To change behaviour, change the environment

Willpower is for jocks. A limited resource to begin with, made even less useful by being depleted by simple decisions, like what to wear to work or eat for lunch. Constantly switching between tasks seems to be a good way to expend it as well. So relying on willpower to change your (or someone else’s) behaviour is not a sustainable strategy.

But what if you changed the environment instead?

Trying to cut back on candy and snacks? Clear out the cupboards. It’s much easier to avoid foods that take some trouble to obtain. If you need to go to the local store every time to satisfy a craving, it’s less likely that you’ll actually do it.

Trying to start exercising in the morning? Aim for 10 minutes to make the goal easy to achieve and to build positive reinforcement. Then put your sneakers and sportswear next to the bed before going to sleep.

When I finally realised that checking Facebook was likely to put me in a bad mood, I deleted the app. And the apps you want to spend less time on, but don’t want to get rid off completely? Put them in other screens and into folders. The more clicks it takes, the less likely it is you’re going to open them accidentally and without intent.

Want to watch less TV and read more? Leave the remote to another room. And when you finally come home from work and collapse on the couch, have a book waiting at arms reach.

Changing the environment is also the smart and sustainable way to create organisational change. Design processes, metrics, rewards, incentives, information flows, tools, management systems, goal setting, performance reviews etc. in a way that they support the behaviours you want to see from the people in your organisation, and discourage those that are toxic.

Want to be more innovative? Get rid of metrics that encourage people to protect business as usual. Replace them with ones that reward creativity, controlled risk-taking and learning. Get rid of informational silos and start using systems that support total transparency.

And treat those changes as experiments. Organisations are complex adaptive systems, where seemingly simple changes can have surprising and significant side effects. Just look at what happened in Yahoo: Fixed project-based employee evaluations meant that none of the top engineers wanted to work with each other, as it would have reflected poorly on their individual performance scores. Consequently the most important projects never had the best possible team working on them.

Of course, none of this matters if you don't first figure out what the desired personal and organisational behaviours are.

Further reading:

Heath, Chip & Heath, Dan (2010). Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. New York: Random House.

McChrystal, Stanley et al. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. New York: Penguin Publishing Group.

Do it with intent

I get distracted easily. If a website takes a few seconds too long to load, I have already opened Facebook or Twitter on another tab. And the next fifteen minutes have disappeared into the endless news feed slot machine, before I realise I was supposed to be doing something else. (1)

I am also a pathological procrastinator. I get stuck in a loop where I first check email, then Slack, then calendar, then Evernote, and round it goes to email again. Evernote houses the things I should be doing, but to actually get started with them requires concentration. And if I could concentrate, I would not have been sucked into the loop in the first place.

Luckily I have found the closest thing to a solution so far. It struck me a few months ago as I was taking a walk outside. The key is to have intent, a purpose for the action. Stopping yourself in the middle of whatever you are doing and asking: “What is your intent?”

I am not saying you should stop using Facebook, and I certainly spend my fair share of time on Twitter. But whenever you use those services, ask yourself that question. Is there a purpose for checking them at the moment, or are you just escaping from whatever it is you should be doing? Are you resisting something?

This question can also be used outside work context. Have you ever seen someone channel-surf with intent? Probably not. It’s another kind of loop. You feel like you should be doing something else, but are lacking the energy or interest for it, so the loop draws you in. But if that is the case, then why not intentionally do something relaxing and enjoyable, instead of just procrastinating and feeling the worse for it?

Go outside. Play some games. Watch your favourite show.

We are not machines. Our energy level and mental capacity fluctuates. Trying to act like a machine does no good.

Footnotes:

1) You should really read this article: How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds – from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist. It’s superb.

What 12-year old kids can teach you about innovation

This spring I have been taking couple university courses on the Coursera online education platform. One was about gamification, or how to use concepts that are more familiar to us from different kinds of games in non-game contexts, in order to e.g. improve business performance or job satisfaction. The other course was about innovation, and one of the reading materials included this gem of a list of advise for aspiring innovators:

• Start simple

• Work on things that you like

• If you have no clue what to do, fiddle around

• Don't be afraid to experiment

• Find a friend to work with, share ideas!

• It's OK to copy stuff (to give you an idea)

• Keep your ideas in a sketch book

• Build, take apart, rebuild

• Lots of things can go wrong, stick with it

Local kids playing ball at Lake Toba, Indonesia.

The first two lines, "Start simple" & "Work on things that you like" serve one main purpose: minimising friction. Often the hardest part is to get going, and the simpler you can make a task appear the less internal resistance you will face. Also, when you get to work on something you enjoy, the more motivated you will be. It stops feeling like work and more like fun, and as you probably know you don't need to spend precious willpower to force yourself to have fun.

The next two lines are about finding direction and refining your goal. "If you have no clue what to do, fiddle around" is helpful to keep in mind when you have only a vague idea of what you want to reach. Or if you are trying to solve a problem, the solution might not make itself apparent at first. In that situation fiddling around, experimenting, and trying new things is essential to keep you moving. You can't stumble on new discoveries, solutions and ideas by standing still.

Creativity and innovation are inherently social activities. The myth of a lone genius has been crushed long since. Furthermore, if you "Find a friend to work with, share ideas!" you will not only learn from each other, but also have more fun in the process. Jon Krakauer had it right when he wrote in Into the Wild that "Happiness [is] only real when shared".

"It's OK to copy stuff (to give you an idea)" might sound deranged in this crazy CISPA and RIAA paranoia induced world we live in, but in reality not a single innovation has been born in isolation. We are unconsciously drawing knowledge from everything we see, hear, and touch. The Wright brothers wouldn't have created the first engine-powered airplane without learning from non-motored flyers as well as from the flight of birds. Google was not the first Internet search engine, but it improved upon the ones that came before and the world ended up better because of it.

"Keep your ideas in a sketch book" highlights the importance of documentation. Trying to remember everything is unreliable and inefficient. It takes away capacity from our already limited working memory, which can handle only a couple different simultaneous thoughts. By externalising the memory function you will have more brainpower for what matters; creative thinking. Furthermore, having your ideas outside your head helps tremendously with sharing and discussing them with others.

Innovation is, if anything, an iterative process. "Build, take apart, rebuild" and learn from your failures is the fastest way to move from an idea to the final solution. When each iteration contributes to the outcome by teaching you something new about your idea, your confidence about the final solution will also increase. Contrast this to an approach where you would come up with an idea that looks good on paper, and then implement it as-is without any testing or experimentation. Like communism.

Last but not least, innovation is about perseverance in the face of failure. As is said, it's 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. "Lots of things can go wrong, stick with it" and eventually you will come up with the winning concept. On the other hand, though, it is also vitally important to know when you should quit and change approach or work on another idea. Seth Godin wrote a whole book about this. However, more often people quit too early than too late.

You could read hundreds of research papers and books about innovation, but this list by 12-year old schoolchildren is easier to remember and already covers the most important parts. Do not overthink innovation. Just start doing and learn on the way.

References:

Resnick, Mitchel (2007). All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten. Presented at Creativity & Cognition conference, June 2007.

Who controls your life?

This is a topic I have been wanting to write about for a long time, but it has been difficult to gather my thoughts and more importantly find the resolve required. Perhaps because this is something that makes me want to scream inside. Here goes.

Do you feel unhappy about some aspect of your life? Not in the perfect relationship you dreamt about when you were young, but hey the guy/girl you've settled with is not that bad. Maybe you drift through workdays in a state of semi-consciousness, hoping to lay low enough not to raise any unwanted attention while browsing celebrity gossip sites. Sure, it's not the job you wanted. Not even the profession you secretly desired, but your parents got you convinced that you'd be better off studying law instead of breeding miniature pigs. One day you realize that those love handles are starting to really show, but what's a girl to do? After all, you spend good 4-5 hours a week on a treadmill in the local gym and always eat your vegetables.

Guess what, no one is going to solve those problems for you, or otherwise change your life for the better.

Step 1

You have to take complete no-bullshit no-excuses ownership of who you are and where you are in your life. You have to man up. Not happy with the job? It's your fault, your responsibility. You've made some bad decisions. Not happy with your guy? Nor the ones before him? You have bad taste. Your fault. Always turning off the lights when having sex because you don't want him to see you naked? Your body, your fault, your responsibility.

You cannot change your life and fix things unless you are ready to take full, absolute, complete responsibility of your actions. The past and future ones alike. What you need is naked honesty. Because only by going through this necessary step will you be able to truly own your problems. Ownership leads to control, and control means you can finally start changing things.

I cannot stress enough the importance of this part. Stop. The. Fucking. Excuses. You don't eat Ben & Jerry's in evenings, slouched in front of the tv, because "it was a hard day at work." You eat that shit because you choose to do so. Relationships, jobs, friends etc., they are all choices. If you are not satisfied with something, it's time to choose again. If you are not the one who controls what those choices are, then who does? If you are not the one living your life, then who is? How can you call yourself a free individual if you won't accept the responsibility that comes with freedom?

You can take control of your life if you want to, but before that you need to take responsibility of every single aspect of it; all the decisions, actions, and their outcomes. No one else can do that for you. To imagine otherwise is to be a puppet, a subject to other people's machinations. Do you think the company you work for has your best interests in mind? Or your spouse? Or your parents? Fuck no. They may believe so and even get you convinced, but they are not you. They can't possibly know what it's like to wake up in your skin every day, or what really goes on inside your head.

Step 2

Start making some decisions. After you have accepted raw, unfiltered, naked responsibility, it's time to identify what you want to change. What aspect of your life is in most desperate need of improvement? Don't try to do everything at once. This is big stuff, so it's better to proceed one issue at a time.

After you've acquired your target, you need to decide how to tackle it. What will you start doing differently?

Don't like your job? Start scouting for a new one, but this time actually spend some time figuring out what your heart desires to do. Unhappy in your relationship? You have two options: you can leave, or you can work on it and see if it can be turned into a happy one. What doesn't work is sitting on your ass and expecting things to change on their own. Or repeat doing the same things that got you where you are now. This is about taking responsibility of your life, remember? And if you indeed eat your vegetables and spend 4-5 hours a week on a treadmill but are not getting the results you want, your method is obviously not working. As Einstein said; "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Step 3

Do your research. I have to admit that this step might be something that is more suited to a geek like me. However, I have found it to be extremely effective in multiple domains. What it means is that instead of making just any decision, you strive to make an informed one. Not sure what you want to do for a living? Read a couple career guides, find out what your Myers-Briggs personality type is, and see if you can identify what your values are (you know, things like integrity, learning, love, joy, honesty etc. that guide your behaviour in both conscious and unconscious level).

I was never able to lose weight following the "eat less exercise more" adage, but after I eliminated sugar and grains from my diet and started lifting weights instead of spending endless hours doing cardio on the "fat burning zone", I got in the best shape of my life in a matter of months. This probably would not have happened unless I had started questioning my assumptions and studying nutrition and exercise more in detail.

Change tends to be difficult as it is. Don't make it more difficult by using inferior methods.

Step 4

Act. Decisions alone are worth nothing unless they are followed by actual changes in your behaviour. This won't be easy. The single best book I have read about the topic is Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. Read it if you are serious about improving your life. Nevertheless, here is a quick summary about how to improve the odds of succeeding in a behaviour change.

1. Make sure you really understand what your goal is, and more importantly why you want to achieve it. Is your goal really to hit the gym 4 times a week, or is there a deeper goal, e.g. the desire to lose weight, and you simply assume that going to the gym is the best strategy for achieving that goal? The goal should also be your own. Not something someone else tells you should do. Change is easier when you know where you're going and why it's worth it.

2. Knowing something isn't enough to make change happen. Every single person knows that smoking is unhealthy, stupid, and pointless, yet they keep doing it. What you need is a catalyst that propels the change forward. This is not something you know or learn, but something you feel. Try to find the feeling that keeps you motivated to change.

3. In most cases it is easier to break down the change into small steps, and tackle one step at a time. This builds momentum and confidence that you can actually achieve what you set out to do. Want to eat healthier? Don't overhaul your entire diet at once, but start by fixing your breakfast. After it has become a routine and takes no conscious effort, move on to the lunch, and so on.*

4. Behaviour is largely environmental. We see something that triggers a familiar thought process and we act automatically. The more often we repeat a behaviour, the more ingrained it becomes. For example, if you often buy some last-minute candy at a check-out counter in the local grocery, the script for that behaviour gets triggered every time you are at a check-out counter, and it takes willpower to overcome it. Willpower, as we know, is a limited resource and when it gets depleted the impulses take over. The trick is to tweak your environment in such a manner that it prevents undesired behaviour while supporting desired ones. Eating healthy is a lot easier when you don't have cupboards full of beer, candy, cookies, and chips. Even small environmental changes can have a surprisingly large effect.

5. One way to create a trigger for the desired behaviour is to determine beforehand when, where, and how you will behave in the new way: "When I am in the coffee shop, sitting opposite to my date, I will smile a lot and be genuinely interested about his life. I will also listen to everything he says, giving my complete attention." Visualising yourself behaving in a situation has a similar effect on your brain than if you actually did it in real life. This will make the desired behaviour more natural, familiar, and easier to trigger when the actual situation occurs.

* As I said, this works in most cases. If, for example, you have a gluten intolerance this kind of approach is just going to keep you feeling miserable. Sometimes a zero-tolerance approach is a necessity. 

In the end, you decide. Do you want to cruise through your days more or less on an autopilot, as a bystander to whom life just happens, or do you have the guts to take control of it? Let me know in the comments.

Give in to the system (and watch your productivity skyrocket)

In my previous life as a consultant I would often get to work, open my laptop, pour a cup of coffee and start thinking about what is that I should actually start doing. As I was slowly sipping the coffee I might have opened my email, browsed a few news sites or blogs, and by the time the coffee was getting cold I'd be nowhere nearer to getting any real work done. Sounds familiar?

It was a rare occasion when I had actually determined beforehand to dedicate the next morning for a particular task or achieving a goal. Even when I knew that one of the best things for productivity is to always have one important thing you want to get done for each day, and start working on it first thing in the morning. No email, no news sites, no distractions. That way you feel that at least you've accomplished something even if the rest of the day is completely unproductive.

So why was it so hard to do this? As it turns out, with an array of tasks which to choose from, I had hard time choosing anything. My experience of Paradox of Choice in action. Also, as I now know decision-making is depleting the same very limited mental resource that is needed to focus on a task and stick to it. So I was already shooting myself in the foot by leaving the decision-making for the morning. (1)

Another problem was that quite often I actually did not know what I should do. I had a list of deliverables, I knew the big picture project plan, and I knew what needed to happen at a given time. However, many times I wasn't able to see the steps leading to those deliverables. And in face of uncertainty it often is easier to just read email and focus on the trivial stuff than to start thinking about how to deal with what is important. 

Let the system guide you

A bit over a month ago Johnny B. Truant, one of my favorite bloggers, published a 116-page novel titled Fat Vampire (Yes, that's an affiliate link. You should totally read the book. It's hilarious.). It had taken him less than a month to get the idea for the book, write the whole thing, edit it, and publish it. By anyone's standards I think that can be considered to be fairly productive. Shortly after the publication he shared some of his tips and tricks on how to do it. This article focuses on one of them: using a calendar.

I have known for quite some time that one good way to be productive is to schedule tasks that need to get done. In the same way you'd schedule a meeting from 9 to 11 am, you could reserve that time slot in your calendar for working on a particular task or project. One of the best ways to be productive is to work in 25 or 50 minute intervals, followed by 5-10 minute breaks, and having a longer 30 minute break every two hours. This way you won't run out of steam mid-day, but also have energy left for personal stuff after you get home from work. In other words, you should schedule work in 30 and 60 minute blocks. (2)

Inspired by Johnny's article I decided to experiment with combining these methods. Here's my calendar from last week (the green color stands for personal stuff, blue is work/study related):

What's going on here is that every night I check my to-do list and create a schedule for the next day. The tasks are scheduled for 30 or 60 minute time slots, which reminds me to take those 5-10 minute breaks. I use a timer when I work because skipping a break is detrimental for long-term productivity. Lastly, I schedule longer breaks such as playing on xbox, taking a nap or watching an episode of South Park (humor boosts creativity!).

The reason I do this for one day at a time -  as opposed to e.g. creating a schedule for the whole week at once - is that meetings are called, deadlines change, and so do my own energy levels. For example, besides writing this article and a mandatory class my schedule for today is almost empty. I have worked a lot during the past few days, including the weekend, and haven't really had time to relax. Yesterday I noticed that my performance started to suffer because of it, so today is a take-it-easy day.

If you need to accomplish a task with a tight deadline, it makes sense to schedule time slots for that task for the whole week. This is to ensure that no one steals that time from you with (usually) pointless meetings - a common annoyance in corporate environments where people have access to your calendar. 

The system is your friend

During the four weeks I have used this method my productivity has skyrocketed. It might be partly because having an hourly schedule is so similar to how all of us have lived our lives ever since the 1st grade. We already have a lot of conditioning to work this way. There are also more specific benefits and advantages:

1. Say goodbye to procrastination. When you have a schedule and you have already decided the day before that e.g. from 9 to 10am you will work on that sales pitch or that presentation, you don't end up browsing email or checking facebook news feed. When the clock hits 9 you put a timer to alert at 9:50 and you get going.

2. Be meticulous when it comes to breaks. Like all the things that need to get done, you have also scheduled your downtime. It's one thing to know on a conscious level that you should take breaks, but another to actually disconnect from work when you're in a good flow. Having a break pre-scheduled removes the sense of guilt you might normally feel about "wasting" time, while also helping to maintain high-level performance in the long-term.

3. Stop wasting your willpower. Did you know that at work Barack Obama wears only blue or gray suits? He does this in order to conserve mental energy: “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make, … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” When you have a schedule you don't need to decide what to do. You have already decided. (3)

4. Gain control of your time. A major cause of work-related stress is the feeling of not having control about how you spend your time. Creating a schedule is exactly the opposite of that. It is one example of a problem-based coping strategy, which can be very powerful when it comes to dealing with stress. Even if you keep getting e.g. many meeting invitations, this method allows you to grab some control back to yourself. And if you need to regain more time for actual work, you can schedule the work time in advance to ensure that no one steals it from you. No more working after-hours or when everyone else in the family has gone to sleep. (4)

Obviously every now and then something comes up during the day that causes changes to your beautifully crafted schedule. Life can't be planned perfectly in advance. When this happens, you at least have a visual representation of what you intended to do with the rest of your day. It becomes easier to prioritize. You can quickly check what you can still do, and what you should move to the next day. This is more liberating than it is restricting, and most importantly it helps you stay in control in spite of surprises.

I mentioned earlier that one big problem used to be that sometimes I didn't know exactly what to do, and that resulted in procrastination and postponing the important tasks. When it comes to dealing with ambiguity, one solution is to schedule time for simply sitting down with pen and paper, making plans, dividing the task into smaller components, creating a list of things you need to find out before proceeding, and planning on how you intent to gain that knowledge etc.

Lastly, by using this system it becomes surprisingly easy to make progress even when a goal seems huge, distant, and uncertain. Many times a project such as writing a novel or creating a new product causes the inner resistance to go on overdrive, filling your head with all the reasons why the project won't succeed. As a result, you give up before even getting started. When you adapt to the approach of working towards a goal in predetermined slots of time, and measure progress by the amount of work done - as opposed to the amount of tasks finished - suddenly the goal doesn't seem that hard anymore.

I for one will certainly continue working using this method. If you want to try it out, or have experience with something similar, I'd love to hear about it in the comments! :)

References:

(1) Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 94, No. 5, 883-898.

(2) Loehr, J., & Schwartz, T. (2003). The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. Free Press; 1 edition.

(3) Vanity Fair: Barack Obama to Michael Lewis on a Presidential Loss of Freedom: “You Don’t Get Used to It—At Least, I Don’t” - online article.

(4) Drnovšek, M., Örtqvist, D., & Wincent, J. (2010). The effectiveness of coping strategies used by entrepreneurs and their impact on personal well-being and venture performance. Journal of Economics and Business, Vol. 28, 193-220.

Increase your productivity... by playing Angry Birds!

Looking back the few years since I started getting interested in how to change human behavior, how to be productive, and in general how our brains work, I can confidently say that I have gotten the most done when I have used a method of working in focused and uninterrupted blocks of time. At first I experimented with working for 50 minutes at a time, followed by a 10 minute break, and a longer 30 minute break every 2 hours. Lately I've found the Pomodoro technique with its shorter 25 minute bursts of work, followed by 5 minute breaks, quite efficient. Especially when having to do something that is difficult to get started with.

However, one major difficulty with this kind of periodization is how to really detach yourself from the task at hand when it's time for a break. How to, e.g., take your mind off cognitive work and do something else. I have tried listening to music, doing a few push-ups, a bit of housecleaning etc., but these activities tend to require so little attention that most of the time work creeps into consciousness anyway. This is not good, as it effectively diminishes the restorative power of the break.

Another issue is that 5-10 minutes is too short a time to really do much. Go to the toilet and drink a glass of water and the time's pretty much up.

Luckily, I think I have found the solution to really improve the potential for recovery during those breaks, and it's called Angry Birds*. Here's why:

1) Angry Birds takes your mind off work

Brain is like a muscle. When extorted it gets fatigued. As with self-control and the ability to make decisions, there are limitations to the capacity to do demanding cognitive processing. Like a car using fuel to run, you also have limited resources that become depleted during intense concentration and thinking. (1, 3)

One way to ensure that you won't run out of steam in the middle of a workday is to track your use of time, and within steady intervals switch from work-mode to recovery-mode. The most important thing in successfully doing this is to push all work and task-related thoughts away.

The beauty of Angry Birds is that even if you only have 5 minutes for a break, it's enough to finish couple levels. More importantly,  Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Where's My Water, Cut the Rope, and other similar mobile games, are quick to start and require just the right amount of thinking to take your conscious thoughts away from work, but not so much that they become a further drain to your limited mental resources.

2) Short breaks are equally, or more important for recovery, than long ones

There is some rather interesting evidence showing that even short breaks have significant positive effects when used in a way that takes your mind off the task at hand and make you feel good and, dare I say, happier.

Doctors who were primed to feel positive emotions  showed almost 3 times more intelligence and creativity than doctors in a neutral state. They also made accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster. (2)

In another study students were primed to feel stress by giving them a task to make a difficult speech under time-pressure, and told that the speech would be videotaped and evaluated by their peers. The subjects were then shown one of three short films; a neutral, sad, or a positive film. Those who were shown the positive film for just couple minutes recovered from the physiological effects of stress 3 times faster than those who saw the sad film, and 2 times faster than those in the neural condition. (3)

One more argument in support of short breaks is the finding that if a resource becomes severely depleted, it falls to a so-called "Burnout Range." When that happens, otherwise reliable restorative sources tend to provide significantly less restorative effect, and otherwise insignificant sources of depletion will cause significant resource losses. So take your short breaks now so you don't end up completely non-functional in the long run. (4)

3) Your subconscious mind will not stop working

An article in Harvard Business Review reported couple weeks ago about a study where participants had to make a complex decision. There were four cars from which to choose from. Each was described by 12 different attributes, and participants had to pick one that was the best match for multiple specified wants and needs. Only one of the fours cars was the "right" choice, having twice as many positive than negative attributes.

As stated in the article: "One group had to make a choice immediately. These people didn't do very well at optimizing their decision. A second group had time to try to consciously solve the problem. Their choices weren't much better. A third group were told the problem, then given a distracter task to do first — something that lightly held their conscious attention but allowed their non-conscious to do more work. This group did significantly better than either of the other groups at selecting the optimum car for their overall needs."

The real kicker was that the distracter task was no longer than two minutes, but it seems that even two minutes is enough to significantly boost your problem-solving skills.

There you go! Don't worry about time wasted, but squeeze in a few minutes of Angry Birds once an hour and you'll not only keep your cognitive performance at a higher level throughout the day, but also feel happier and more energized for it.

References:

(1) Muraven, M., Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Self-Control as Limited Resource: Regulatory Depletion Patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 74, No. 3, 774-789.

Vohs, K. D., Baumeister, R. F., Schmeichel, B. J., Twenge, J. M., Nelson, N. M., & Tice, D. M. (2008). Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 94, No. 5, 883-898.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego Depletion: Is the Active Self a Limited Resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 74, No. 5, 1252– 1265.

(2) Achor, Shawn (2011). The Happiness Advantage. [Kindle Edition] Virgin Digital.

(3) Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 3, 300-319.

(4) Greenblatt, Edy (2002). Work/Life Balance: Wisdom or Whining. Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 31, No. 2, 177-193.

* None of the links in this article are affiliated. These referrals are my own recommendations, and I do not get any compensation for making them.

How to take advantage of your commutes and save dozens of days a year

I work wherever my clients are. This year I've had it easy: door-to-door commute takes about 30 minutes and I only have to take one subway. While working on my previous project it took easily 40-50 minutes by tram and train, as well as quite a bit of walking to get from home to the client office.

Let's do some math: Assuming I'd go to the office 5 days a week (hardly unrealistic for anyone with a regular job), 48 weeks a year (daddy needs his vacation!), and commute 60 minutes daily (30 minutes back and forth), that equals 240 hours of which about 1/3 is spent walking and the remaining sitting in a subway.

That equals 30 eight hour workdays wasted every year - if I didn't make use of that time.

I read. Since elementary school I have spent the bus drives nose glued to books. Granted, those books were mostly fiction. Yet I hated idle time. I kept reading all the way to my first couple years as a professional. At some point the Pratchett's and King's and Herbert's just changed to local newspapers.

That was until I figured out that reading those newspapers was almost complete waste of time. The problem with news is that 99% of the time they are not actionable; your life will be exactly the same before and after reading them. Another issue is that most news tend to be negative. If the first thing you do in the morning is read about war, famine and depression, what kind of mood do you think it sets for the rest of your day?

Before you panic and choke on your pretzel, let me assure you that avoiding news does not make you ignorant. If something really important is going on you WILL hear about it. Maybe from your friends or co-workers, or simply by looking at the headlines when passing a newsstand, or from Facebook statuses and Twitter feeds. Then you can act on that information if you want to.

So if you shouldn't read news during commutes, then what? I am by no means against reading a good book or informative blog posts so that the time is not completely wasted, but I think there's an even better way to take advantage of the void that would otherwise exist between work/school and home: educational audio.

Listening to something is obviously even more relevant to those of you who drive to work. Reading while driving is generally a bad idea. However, even if you walk or use public transportation this can save you a lot of time.

Remember when I mentioned in the beginning that of the 1 hour I spend commuting each day 2/3 are spent on subway. The remaining 20 minutes I am on my feet. Reading while walking is rather difficult, but listening while walking isn't.

Now that we have established that taking advantage of good audio content is one of the most effective ways to utilize the commuting time here are three ways to get you started. 

1. Audio books

A respectful number of books are already available in audio format and I don't think I know anyone who wouldn't be carrying a mobile phone or an MP3 player capable of playing them.

However, there is one caveat: audio seems to work more naturally with works of fiction. Maybe it has something to do with the storytelling traditions that have been part of humanity for thousands of years. On the other hand, I am currently listening to Wheat Belly and thanks to smooth writing and a very good narrator it has been a pure pleasure so far.

I'd also recommend taking advantage of sites like Audible where you can listen to a sample of each audio book before purchasing it. It's best to check for yourself whether or not a book is worthwhile getting as audio instead of text. 

2. Podcasts

Despite the name you don't need an iPod to enjoy audio podcasts. They are simply "radio shows" that can be downloaded and listened to whenever you want. iTunes Store is a great tool for searching and subscribing to podcasts but there are also many that accompany a blog or a website, and can be downloaded directly from there. Unlike most audio books, there is a great number of quality podcasts that are completely free of charge.

During the past few months I consumed about 100 episodes of The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf which has significantly increased my knowledge in nutrition, health, and exercise. That's more than 100 hours of free, effortless education on a subject that greatly interests me. Definitely not wasted time!

Another great show for the health nuts is The Healthy Skeptic (the show is currently ongoing a name change, so my apologies if it will be Skeptical Health Detective or something else by the time you are reading this) and there are podcasts on almost any subject imaginable, so I'm sure you will find something interesting! 

3. iTunesU

This might be a somewhat lesser known feature of iTunes Store, but there is a whole section devoted to lectures and other material published by top universities and educational institutions. And did I say that most, if not all, of it is free?

How are you taking advantage of time spent between home and work? Please share your tips in the comments! Also, if you know of good podcasts or non-fiction audio books - no matter what the topic is - let me know!

So you want to get lean, build muscle, and finish an Ironman?

Me too, but it’s not going to happen. You know why? Because you’re giving your body mixed signals. One day you’re telling it to grow strong, which pretty much equals putting on weight (yeah yeah I know you can increase strength without mass gains due to e.g. nerve conditioning but for the sake of argument let’s forget about that for a moment, ok?), then you go underfed and “cut” some body fat on a marathon treadmill session while also catabolizing the muscle you were trying so hard to build. A week from that and we see you in your skin-tight shorts, riding a bicycle on an 80km escape from family life.

And then you wonder why you’re not getting results.

Korean pop star Rain on Ninja Assassin

Your body is pretty amazing at adapting to the stress you put it under, but you need some consistency if you want to make significant changes. Want to look like Brad Pitt on Fight Club (or Rain in Ninja Assassin which has replaced Brad as the “gold standard” - at least in my books)? Then your training and diet should consist of things that enable efficient burning of fat while also preserving lean muscle.

And if you start crying over not making any personal records on deadlift or squat, it’s time for a reminder: what was it that you set out to do again? If you want to lift more you’re certainly not going to do that with a protocol that emphasizes fat loss. You’re lucky to maintain your strength at its current level.

The next time you go to a gym, a run, swimming, yoga, or whatever it is that you’re doing, ask what your goal really is, and is your current way of training actually aligned to that goal?

Or maybe you don’t have a goal. In that case make one for yourself. And track your progress. It will make working out immensely more motivating. Trust me.

Just be sure not to sweat over things that are not related to reaching your goal. Instead, focus on stuff that matters. If you want to lose weight you need to concentrate on weight, fat %, waist circumference etc. All else is secondary. Sure, it is nice to notice that you’re able to run faster or lift more, but it shouldn’t matter. Neither should possible losses in strength. Not until you’ve reached your goal. 

Creating a clean slate

The past two months have been hectic to say the least. I've been doing more courses in the university than during the fall, and I also started a new work project which actually turned out to take quite a lot of my time and energy. I'm doing things that are entirely new to me such as detailed project planning and resourcing. Factor in a new relationship and the end result has been an almost complete neglect to my own personal growth, which resulted in a slight depression.

During these couple of months I've learned something new, though. This is probably the first time ever when I have had so many promising opportunities that I simply can't get involved in all of them. I had to start prioritizing and actually refuse from things which is definitely something that doesn't come naturally to me.

Because of the standstill in my personal growth I have felt that I'm not moving forward, that I'm not evolving, and as a result I felt like I had betrayed myself and wasn't living up to my own standards. I also learned that this blog and my personal growth are very much intertwined. Without new profound realizations and discoveries in my own life it feels like I don't have enough interesting things to write about.

It's great to be able to plow through obstructions and get the job done. And it's good to keep yourself disciplined and on purpose. But if you forget your larger purpose while pursuing the small and endless tasks of daily life, then you have reduced yourself to a machine of picayune... Tasks are important, but no amount of duties adds up to love, freedom, or full consciousness. You cannot do enough, nor can you do the right things, so that you will finally feel complete.
- David Deida: The Way of the Superior Man 

I'm sure no one wants to hear about the intricacies of my work as an SAP specialist, or what I'm learning at the university - which quite frankly isn't all that much. School and work really are not the places where you learn things about yourself, about what your wants and desires are, or how to discover your place and purpose in the world.

I wanted to empty myself of my commitments, obligations, duties, and wants in order to see them objectively and pick the ones that are most important. Applying Pareto principle, I wanted to find out the 20% of things that give me 80% satisfaction. Call it prioritizing or mental spring cleaning, but after I realized I needed to do this it felt like a huge burden was lifted from my shoulders. This is the list I came up with. 

Highest priority commitments

Currently my number one goal is to do a student exchange in Seoul, South Korea next fall. I should know in two weeks whether or not I get accepted but I'm having my hopes high. I also want to graduate some day, so right now I'd say the two commitments I really feel obliged to keep are

• School

  • Getting more courses done this spring so I'm a step closer to graduating.

• Work

  • Saving money for the student exchange.

I was losing money the whole fall due to not having enough work, but to my big relief that changed now in mid-January. It also looks like I'm able to work throughout the summer and save money for the exchange. I'm having a new kind of project role at work which gives me more responsibility than before, so I'm also taking it as a challenge and a learning experience. 

Other high priority stuff

These are the things I enjoy a lot, or are otherwise the ones that are giving biggest dividends for the time I invest in them.

• Physical fitness

  • Going to gym, doing yoga, running after the snows melt, playing squash etc.

• Diet and nutrition

  • Making sure that I keep eating healthy, which involves preparing most of my own food.

  • Taking care of what I eat and how I exercise gives so much energy that they are more like enablers that make it possible to tackle all the rest of the things going on in my life.

• Relationship

  • I started dating a lovely girl about two months ago, and this relationship is something I really want to invest in and explore more :)

• Friends

  • The people you spend time with will shape your own personality. One of the fundamental success principles is to surround yourself with people who are forward looking and have a drive to succeed in life. Their energy will enhance your own. There are some extremely wonderful people in my life, and I want to keep it that way :)

• Language learning

  • Don't ask why, but I wanted to do a student exchange in a country where English is not so commonly spoken. This is because I want to learn a new language and I figured it's much easier to stay motivated when you are actually going to need it every single day. So yeah, as soon as I get confirmation about South Korea, I'll start studying the language lifehacking style.

• Personal growth

  • As I said, this area of my life has been on a standstill for the past couple of months. Only this week was I able to do something new regarding it, and it's amazing how much energy the experience gave me. I felt again that I'm moving towards some larger goal in my life. For me reading is an integral part of personal growth, so I will not mention it separately.

There are actually quite a lot of these high priority things that I want to keep in my life and juggling all of them might be a bit of a challenge. I don't know how things will turn out, but these are the ones I will try to devote my free time to. 

The rest

This category includes things that I will do if I have time left from my other activities. The main reason to write them down and have mentioned here is to stop myself from feeling obligated to do them. I want to be free of them, and enjoy them only when and if it fits my schedule.

• Aalto Entrepreneurship Society

  • It pains me to not be able to commit more to being an active member of the society, because Aaltoes is doing amazing job in aggregating entrepreneurship in Finland.

• Blogging

  • Even though I enjoy writing a lot, I've realized that I shouldn't force myself to do it, at least when doing so does nothing but makes me more stressful. I will keep writing new blog posts in the future as well, but I'm stopping myself from being committed to the earlier once a week schedule.

• Developing business ideas

  • I am starting to seriously consider becoming an entrepreneur, and I have quite a few different business ideas to get started with. However, I feel that this is something I can also focus on later after I have done my student exchange.

There are a few other existing and emerging short-term opportunities in my life, and I try to keep what I have promised to deliver earlier. I don't want to prevent myself from accepting possible new challenges either, but I think I have to start acknowledging that I can't do everything, and to become rather critical about what I should commit myself into.

This exercise was first and foremost to help me regain some control over my own life and to figure out what I really want to do with the limited time I have. If you have done something alike or have a completely different method I'd love to hear about it!

Managing stress... and sucking at it!

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
- Matthew 6:34

I am not a religious person. In fact I've been jokingly telling my friends that if I had a religion it would have to be Dudeism, and even that only so I would be able to marry couples. I think that would be cool.

Luckily you don't have to be religious to find wisdom in religious texts, and I think the quote above is a very important one to keep in mind. I am a worrier by nature. If I have many things that need to be done, they start to accumulate in my head and I find it more and more difficult to focus on actually doing them. I become stressful and I feel like I'm not getting anything done, even though in reality I am probably working harder than ever to meet my obligations.

I am good at dealing with stress. Or so it used to say in my CV. I actually thought it was true, but my current situation of working most of the week, dealing with university courses, and trying to keep my other commitments such as writing this blog have proved otherwise. I suck at dealing with stress. Having one or two big things to do is perfectly fine, but when the small ones start to accumulate on top of those, I am in trouble. I find it genuinely difficult to put them in order and deal with them without letting them gain power over me.

The problem is not so much that I wouldn't be able to deliver what I've committed to, but the process of doing it drains all the juice out of me and I end up feeling miserable until most of the things are out of the way.

People who know me tend to see me as someone who is very focused and constantly getting a lot of things done, but that's not the way I see myself. My attention is not on what I did, but what is still left to be done and that is a problem. Instead of stopping to celebrate the things I've accomplished I'm already striving towards the next thing on my list.

I could use some help here, and that's the main reason I'm writing this. I'm not a big fan of productivity systems that are complex and difficult to maintain, but I think I could use something to organize my thoughts and help me visually arrange the things I need to do. I have a tendency of committing myself into doing things even though I know I'm already busy with other stuff, so something that would help me see my current commitments and evaluate how much time it takes to do them would be perfect. If you have any ideas on this, I'd love hear them!

Now, I don't want this post to be all about bitching and whining, so here are couple things I've actually found very useful to make an active and busy life a lot more tolerable:

1. Write stuff down, even the small tasks.

If you try to keep everything in your head, these things will be popping up into your thoughts constantly to remind you that they need your attention. This will destroy focus, increase stress, and is just plain annoying.

2. Have an off-day once a week.

Doing this has worked great for me! Even with many things going on, forcing yourself to have one day a week when being productive and getting things done is banned from your vocabulary is a great stress relief. It might take a while to learn to do it as you need to consciously refuse to let your work and other commitments get inside your head. In long-term, though, this is very useful as it ensures that you have more focus and energy for the other six days.

3. Take care of eating, sleeping, and exercise.

Stress releases cortisol, which is a hormone that acts like insulin; driving glucose from blood into your cells to be used for energy or stored as fat. This is all fine and a natural survival mechanism as long as the cause of stress is short, but if you are experiencing chronic long-term stress you're in trouble. Sleep is important for stress release, and proper diet and exercise will improve your insulin sensitivity. These factors help you to maintain blood sugars at an optimum level, which brings numerous health benefits both physically and mentally.

I pretty much despise companies that track working hours of their employees and pay salary according to them. Counting time instead of actual results is a ghost of the industrial era and mass production. If the role of the employee is even a little more than that of an organic robot, time starts to lose its meaning.

If you're feeling stressed, low on energy, and lack focus, it might easily take 2-3 times longer to do a task than if you were super focused and completely immersed in it. Letting yourself take a day off and taking care of your health will help you reach that level of focus for the rest of the week. Even though you lose the hours of the off-day, you will end up getting more done in all the other days. And you are likely to feel better too.

On another note, I wrote an article for Lateral Action - one of my favorite blogs - about using your naturally occurring bodily rhythms to boost focus, energy levels, and consequently productivity. If the topic is of any interest to you, it's definitely worth checking out!

Why New Year's promises fail, and what to do about it

You have finished cleaning the plate of the last bits of ham. You take a sip of your beer, feel your stomach bulging and think: "This is Christmas, it's ok to indulge and eat in excess. Soon it will be next year, and then I will get back in shape. I will start exercising and eating healthy, and by the summer I'll look great when I'm lying on the beach in my swimming trunks and enjoying the sun. Promise."

I wonder how many thousands, or millions of people are making these kinds of New Year's promises: "I will lose 20 pounds", "I will go to the gym 3 times a week", or "I will become a vegetarian". Few weeks into the future and most of them have quit, and most likely also made up reasons and justifications for themselves about why they had to quit. It's always something external, so that one doesn't have to face the reality of being a failure and take responsibility for it.

There are a few reasons why this happens. One is motivation. And I'm not even talking about how to motivate yourself, or what kind of techniques can be used to build up motivation. Most people lose the motivation to make a change because they haven't really thought the whole thing through. They haven't had a long, honest conversation with themselves about what is the current reality of the situation, and why it needs to be changed. The motivation for losing weight is never the actual event of weight loss, and if you don't look deeper, your motivation will be short lived.

You need to get to the underlying reasons for hitting the gym 3 times a week or losing 20 pounds. Do you want to feel healthy? Do you want others to think you look good? Do you feel that being a bit chubby or skinny prevents you from attracting the opposite sex? If you don't think these things through, you'll never get to the real reasons for making a change in your life, and therefore you'll never find true motivation for doing it.

Besides motivation, information is also an issue. There is too much of it around, and no one is going to tell you about what is right and what is wrong. Everyone's selling their own product, beliefs, and way of thinking. I do this too. I'm very much advocating the low-carb way of life because it works wonders for me, and I feel that it makes logically more sense than any other diet I know besides the paleolithic diet, but that one is rather difficult to achieve in practice.

The thing is, that most people make a New Years promise and then rush into action immediately. They will start going to the gym doing something they assume works, or they will start eating based on their earlier beliefs about what is healthy and what is not. This is exactly what I did. When I decided that it's time to lose the belly over a year ago, I started exercising 5 times a week, eating "healthy", and after 3 months I looked exactly the same as when I started. When you realize, that the struggle of the past 3 months was for nothing, it's a bit difficult to stay motivated.

I'm pretty sure that most New Years promises revolve around losing weight, getting in a good physical shape, or becoming healthier. Now, if an overweight person wants to lose weight, how do you think she will approach the challenge? She will use the exact same information and beliefs that have been stuck inside her head. Now, if she already has that information, why hasn't she been using it to become normal weight already? That's because whatever she thinks she knows is wrong. It's as simple as that.

If we knew, I mean really infallibly knew, what to do to become a healthy, fit person there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. The problem is, that most people don't face the fact that the mental models and preconceptions they have might be wrong. Cognitive dissonance explains a bit why it is so difficult to admit being wrong. When I say it like this it sounds ridiculous, but there are many people who really, honestly think that they are eating healthy - or have an otherwise healthy lifestyle - yet year-by-year they're gaining weight. It's a very rare individual who actually stops to think that maybe the knowledge she has about a healthy lifestyle is wrong. If she thinks she's eating healthy but still gaining weight all the time, maybe her preconceptions about what actually is healthy are the source of her problems?

Before you can start losing weight, you have to lose your way of thinking. It obviously isn't working, so it's time for a reality shift. It's time to start questioning those beliefs and search for different points of view. It takes some time and commitment, but it's definitely going to give you better results than just rushing into action without thinking thinks through or doing some underlying research about what works and what doesn't.

Go to a library, or Amazon.com, and search for books about diet and nutrition. See what other people say about these topics. What kind of reviews and ratings have they got? Is the author credible? Search for blogs. Even if you don't immediately find the information you seek, they can be a great gateway to other, better websites about the topic, or lead you to a book that will change your life.

This is not applicable only for diet and nutrition, but if you're skinny and have been trying to build muscle for the past months without any results, you're obviously doing something wrong. It's time again for a reality shift, and to question the beliefs you have about muscle hypertrophy. Time to hit Google and start searching for blogs, sites, and books about what we actually know about how to do it. What is the actual science saying about it? That information will be tremendously more useful to you than just relying on monthly tips from Men's Health or similar magazines.

Maybe you've tried to quit smoking three times before with the help of nicotine patches, but failed every time. What makes you think that this time would be any different? You're setting yourself ready for failure unless you question your basic assumptions and beliefs, and come up with a new strategy.

If you made a New Year's promise in order to change some aspect of your life, don't rush into it. Think about it thoroughly to discover what is your real motivation for making that change. Be honest to yourself. Then write down what preconceptions you have about how to actually make the change happen, and question those preconceptions. Don't show mercy to them. Do a little research to see if what you believe is actually backed by solid, preferably scientific, evidence instead of some bloke just believing the same way you do. Only when you have a clear idea about what works and why it works, it's time to take action.

2010 will be a great year. Make sure you get the most out of it!

Why I don't follow news: Case H1N1

It's been about 6 months since I decided to stop watching news on TV, reading newspapers (except when stealing a glimpse of a headline at the grocery), and following most news sites on the Internet. Back in my high school days I took special pride in reading the morning paper and keeping track on world affairs. But for what purpose? Other than it making me feel smug and superior to those who weren't doing it, I'm not sure I have a good answer.

Photo by just.Luc (just.Censored)

Unless you've been living in a shed, you know as well as any man on the street that the past decade has affected tremendously the availability and amount of information. Even before the Internet, TV and newspapers took care that when something noteworthy happened in the world, it didn't take long for you to get a report. Then came the Internet and the quantity of available information just exploded.

Considering how long we've had TV, or even newspapers, do you think that the human species has had sufficient time to adjust to handle that kind of amount of information? I don't have an answer to this, but I can let you know how deliberately ignoring news has affected my life; I've become happier, and I have more time and energy to focus on things that really matter to me.

I think that the biggest problem with following news is, that considering the time invested in doing it, it doesn't really give you anything in return - except maybe something you can gossip about with your girlfriends. Really. Think about it. If you read about a plane crash, oil spill, or how some economist thinks that the downturn is predicted to end when the swallows migrate back, how is that information really going to affect your actions? What can you do about it? Or how will knowing that piece of news improve your quality of life?

Herbert Simon, who was the pioneer in Attention Economics, argues that the overload of information results in a decrease in human attention:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it"

I have heard similar concepts elsewhere as well; that we have a limited amount of energy, willpower, or attention to use each day, and wasting that on useless pieces of information will decrease the amount available to really focus and put our hearts into things that matter, things that can have a positive impact on our quality of life.

Being able to focus is a gift. It's a unique ability we humans have that allows us to concentrate on specific things for long periods of time. If asked, productivity gurus and trainers would tell you to figure out what's important in your life, or what are the most important tasks you need to do, and then focus on one task at a time, while eliminating all the distractions that might make your attention to wander. They would probably also tell you to start working on those tasks first thing in the morning, for the simple reason that if you wait until the evening you have already filled your head with so much useless stuff that there's no willpower left to focus on anything.

I can hear you already arguing, that how can I then know what's going on, especially if it's something important like a nuclear meltdown or the death of Michael Jackson? I use my supreme powers of Internet wizardry to circumvent this problem, which pretty much comes down to two things: I'm on Twitter and Facebook. With those two tools alone I can very well see what people are talking about. It works like an automatic news filter. Only the really important news, something that people feel strongly about, or will actually affect their lives, are the ones that will get discussed and thus brought also to my attention. You wouldn't believe how well this actually works in practice. It's almost like having a personal staff, telling you only the things you might actually have to react to in some way, or have a strong interest in.

So, if I don't follow news I must be pretty ignorant then? Not quite. I would rather say that I'm selectively ignorant. Like I said, following the so-called world news doesn't really add much value to my life. I see it as time wasted and as a distraction. So instead, I put that time into reading books and blogs focusing on topics that I care deeply about. There are also a few science news sites that I check occasionally if I have time to procrastinate, as well as sites such as Digg, Mixx, and StumbleUpon, but even with these customizable and crowdsourced sites I find the real added-value very fleeting for my purposes. 

Finland and H1N1

A good case example about how not following news pays off was the H1N1 hysteria here in Finland. I started hearing about it first from my mom, then looked into it a bit on international health sites to discover that there was not really any reason to get worried about it - less chance of getting an H1N1 infection than the seasonal flu, and even in the worst cases it seemed easily treatable with modern medicine. At the same time, however, news outlets in Finland were using fear mongering tactics; pandemic, estimates of H1N1 death toll, how especially pregnant women were at risk etc. Now consider if that was your only source of information, like it was for many people, how would it have made you feel? Scared? Panicked?

Then Finland bought 5.3 million doses of Pandemrix vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline, as recommended by The National Institute for Health and Welfare. Hallelujah! And the scare tactics had worked, too. People were actually fighting to get vaccinated. The Institute continued its campaign of fear with the help of news outlets - as most of their information came from the Institute. Latest at this point, however, some people started to become skeptical: Finland has a population of about 5 million. Was it really expected that everyone would get vaccinated? Then the best part was discovered: The National Institute for Health and Welfare had received 6 million euros from GlaxoSmithKline for 'research', and the Institute did not ask for competing offers or from any other pharmaceutics companies, but went straight for GSK's Pandemrix vaccine. If this doesn't smell fishy, then I don't know what does.

Only when the complications and side-effects of the vaccine started to become too numerous to ignore, the voice of the mainstream media started to change somewhat. Yet during the whole ordeal, a non-profit citizen activist website had published H1N1 related information from numerous sources, national and international, and as a result got even accused by The National Institute for Health and Welfare for spreading misinformation. So no matter what was happening in the rest of the world, the Finnish people are apparently expected to have blind trust.

I do not want to keep beating this death horse any further, and I definitely want to avoid all the conspiracy theories surrounding World Health Organization, the corruption in Finnish national healthcare, or how BigPharma is pushing its own agenda in the Finnish parliamentary politics etc. What I want to say, however, is that in light of these events no matter what your source is, you can't be certain that the information you get is correct. It might also be wise to consider what motivation your source might have, or who is actually funding it. Can you trust them to offer a neutral, objective view on the topic?

Despite this 'trust no one' tone of voice, I want to believe that there is a better chance at finding more accurate and objective information from specialist sites such as The New England Journal of Medicine or Mercola.com, compared to the Finnish mainstream media that seems to get its information from the aforementioned biased and possibly corrupted sources.

In the end, if I had followed the news surrounding H1N1 in Finland, I'm almost certain I would have felt a lot more anxious and worried about how the situation would play itself out. At the same time there wasn't really much I could personally have done about it, yet it would have robbed me of some of my attention, willpower, or energy - whatever you want to call it - and hindered my ability to put my mind into more important things. That to me is worth much more than finding out who won the Big Brother this year or who is our prime minister dating this time.

We have failed to fail

One common topic of discussion we have had this fall at the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society events is how fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles stopping people from starting their own businesses. Some are concerned about their financial security and what would happen if the business fails, but on the other hand the steps that can be taken to minimize the financial impact of failure are rather simple. For example; don't quit your day job until you have some idea about the feasibility of your business, and make sure you have enough savings to last 6-12 months with no other source of income.

I dare say, that the financial side is not the real issue here. It is the culture, especially here in Finland. It is the fear of how others will see you if your business fails; the social pressure. We do not have a culture that celebrates those who try and fail - frankly, in Finland the ones who try and succeed are probably hated even more. Jealousy runs deep in our veins.

It is easy for the government to say "we need more entrepreneurs", but much harder to change peoples attitudes towards those who take the leap to pursue their dreams. So it is not very hard to see why we have so few truly ambitious startups.

Why is it then such a taboo to fail? I think the problem can be traced back to the way we have been educated. Ever since the first grade we have been taught that there are only two types of answers; the right and the wrong. And if you don't have the right answers you will be scowled at by your teacher and by your parents, you will not be successful, you will not get into a good university and you will end up having an unappreciated job.

From a very young age you are conditioned to provide the answers you think the other party (your teacher, boss, or parent) wants to hear instead of just having a go at it, and trying to come up with alternative options. Your brain becomes more of an information silo where everything is organized and filed to provide off-the-shelf answers. In the process, however, you also start to lose your creativity, and the ability to form new connections between different ideas and information.

The reason I brought up entrepreneurship at the start of this post is, that the capability for creative thinking is where the money is made. The vast majority of people only have generic answers that every single one of their peers have also learned at school or by following what others are doing. Successful entrepreneurs, by nature, have a different view on the world. They are the ones who have the creative ability to combine apparently unrelated things into something wonderful.

Every year worldwide more and more people are graduating with university degrees, so how are you going to differentiate yourself from them? Why should a company hire you when so many others have exactly the same education? Is it a wonder, that the most valued employees today are those who can come up with creative solutions and make them happen?

In one of my all-time favorite TED talks, Ken Robinson is making a case about how difficult it is to teach children in the modern world when it is changing at such a rapid pace. How can you educate someone who starts school now and will enter working life in 15-20 years? How do you know how the world is in 20 years when you can't even tell what it looks like in 5 years? And yet you are supposed to provide education that prepares for this unpredictable future.

With so much uncertainty it is even more important to nurture creativity, and to get rid of this mentality of right and wrong answers. We simply do not know yet what the future challenges will be, so the best tool to face those challenges is the extraordinary human capacity for creative thinking.

Failing at something should be celebrated instead of frowned upon, and the mindset that we need is not how to avoid failures, but how to learn from them. Anyone who has ever studied or tinkered with something on their own knows that the best way to learn is to actually do it, make a mistake, find out what went wrong and learn how to avoid it the next time. Unfortunately, the current form of education is not cultivating this approach.

The brain is like a muscle, creating new neural pathways the more you use it and the more you apply what you know in different ways. Intelligence is not a static quality you're born with, but something you can nurture. You won't, however, be giving your brain the exercise it needs by simply memorizing information that someone else has prepared for you. Don't be so concerned about being right or wrong, but instead have the courage to take a shot and be creative!

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
- Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize winning physicist