You are what you repeatedly do

I've been taking piano lessons for the past two months. I haven't written about it here on my blog but I'll save the details of what motivated me to learn the piano for another post. Right now I'm writing because I recognized something after two months of taking piano lessons. A weekly thirty-minute one-on-one session with a coach doesn't make someone a proficient pianist. It's the practice that makes someone a proficient pianist.

But I already knew that. In fact, when I started taking lessons I knew that if I didn't practice I wouldn't get anywhere. Now it's been two months and I feel like I don't know nearly as much as I should. Every week I end up not practicing enough because I constantly put practice off until tomorrow, telling myself that I can make up for it later. As the weekly session with my coach gets closer, I feel more and more anxiety for not having practiced enough. I fear he will call me out on it and get angry. But why should he? It's not his fault. There is no one to blame for lack of practice but myself! I'm paying him for his time and if I choose not to make use of what I'm paying for then I'm only screwing myself. No one else.

That's another interesting thing. Every week I feel so sure my coach will call me out for not practicing enough but every single time I leave the session calm and relaxed. I'm sure he notices that I haven't practiced but he doesn't get angry or make me feel bad for not practicing. Instead he calmly coaches me and helps me improve, even if the improvements are barely noticeable. Sure, yelling and screaming can be useful when you're pushing your physical body and trying to block out what your brain is telling you, but when you're trying to get your brain to learn something new it has to want to do it. Pressuring your brain into learning just won't work.

Practice under stress is bad. Very bad. Our brains are wired to shut down certain areas when we're stressed out. Stress makes learning much more difficult. If we're stressed out every time we practice, we're not going to look forward to practicing (and when we do, it won't be effective anyway). Practice should be fun. Science has even proven that we learn faster and remember more when we're having fun!

When I started learning the piano, I set myself a goal of being able to play Fur Elise by December 25th, 2009. That's about four months away. At the rate I'm going now it will probably take me another year. But I can fix that. I can shorten one year of skill development into four months. All I need to do is commit to practicing and make it a regular habit. It needs to become a routine -- as routine as sleeping or brushing my teeth. And it needs to be regular. Cramming in a six-hour practice session the day I'm meeting with my coach won't help my brain form new synapses.

You are what you repeatedly do. That's my new mantra. Earlier today I opened a random book on my bookshelf and turned to a random page and saw that quote. Starting today, I'm going to write that sentence every single morning when I wake up and spend a few seconds contemplating what I want to be. Do I want to be nothing? Then I should do things that equate to nothing. Do I want to be a decent pianist? Then I should practice the piano daily.

Rejecting Limitations

Its always been difficult to set aside any great amount of time to learn a new programming language. I would tell myself there was so much more I could learn from PHP and I would further justify my lack of commitment by believing PHP was all I really needed to make great web applications.

When I started learning more and more about AJAX and the power behind JavaScript, a client-side scripting language, I began to realize just how much I was limiting myself by concentrating solely on PHP. The acceptance of my limitations hid me from the great power behind other programming languages. (Oddly enough, my sudden interest in classical music followed this recent mental rejection of several personal limitations -- I can't help but wonder if there's a connection.)

Don't accept your limitations, reject them. Treat every limitation like the rung on a ladder -- if you don't pull yourself above each one, you're never going to get anywhere!

Learning not to become discouraged

Over the past few days I have been really enthused by the prospect of making a great, simple, task management site. Ever since the engineering team at work became very task-and-deadline oriented, my co-workers and I have been using a shared Google Notebook containing a list of tasks with deadline dates to keep track of things.

The Google Notebook wasn't designed specifically for tasks, so naturally I started thinking of a different solution. I wanted something that would allow us to manage our tasks online, but that would also maintain the extreme simplicity of the way we used Google Notebook. So before even entertaining the idea of working on building such a site, I did some really quick Googling and concluded there was nothing out there even similar to what I wanted.

But in the following days I did some more research. Online task management seemed like such a obvious online tool and I couldn't believe there weren't any good sites out there doing it already. The first online task management site I came across was UseTasks.com. It has lots of nice features, but they charge a fee and after trying the demo I concluded there were simply too many features.

"Good," I thought to myself, "I have an opportunity to make a great, free task management site!" So I decided on a name and registered the domain TaskZen.com. Then almost by accident I discovered Toodledo.com, RememberTheMilk.com, HiTask.com... the list goes on! Tons of great, free task management sites that were relatively simple to use! I couldn't help but feel discouraged. Only a few days earlier I ran into a similar discouraged feeling when I discovered NoteSake.com.

Why was this happening?! I have great ideas, I register good looking domains, I start jotting down killer features that I believe will make the site popular, and then I discover someone else has already done it all and feel I will be wasting my time by "reinventing the wheel". I browse the sites and while using the very features I imagined I would be the first to develop and make popular, I can't help but feel discouraged when I realize how much time and effort I will need to put into creating my own version of the same feature. I was almost ready to throw in the towel and give up. Almost.

Then I realized something: It is the competitive mind that is making me feel discouraged about following through with my own ideas of a great online tool. Prior to learning of the existence of similar online tools, the creative mind was in full swing, dreaming of features which would make my online tool useful and helpful to the largest audience possible.

The only reason I was able to quickly make this distinction between the competitive and creative mind was because I recently read a great book about getting rich which talked about them (I won't tell you the name of the book yet; that's for another post). So I knew I needed to get back into the creative mind; I needed to stop thinking about the competition and focus on how my version of the online tool will be useful for me and helpful to others. I briefly made this conclusion when I discovered NoteSake a few days ago, but discovering dozens of online task sites really tested my ability to switch modes of thinking.

My ideas for TaskZen were similar but not exactly identical to the other sites. Oddly enough, when I registered TaskZen I wrote the domain on the whiteboard in my apartment and circled it. Then I wrote down the very first idea for the site that came to mind. It was one word: "Simple". When I started consciously changing my thinking from competitive to creative, I realized that one word is what makes my idea unique. All the other task management sites are full of features which made using them slow down productivity, with some of them plain frustrating (like the Toodledo not having a delete option available by default).

While reading the word "Simple" on the whiteboard and making these realizations about competitive and creative mind states, another domain I had written on the board, CORBAWeb.com, gave me a perfect example of non-competitive thinking. I registered that domain to eventually replace Akmai.net as the publicly visible domain for my web hosting company.

It was a few weeks ago that I realized my web hosting company, Akmai.net Web Hosting, was slowly but steadily growing. I started the little web hosting business with absolutely no intention of making money. I knew the Internet contained literally tens of thousands of web hosting companies and competition for best pricing/features was through the roof. After concluding that I would always need hosting for my own domains, I quickly realized the huge number of options available to others looking for web hosting would cause those who knew me to ask for my recommendation. What better way than to be able to recommend something I manage myself? So in late 2005, with myself as it's only customer, the hosting company was started.

Today, with 15 paying customers and over 45 domains, Akmai.net rents a full dedicated server and has an 85% profit margin. Am I worried about the competition? No. Are there better priced web hosting options out there? Yes. So what makes my web hosting so special that people host with me? They know me. They know they can pick up the phone and call me if there is a problem. With so many options out there, what is the natural choice? To go with what you know and trust; to choose that which is closest to you. When someone asks my customers for their web hosting recommendation, which web hosting company do you think comes to their mind first?

The whole point of the creative mind is to forget about how "mine is better than his". There is no problem with looking at other businesses to gain ideas or learn how they solved certain issues, but its important to never think negatively about another persons' work; to never put down someone else because you think you can do it better. If you can do it better, it's because something less exists. Without many different task sites in existence, my idea wouldn't be unique.

When we are in the competitive mind we often forget those we are competing with are directly responsible for our success, and not realizing this greatly inhibits our quality of life. Selfishness is the opposite of gratitude and to be discouraged about doing something is to be selfish and therefore ungrateful. Gratitude is an important part of being creative. If you are not thankful for what you possess, and content with the knowledge you hold, you will always feel incomplete and the creative energy will not flow. We all have a desire to be successful. Creativity leads to success. Discouragement leads to failure.

My Naked Body and Money

We all need it. Some of us need more than others because we refuse to live a lifestyle less than what we've already become accustomed to -- usually a lifestyle we were born into. What does it take to change your lifestyle to one that requires less? You'd think it would be rather simple, right? It should be simple -- how many different "things" do you actually use on a daily basis? Take a minute to think about it and add them up in your head: everything you use during an average day.

OK, now think about everything you own; down to the pen on your desk, toothbrush in your bathroom, even the clothes you're wearing, stuff in your closet and that shoe box under your table. Imagine your body stripped naked and piled next to you is all the stuff that belongs to you; clothes, electronics, cars, houses, tools, food, everything.

I don't know about you, but wow, that’s a pretty big pile next to me! Holy crap. How much of that stuff do I really use? I mean, if I were to actually use each thing for 1 minute, it would probably take me a couple of weeks, if not months, to use them all! There are several things, namely services, I couldn't even include in that pile: my cable TV service, Internet service, propane gas, auto gas, cell phone service, email and web hosting services -- the list goes on! If I were to take all of the physical infrastructure required for my services to exist and add them to that pile, the size of the pile would grow exponentially!

So I think I've made my point: there's a lot of stuff we own, and clutter our life with, that we don't actually need. OK, so that's not going to change overnight. I justify a lot of what I own by telling myself it would be stupid to sell it all at a loss, when the smarter choice would be to reduce what's unnecessary and maintain the rest. My three investment properties are a good example. As much of a struggle as it is to keep them, I know that in the long run they will solidify my financial future. Selling them now would cause me to loose money and I'd gain nothing in the long run (besides maybe some peace of mind, but that's a whole other post in and of itself).

My recent (or rather continuing) financial troubles have made me rethink a lot about what I own and what I need to live. I have observed how habits are what cause much of the unnecessary spending (Starbucks) and discovered that breaking those habits can be incredibly difficult. Instead of breaking them, simply reducing their frequency seems to be the best solution. I feel that my spending habits have reached a turning point, a roller coaster resting at the crest of a track, inching towards the long drop into the trough.

When I'm in a tight spot and I don't have enough money to pay bills, I'm constantly thinking about what I can do make more money. I've been brainstorming for the past few months about what could be done in my spare time to bring in extra cash. I ask myself, what makes a successful person and what have they done to become successful? I know for a fact that hard work makes people successful. But in this world of changing technologies and "work" that doesn't require any physical labor, there is something to be said about those who simply outsmart the masses -- who use their brains and figure out how to make money by using the tools technology has created; namely the Internet.

A friend of mine, who is several years younger than I, has come up with a business model that works very well. He's making 2x - 3x as much money as I, working only a few hours a week. Compare that to my 75+ hour work weeks and you'll probably be dying to know what he's doing. Without going too much into detail, I can say that his business model works on a simple principle: bridging the technological generation gap between those who grew up without the Internet and those who use it for almost every aspect of their lives. There's a generation of people whose only source of news comes from the daily newspaper. And then there's the generation who uses the Internet on a daily basis and has possibly never bought a newspaper. The latter being a generation whose lives move at the speed of light, with information in many different forms, pouring in from every direction.

At the end of the day, I don't take any money with me to bed. I don't go to sleep with my car, computer, food, auto gas, or for that matter my house. I sleep in my house, but might I might as well be sleeping in a cardboard box. When I wake up, I wake up with nothing but the skin on my bones. I need a safe shelter to sleep in, yes, but even shelter is a lifestyle item we've grown accustomed to having. I know many people who could not live in a basement -- I do, and I have no problem with it. For the past 6 years I have lived in either a basement or an attic, mainly because I don't see the point in wasting money on a full size apartment when I can save money in something smaller (living at my parents house would simply be taking advantage of those to whom I already owe my very existence, so that's out of the question).

When I was sitting in the 2 bedroom apartment of one of my rental units, I felt for a moment a sense of luxury. There was nothing luxurious about the place (luxurious, that is, to the average person living in the USA), but I felt as if that small 2 bedroom apartment was so beautiful, with all the light coming through the full size windows, high ceilings that I wasn't able to reach up and touch, and a full size living room with separate, closed off bedrooms. I then realized it felt so luxurious to me because I've been living a lifestyle which doesn't have those luxuries. Instead, I have learned to live with the open style basement or attic apartments, with low ceilings and few windows. I finally understood how grateful the people who actually have to live in cardboard boxes feel about simply having a solid roof above their heads.

The more I understand the driving force behind money, the more disgusted I become with myself and all that is wasted. If a human life is the standard with which we measure the value of material things, where does that leave the person who consumes the equivalent of 100 humans? Does that make the person morally obligated to support the very existence of that number of people? And if he doesn't directly support them does that mean he is committing, on a daily basis, one of the worst crimes known to man -- murder?