5 Tips for Making the Most of Your Travels
“The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
- St. Augustine
One of my biggest passions in life is traveling. Seeing new countries with their own distinctive culture, sceneries, people, smells, and foods always expands my mind and helps me to see the world through different perspective.
The longest trip I have done was about three years ago and lasted for almost four months. I flew first to Australia, traveled from Sydney to Darwin by car, seeing all the cities and towns in between, fell in love with sailing and diving in Great Barrier Reef, surfing in Bondi Beach, the starry night in the middle of the Outback, the crocodiles in Darwin, and all the amazing fellow travelers and friendly Australians I met during the trip.
After Australia I surfed in Bali and saw some of the most beautiful sceneries I’ve ever seen in Gili Islands in Indonesia, experienced the crazy amount of scooters in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, relaxed by laying one day on a tractor tube in one of the most beautiful rivers in Laos, saw what one of the most horrific genocides in the history of humankind had done for really cool and relaxed Cambodia, learned what traffic jam really means in Bangkok, Thailand, and finally smuggled some bubblegum to Singapore before heading back home. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Declutter Your Life in 5 Days
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
- William Morris
Is your desk filled with paper and books? Are your closets full of clothes you never use? Is the amount of clutter starting to overwhelm you and it feels like it is getting harder and harder to start cleaning things up and making your life simpler? Maybe you just don’t know where to start?
It happens to everyone sometimes.
The feeling you get when you have cleaned things up and got rid of everything that is not absolutely necessary for you is amazing. It’s like you are then able to have a fresh start again and you can also enjoy the visible results that you have been able to create with your bare hands. Almost nothing beats that feeling.
I have also noticed that decluttering the apartment helps me to be more efficient in everything I do at home, so it is definitely something worth doing regularly.
I have collected some simple and practical tips for decluttering your life one part at the time to help you to get started. If you can’t do everything at once, start by doing one of the following steps every day. It won’t take too much of your daily time, but after just a few days you will have decluttered most of your daily space. Read the rest of this entry »
3 Practical Steps for Making Friends and Improving Your Social Life
“Only a life lived for others is worth living”
- Albert Einstein
It is quite surprising to realize how many people have problems with social skills, although we humans are supposed to be social creatures. For some people good social skills come naturally and they are usually the loudest ones as well, so it might seem like most people would be good in making new friends, but that is not quite the reality. Many people have problems with making friends and building a social life for themselves, which can be problematic especially when one:
- Has lost one’s social life during a long-term relationship that has now ended
- Has moved to a new city and doesn’t know many people from there
- Doesn’t feel that good around old friends anymore and would like to find new ones
- Used to be happy most of the time alone but now would like to become more social
- Just never has known how to make friends even though always has dreamed of a good social life
Like almost anything in life, also social skills can be learned, no matter what your starting point is. If making friends does not come naturally for you, it is necessary to learn new habits that help making friends and maintaining a fulfilling social life, so that after a while those habits become a normal part of you.
Here are a few practical steps that you might want to follow – all the socially skilled people have these kinds of habits in common, no matter if they think about them consciously or not: Read the rest of this entry »
How to Control Anger – 5 Tips that Actually Work
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
- Siddharta Gautama
Some people have shorter temper than others, but I believe that everyone loses temper every now and then. I consider myself as a calm person who does not get angry very easily, but I have still had my share of extreme feelings of anger during my life.
I used to play online poker for living a few years ago and it’s amazing how the upswings and downswings can affect your mood. When I had really bad luck and lost a lot of money in just one or two hours, I just sometimes snapped and smashed into wall whatever I had in my hand – usually my mouse.
After killing a few innocent mice I had to come up with techniques to control my anger. After all, it’s waste of energy to be angry at things that you can’t change. And if you can change it, there’s no reason to be angry anymore.
Here are five anger management tips that I have tested and found useful: Read the rest of this entry »
How to Remember Someone’s Name with One Simple Trick
“A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language”
- Dale Carnegie
I am not sure if this is the case for everyone, but I have sometimes serious problems of remembering the names of the people that are not in my closest circle of friends. I can remember the face of someone who I have only met once briefly, but the names just seem to be impossible to keep in mind.
This has been especially problematic when I’ve been introduced to a new person. Sometimes I just can’t remember the name after five minutes. It is really embarrassing, so I thought there must be something I could do about it. A person’s name is the most beautiful single word in the world for him or her, so it really pays to remember it.
What I found out is that there is one common trick that all the professional memory performers use. They have noticed (just like I have) that it is much easier to remember pictures than words. Let us find out how we can use this idea in practice.
The trick is called visualization and association. It works also for people with average or bad memory, which is great, because it gives hope to us who are hopeless with our memory.
Five Simple Steps to Remember a Name
Here are five tips that all the memory performers use in order to remember huge amount of names of different new people: Read the rest of this entry »
The Power of Giving
I stumbled upon this great story in Joshua Becker’s blog “Becoming Minimalist“, which he had found from the book Mr. Little John’s Secrets to a Lifetime of Success
Many years ago, a 10-year-old boy walked up to the counter of a soda shop and climbed onto a stool. He caught the eye of the waitress and asked, “How much is an ice cream sundae?”
“Fifty cents,” the waitress replied. The boy reached into his pockets, pulled out a handful of change, and began counting. The waitress frowned impatiently. After all, she had other customers to wait on.
The boy squinted up at the waitress. “How much is a dish of plain ice cream?” he asked. The waitress sighed and rolled her eyes. “Thirty-five cents,” she said with a note of irritation.
Again, the boy counted his coins. At last, he said, “I’ll have the plain ice cream, please.” He put a quarter and two nickels on the counter. The waitress took the coins, brought the ice cream, and walked away. Read the rest of this entry »
Are You Ready for REAL Freedom?
“It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.”
- Chuck Palahniuk
When you think about the word freedom, how do you interpret it? For many people freedom of action, movement, opinion, and ability to achieve their goals are the most important things that come into their minds. Freedom is usually seen as an external thing that other people or the society grants for us. When we are able to do whatever we want and act on our impulses, whatever they might be, we feel that we have a decent amount of freedom in our lives.
I think that it is important to recognize the difference between external freedom and internal freedom to really find the inner peace. Inner freedom is most of all freedom from our own egos that keeps dictating us with thoughts that are all about “me” and “mine”. To be free is to be master of oneself.
Freedom is about knowing where you want to go with your life, and sailing towards the destination with a smile on your face. Doing nothing and letting your boat drift is not freedom – it is drifting. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Consumerism Kills Your Happiness and How to Get Rid of It
“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”
–Tyler Durden (from the movie Fight Club)
We live in a consumerist society, where the main purpose of our lives seems to be the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods or services in ever greater amounts. We see advertising everywhere: In television, radio, and on the streets. Companies even call us directly to sell us something or send us advertising via mail. We just can’t avoid seeing the ads.
The message is always the same: Buy this new product and you will gain youth, respect, beauty, self-worth, a new relationship, or happiness. It is only natural for us to start believing these messages because we are brainwashed with them almost 24/7 and all the other people seem to be following the same rules, too.
It even looks like it is our duty to keep on spending, or otherwise our nation will go bankrupt and everything will fail – at least this is what our leaders repeatedly tell us. The economy has become the ultimate goal that should be kept growing exponentially, no matter what the actual costs for human beings are. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Get Rich by Not Chasing Money
Many people look for fast and easy ways of making money. Different people have different motivational drivers but the underlying premise is that people want to make as much money in as little time as possible with minimal effort. This is why for example get rich –schemes, network marketing opportunities, and gambling are so popular among human beings.
Some people are willing to pursue legitimate businesses such as starting their own company or investing money for example to real estate. Often the reason for starting a business is that you have seen some people that have become very successful with a certain business model and you want to have the same success by doing what they did. The problem with this is that it takes a lot of time and hard work, so most people usually cannot stick to it long enough to really succeed.
Of course some will be able to put in all the work and time that is needed in order to succeed and get rich, but if they only focus on the money and forget themselves, they will most definitely feel very empty inside, no matter how much money they have on their bank account. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Comparing Yourself to Others Is Harmful and How to Stop It
Comparing yourself to other people is one of the most common things we do. It is ingrained in our natural behavior and we usually can’t help doing it. Human beings are social creatures and comparing yourself to other fellow humans helps to know where one stands in society’s hierarchy.
Remember when you were in school? Especially from elementary to up until high school, it was pretty much about popularity and appearance. Later on you might have been comparing your university to the other universities your fellow students attended, and after graduating it is all about how much money you make, what kind of material possessions you own, how good looking your partner is, how many friends you have and so on. The list is endless.
It is obvious that there is a set of rules that people have agreed to play on, even though they are not visible. As a marketing major from a university, I have realized quite well how companies try to initiate these rules and different kinds of needs by advertising and the media – for companies selling things that help people to feel that they are one step higher in the social hierarchy it is very profitable! Read the rest of this entry »
7 Amazing Productivity Tips for Lazy People
I must admit that I am quite a lazy person, like many people seem to be. Often, the most tempting way for me to spend a day would be something like going to the beach and listening to some relaxing music on my iPod. For a long time, I thought that it would be impossible for me to enjoy life and get things done at the same time, but recently I have noticed that it is not true.
One of the most important things to realize is that most of the tasks we do daily are not crucial for our long-term success, so just by shaving all the irrelevant tasks from our daily schedule and focusing on just a few of the most important tasks every day makes us proceed incredibly fast by actually working only for a few hours a day.
Even for a lazy guy like me two or three hours of work a day is possible, and whenever I use those two or three hours doing something important that brings me one step closer to my bigger goals, I have a great feeling for the rest of the day (at the beach).
Here are my personal productivity tips for the lazy people:
1. Choose only two or three things to do today.
Setting a limit helps you to choose the most important tasks everyday. If you don’t have any limit, it is too easy to get overwhelmed and get nothing important done, or give up completely. If you try to do too many things in one day, you often end up doing lots of irrelevant tasks that are not really taking you closer to your goals. Think about two or three things to do today that are the most crucial for your success. Read the rest of this entry »
How to Get Lean in Just 30 Days
The internet is full of tips for us looking to lose a few pounds of fat in order to look good at the beach in the summer. However, most of these tips are not in my opinion good, or at least it is quite hard to find the best ones that actually work. These few simple tips I have gathered here are the ones that I have personally tested during the years and found them really effective when you want to get really lean and feel good:
Cut out grains and sugars completely. For an average person, this might sound a bit extreme, but after thinking about the fact that the humankind has started to eat these only like 10 000 years ago, which is a really short time regarding our genetics, cutting them out completely from the diet does not sound too extreme anymore. Grains are loaded with anti-nutrients, such as gluten and lectins that are actually a bit poisonous and made for preventing animals from eating them.
Refined grains and sugars are also full of carbohydrates, which should be minimized when trying to lose weight. Consuming carbs stimulates insulin secretion, and insulin promotes fat storage and makes it harder for the body to burn fat. Limit your carb intake to the immediately post-workout period, when your muscles are starving for glycogen – then the glucose from the carbs will go straight to the muscles instead of the fat cells. Remember to opt for starchy vegetables instead of grains and sugars, and you will notice the difference in your body. In addition to losing weight, cutting out grains has helped many people to get rid of digestive problems and chronic fatigue. Read the rest of this entry »
The Real Truth behind Perfectionism
Do you have the irrational belief that you and your environment must be perfect and you always strive to be the best, try to reach the ideal and never allow yourself to make a mistake? If so, you can call yourself a perfectionist. This is one of the most common sources for stress nowadays, so it might be useful to analyze if there are some ways to make one’s life less stressful and still achieve the same or better results.
We all set bars to ourselves and try to achieve them, but for some people the bar-setting goes over the top and running the extra mile just to be perfect does not necessarily give enough value to the task to justify the extra work. At first, we might assume that the better we do things, the better results we get, but in reality, perfectionism often prevents us from achieving the best results.
If we focus on all the little things, we often miss the bigger picture. Usually the smallest things are insignificant and have very little effect on the success, so the time is spent much more efficiently if one focuses on doing only the relevant things within a project and forgetting the unnecessary details.
Sometimes the need for perfection also makes it harder to start doing things. I had planned starting a blog for a long time, but it was really hard to start actually doing things because I wanted everything to be perfect from the start, which is logically thinking impossible. Read the rest of this entry »
Money, Debt, and Happiness
When I was younger, I thought that material things would make me happy. If I would just get enough money to buy a nice car and a nice house, I would never whine about anything anymore. There was always something that I wanted to have in the near future: new brand clothes, a new big plasma television, and a new laptop – all the things that advertisers tell us to buy if we want to feel normal.
As I’ve grown up, I have realized that those things never did what they were supposed to do; I was enjoying them for a while but then my personal level of happiness quickly lowered to the level where it was before the purchase. So I am sure that money can’t buy happiness, although complete lack of money will not bring it either.
Studies show that after a certain point, money does not make people any happier. People are most likely to be happy when their lives are organized, their careers or personal businesses are in line with their values, and they have many good relationships.
When we chase money without thinking deeper the meaning behind of it all, we lose time that could be spent walking in the beautiful nature with the love of our life or making sushi with our best friends at home instead of eating expensive food in a restaurant. We spend awful lot of time working in a day job when we could use all that time to lead us to a career or our own business that we would truly enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »
8 Ways to Have a Horrible Body Language
Body language is a form of non-verbal communication, which consists of body posture, gestures, facial expressions, and eye movements. Like other animals, also we humans send and interpret such signals subconsciously. According to research, between 60 and 70 percent of all meaning is derived from nonverbal behavior, so it is quite odd that we are mostly taught in school and in work how to write better or how to use the right words, when it would be much more beneficial to teach us how to improve our body language.
As we improve our body language and learn to notice the subtle things that have an effect on the message that we send to the world, it is easy to also start seeing how often a bad body language can cause many problems in people’s lives. It affects your attractiveness, communication skills, and your own emotions, so it is worth starting to notice these things. I, however, have listed here eight bad body language tips for people whose aim is to become a social failure. If you would like to improve your body language skills, then you might want to avoid these habits like the plague.
1. Cross Your Arms Across the Chest
This is one of the most basic and powerful body-language signals that can indicate that a person is putting up an unconscious barrier between themselves and others. This can be enhanced by leaning away from the speaker and giving a blank or harsh facial expression, which indicates outright hostility. This is a great way to make people not want to talk to you. Another, a little bit less effective way of having the same impact, is to cross your legs – it will make you a little bit more closed as well, so combine these habits and nobody will bother you unless they want to punch you! Read the rest of this entry »
