Good luck is everywhere, you just have to know how to utilise it.
For the last few weeks, I have been extremely lucky. Whatever situation I find myself in, I manage to make it work in my favour. Even situations that seem unfortunate at first I manage to somehow take advantage of.
This is not a coincidence. I used to believe luck was something that happens to you. I now know luck is something that you create. Furthermore, creating luck is extremely simple and easy. I adopted a mindset that helps me maximise and utilise the good luck I encounter.
Last month, while trying to fall asleep, I randomly thought of a girl…
Don’t give up on your dreams just because of the time they take.
A few years ago I started learning Japanese. With the time I was willing to invest in it, I could learn 10 words a day. At that pace, it would’ve taken me years to reach fluency. After realising just how long it would take, I quit. After all, it would take years to become fluent! The years passed anyway, except now I don’t know Japanese.
This has been a recurring motif throughout my life. …
This will put you ahead of the majority of people who are standing still.
Many people are standing still. This is a good thing — maybe not for society at large, but definitely for you, because this means that you’ll be able to get ahead of the vast majority of people, just by slowly going forward every day.
Many people don’t make progress towards anything on a typical day. Many people are working a dead-end job, hoping for a 2% raise by the end of the year or a promotion by the end of the decade. …
A modern and pragmatic interpretation of Hinduism’s karma
Karma is the Hindu idea that good deeds generally lead to good luck and bad deeds often lead to misfortune. In Hinduism karma is tied to reincarnation, past lives, and other parts of the Hindu religion; what if you strip away all that? What if you remove all religious aspects of karma, and simply use it as a guiding principle in life?
What is karma?
The basic idea of karma is simple. All your actions have consequences. Sometimes the cause and effect are obvious and immediate: studying more leads to higher grades. Working more leads to more money. Eating more leads to gaining…
It only takes 30 minutes.
What do you do when something goes wrong? Most people just move on and hope that it miraculously goes right next time. This is obviously the wrong approach. There is a reason why the following quote is widely attributed to Einstein (despite him probably never having said it):
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
However, that is exactly what most people do. They keep procrastinating, they keep getting into awkward social interactions, and they keep making poor decisions. Yet they never take a moment to self-reflect and figure out where it went…
How small changes lead to big results.
Doubling your productivity may seem impossible. If your productivity is 100 today, it won’t be 200 tomorrow. But what about increasing your productivity by just 1 percent? What about going from 100 to 101? That seems doable. So why not do that a hundred times?
Incremental Improvement
Big changes rarely happen instantly. There are very few things that can actually cause your output to significantly increase. There is, however, a plethora of things that can increase your output by an amount that may seem insignificant at first. There are many, many things that can increase your output by one or two percent…
Here’s a more dynamic approach to reaching long-term goals.
Years are very long. They might not appear long — to me, 2020 feels like it has just begun, and it’s almost over already — but they absolutely are. If you don’t spend all your time playing video games, watching series, browsing social media or any other type of mindless consumption, it’s amazing how much you can discover, learn, and improve in a year. This means your future self will have way more knowledge than you. The question then becomes:
How can you set a goal that the more knowledgeable future you will certainly want to reach?
The short answer…
A goal without a plan is but a wish
Everyone has goals they want to achieve someday. What the vast majority of people don’t have, however, is a plan to achieve them, and a goal without a plan might as well not exist. In this article, I will explain why you need to create a plan, and how to effectively do it.
Why you need a plan
Most people are, in their core, lazy. Freud’s model of the psyche explains this best when it divides the human mind into the id, ego, and superego. The id is the animalistic base of the person: the lazy, hedonistic, hairless ape who wants to do nothing but…
Because sometimes, a slow and gradual change just doesn’t suffice.
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Most people view change as a slow and gradual process. Something that happens over months, if not years. This is a commonly held opinion because it is usually true. To completely change who you are is an ambitious undertaking and most who try to do so unpreparedly fail. However, sometimes you don’t have time to wait for slow and gradual changes to happen. Sometimes, you must change immediately.
I embarked on this journey myself a while ago, and while doing it made notes and…
Knowledge, like air, is vital to life.
Having learned something is fantastic. Sure, the act of learning itself can be, and often is quite enjoyable as well, but it’s nothing compared to the sense of fulfilment you get after just having learned something. To be able to look at a map of the world and name every country, to open a book in a foreign language and understand every sentence, or to be able to automate a boring task with a programming language you recently learned; learning something new does to life what unlocking a new level does to a video game.
I first began noticing this…
Djaro Donk
High School Student from the Netherlands--part-time writer, full-time thinker
