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…
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?
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…
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…
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.
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…
“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…
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…
COVID-19 is an ongoing crisis, and it has completely occupied the media because of that. News organizations, like any other business, need to earn money, and next to nothing sells better than stories about a potentially deadly virus spreading around in your neighbourhood. Because of this, only stories centered around COVID-19 are being published, which has lead many to believe other news stopped happening. The media doesn’t cover climate change, so many assume it must have stopped. This, however, is not true in the slightest.
Climate change does not pause because of a virus. Based on current predictions, 2020 will…
I live in the Netherlands, one of the safest countries in the world. Hurricanes don’t exist here, and the amount of (very weak) tornadoes that happen in a year can be counted on your fingers. There is one volcano near our country, but it’s been inactive for 150 million years and lies 2 kilometres under the seafloor. There are close to no noticeable natural earthquakes, the only ones that do occur are man-made and mostly confined to a single province with 8% of the land area and less than 4% of the population. …
High School Student from the Netherlands--part-time writer, full-time thinker