are weakly negatively correlated, with a correlation of about -0.2. This result may indicate that being productive makes me feel less bad, but only a little bit. It definitely means that I can be productive, even if I feel unhappy and unmotivated.

4. Focus On Your Experiment

Do not try to do many experiments at once. And do not make your experiments complicated. Stick to your initial experimental layout and do not try to change anything until the experiment is over. Of course, if you fail terribly and very soon, you may abort your current experiment and try a different one. The purpose of experimenting is to gain knowledge. But you really need to stick to a systematic approach to gain reliable knowledge.

Remind yourself every day that you are doing an experiment. Take a look at the document you have written down in the last step to see what you need to do. Feel like a scientist, if it helps you. In fact, you do personal science. Read the article Personal Development, Self-Experiments, and the Future of Search on Quantified Self for getting some inspiration about how personal science could improve our lives.

5. Track Your Progress

Actually, the most important step in this whole process is to track your progress during the experiment. Measure all the variables you decided to capture. Ideally, do that daily, or even more often, if you wish to. Enter your data into a spreadsheet, for example in Google Docs. That way, you can also create diagrams of your own progress easily.

Using spreadsheets also has the advantage of making it easy to compute correlation coefficients quickly. The usual command for computing correlations in a data set in a spreadsheet is CORREL. For example, if you measure your coffee consumption in column B and the number of words you have written for your blog or book in column C, and have data in rows 2 to 31, then CORREL(B2:B31,C2:C31) will compute the correlation between your coffee consumption and your word count.

Again, I recommend tracking your data daily. Reconstructing your data from memory doesn’t work nearly as well as writing down your data as soon as possible.

6. Review And Analyze Your Results

Once you have finished your experiment, you need to do something with all that data you have collected. Create graphs, compute all interesting correlations, and interpret them. Graphs are easy to interpret. If they move into the desired direction, your approach seems to help. If not, you need to try something else.

Correlations are more difficult to interpret. They can only hint at causation, but there’s no clear way of telling whether your interpretation is right. Just because rain and clouds are correlated doesn’t mean that rain causes clouds (except if you reverse the direction of time). Often correlations occur, because there is a common cause for both measured variables. For example, if you measure your weight and your happiness and they are negatively correlated, that doesn’t have to mean that happiness causes weight loss, or weight loss causes happiness. You could very well have just done a lot of exercise which made you both happy and slim.

Be aware that big correlations also can occur for variables which don’t have any meaningful relation with each other. Such a correlation would just be the result of pure chance. So, use some common sense to interpret your results. If you get weird and intriguing results, repeat the experiment to see whether your results can be reproduced.

7. Tweak Your Methods

If your experiment turned out to be a failure, just try something else. Don’t try to try harder! Read more about alternative methods to reach your goal, or modify your own approach.

I tweak my schedule on a weekly basis to find out how that affects my performance. That has been one of the main drivers which have facilitated the increase in my achievement point scores.

How different your next approach is to your last approach may depend on the success of the approach you have just tested. If it turned out to be complete junk, try something radically different – you may even try to do the exact opposite, even if it sounds crazy! For example, deliberately spending more time on rather useless activities could increase my overall productivity a lot, even if that sounds counter-intuitive.

Once you have found a method that works reasonably well, stick to it and only test small modifications of it to improve it further.

Life Is An Experimental Game

How can gamification and experimentation be combined harmonically? You could say that doing experiments can be so much fun that you see them as games in themselves. On the other hand, you could gamify the experimentation procedure and collect points for doing experiments correctly. There are many ways to combine both paradigms synergistically, but it’s a good idea to consider the different purposes of both general ideas first.

Different Paradigms, Different Purposes

Creating additional motivation is the main purpose of gamification. Scientific rigor is not necessary there. Experimentation however aims to increase your knowledge about yourself and the world and requires at least a mildly systematic approach. Both paradigms are compatible in principle, even though they can clash with each other sometimes.

Problems can occur if you use a score both for motivational purposes and as variable you want to optimize and experiment with. For giving optimal motivation, you could implement all kinds of bonuses that increase your score. One example for this is the XP system in Task XP, a gamification app for task management apps on Android.

Some skills from the Android app Task XP

Increasing your “Efficiency” skill in that game helps you to gain more experience points (XPs) for finishing a single task. So, taking your XP score as a measure for your productivity wouldn’t be a good idea. When using game mechanics for increasing your motivation, be careful not to distort the measurements you are making in your experiments.

My achievement point system is an example of a system with dual use. It can help me to get focused and motivated, and I also use it to measure my performance. Therefore, I need to take care that what I give myself points for does really count to my performance in some meaningful sense.

Directing Your Own Behavior With Game Mechanics

In principle, I could use ridiculously high bonus scores to boost my motivation for doing any action I can think of. Unfortunately, it would distort my scores terribly, so I don’t do that. What I actually do is to set a daily challenge for every day. Finishing a daily challenge is worth as much as 6 hours of usual work, so most of the time I’m sufficiently motivated to work on them. These challenges actually are productive, difficult, and important tasks; so it’s a meaningful measure of my performance whether I can finish them or not.

Building a game framework around your tasks is a tricky way to direct your behavior towards valuable activities you find rather uninspiring. You could start with calling your tasks adventures or missions. Think about all the experience points you will gain on your dangerous adventure! Level up your character skills by defeating your fears!

Warning: Game Mechanics Modify Your Motivation

Using game mechanics for increasing your motivation can have undesired effects. Actions which aren’t supported by game mechanics can lose their appeal to you, because they don’t have the extra motivation boost attached to them. You can either accept that, or you can build game mechanics around all activities you are interested in. Doing the latter is a bit extreme, but it’s well possible to do so, if you create sufficiently general categories of actions you give yourself points for.

Doesn’t Gamification Decrease Intrinsic Motivation?

From the definition of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on Wikipedia it is not perfectly clear whether life gamification counts as intrinsic or extrinsic motivation:

Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on any external pressure. [...] Explanations of intrinsic motivation have been given in the context of Fritz Heider’s attribution theory, Bandura’s work on self-efficacy, and Deci and Ryan’s cognitive evaluation theory (see self-determination theory). Students are likely to be intrinsically motivated if they:

• attribute their educational results to internal factors that they can control (e.g. the amount of effort they put in),
• believe they can be effective agents in reaching desired goals (i.e. the results are not determined by luck),
• are interested in mastering a topic, rather than just rote-learning to achieve good grades.

Extrinsic motivation comes from outside of the individual. Common extrinsic motivations are rewards like money and grades, coercion and threat of punishment. Competition is in general extrinsic because it encourages the performer to win and beat others, not to enjoy the intrinsic rewards of the activity. A crowd cheering on the individual and trophies are also extrinsic incentives.

Social psychological research has indicated that extrinsic rewards can lead to overjustification and a subsequent reduction in intrinsic motivation. In one study demonstrating this effect, children who expected to be (and were) rewarded with a ribbon and a gold star for drawing pictures spent less time playing with the drawing materials in subsequent observations than children who were assigned to an unexpected reward condition and to children who received no extrinsic reward.

Self-determination theory proposes that extrinsic motivation can be internalised by the individual if the task fits with their values and beliefs and therefore helps to fulfill their basic psychological needs.

How do self-defined game mechanics fit into this scheme if they are used to generate motivation towards an action that you aren’t intrinsically motivated to do at all? They neither fit the classical descriptions of intrinsic nor extrinsic motivation. Nevertheless, they may be closer to intrinsic motivation, because they are self-chosen, and do not restrict your autonomy. You are free to decide to stop playing your own game. Nobody else has control over you in this setup.

In this light, it would be a wrong conclusion to predict that life gamification will decrease your intrinsic motivation for those activities you apply game mechanics to. Only certain kinds of extrinsic motivation have been shown to have adverse effects on long-term motivation. For an overview over some arguments against classical gamification see the post Gamification Backlash Roundup on The Ludologist.

These results and arguments can’t simply be transferred to the new concept of life gamification. On the contrary, life gamification can be used to train yourself on activities you aren’t really in the mood to do. In due time, this will increase your skill and competence levels for those activities. In general, doing things you are good at is more fun than doing things you are bad at; so, in the end, life gamification can be used to create authentic intrinsic motivation.

In the case that you want to play a DIY scientist, you could start your own experiments on the question whether life gamification can decrease long-term motivation or not.

The Big Picture Of Life

Turning your life into a kind of game is well possible. However, you need to be clear about whether you just want to have a good time with that game, or whether you want to win at it. For the former, you just need to apply some gamification techniques to your own life. Make it an adventure! Define your main mission objective and rock the house! But if you desire the latter, you would profit from spicing up your life with some experiments, and from reading The Science of Winning at Life on LessWrong.

Don’t think this is an either or choice. You can as well be successful and have a lot of fun at the same time! And doing experiments can be great fun and very exciting.

But that’s actually not what I mean when I write that life is an experimental game. What this means, is that life isn’t a completely finished game with fixed goals and rules. You can change the goals and rules of your own life! Even better: You can use the experimental method to do so in the best way possible. Try out different goals and find out which ones suit you best. Be flexible and test different hypotheses!

Life is quite an open-ended game. There’s no definite thing in life which you have to do and then you stop. You can always set new goals, test new methods, try different activities. Do experiment a lot to get the most out of life! That is the meaning of life – as an experimental game!

More Related Information

• The Experiment-Driven Life on matthewcornell.org

To Cut a Long Story Short:

From the deepest depths of depression and burnout I had risen from my own ashes like a phoenix and started my journey of unrestricted personal development and progress. Enthusiastically I didn’t only overcome most of my personal problems in a breeze, I also felt I had really become who I wanted to be. What happened to me was nothing less than the greatest personal transformation in my entire life – and it’s still continuing!

If you are really interested in my whole complete story, then you can take a look at my old personal blog (-Death)rant.net. In 2009 I started that blog as an attempt to banish my depression by screaming out my worries out into the digital ether. Well, it didn’t help a lot, but at least I had a place where I could write down my thoughts in a more or less sensible way.

Drowning my depression with antidepressants temporarily, I got better for a while, just to fall into the horrible abyss of depression+burnout one year later. Antidepressants weren’t strong enough to get me out of there. I needed to change my approach entirely. So, I started an online journal, invited some friends to it, and was suggested to read the awesome self-help book Feeling Good by David D. Burns. That fabulous book saved me by inviting me to try the scientific method on my own life!

Inflection Point

Yes, that was really the central inflection point of my life. It may be hard to understand why such a simple idea can have such a massive impact, but think about it: We used experimentation and science to make fire, build steam engines, split atoms, and create a global information-meta-network. That hasn’t just changed our world a little bit, but radically. Similarly, the application of science to your personal life will not only change it a little bit, but in a really unprecedented and awe-inspiring way!

Of course, we do some wild “experimentation”, but usually we do so in an unstructured way. Giving that process a clever structure is not only an absolute game changer, it’s an absolute life changer! It can turn your life into an experiment, a game, a challenge, a voyage to unimaginable greatness. That’s what I call Systematic Life Improvement.

Systematic Life Improvement

Improving your life in a systematic way is the central theme of this site, and it works roughly the following way:

1. Find out what you really want to do.
2. Define smart challenges that are connected to what you really want to do.
3. Learn, think, and find out how to win that challenge.
4. Write down a plan that will make you win that challenge.
5. Stick to that plan.
6. Track your progress and your success.
7. Review and tweak your goals and methods.

This method works! It leaves all alternative approaches in the dust and elevates you a higher level of existence – if you implement it the right way! Unfortunately, implementing it just the right way is the main difficulty. Therefore, I need to explain how to do that. Due to the complexity of that task, this will take a while. As a matter of fact, you will need to stick around at this site to find out what I have to say about Systematic Life Improvement.

But Where’s The Fun?

The fun appears once you apply the Systematic Life Improvement method the right way. Few things are as exciting as having the strong feeling of being on the right track. Making optimal progress at reaching your own goals can be really exhilarating. You don’t need drugs, or very special experiences to feel absolutely great, you just need to do the right thing at the right time! Reach an intense experience of flow and you will know where the fun is.

In fact, I have been a computer game maniac for almost my entire life. Just recently, I have found out that my own personal development is a game that is superior to those computer games in many respects. Most importantly, it’s a game that really makes a difference to real life! It’s not a waste of time and there’s nothing to regret. And the chances are limitless, as is the potential of us all!

You can play the game of personal development, too! Together we can overcome all boundaries and finally become unrestricted!