How do I convince myself to change my habits

How do I convince myself to change my habitsHow do I convince myself to change my habitsVery few people truly realize the power of habits. Once you get it, you are less prone to ignore the matter.Of curse, its not a guarantee. Plenty of people realize the importance of health and education and neglect those areas nonetheless. Its easier to do nothing than to put the effort and reap the fruits of your hustle.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moraThe best educational resource on habits? A free Tiny Habits course created by BJ Fogg, the head of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University.Method 1 Spend time with the right peopleThis is a good way for slackers to start. You see, you dont need to do anything else. Be around people who changed their habits, who convinced themselves to change those habits and you will become more like them. Its a given.We are social mimicking machines. We copy everything from those around us?- ?gestures, vocabulary and life philosophies.Spend time with the right people and if you dont consciously fight off their influence (which by the way is a lot of work), you will deem habits more important in your life. The change will happen in the background, on autopilot.Method 2 Develop a keystone habit.This is another method that bypasses your conscious mind. Instead of convincing yourself, which most people are very poor at, take the effort to develop a keystone habit.Keystone habits are habits that have a multiplier or a domino effect in your life.?- ?Brian TracyThe two keystone habits known to science are exercise and healthy eating. Healthy eating became so diluted in modern society that you may even be confused about what the heck it is. Thus, I recommend exercises.(my pushups routine)You dont need to train for hours. I started my habit development journey with only one consecutive series of pushups. It was enough.If you cannot do push ups or can only do very few of them, do some other bodyweight exercise. The point is to balance the level of difficulty with your current abilities. When I started my pushups I could only do them for 13 minutes. If you can do sit-ups for 15 minutes, dont bother with them. Pick an exercise that will exhaust you in a few minutes.And dont convince yourself. Just do it. Consider it a must, like brushing your teeth, dressing up for work or turning on your cars engine on before you drive. It may be a chore, but do it anyway. Every single day.How will it make a difference?A keystone habit provides a domino effect by begetting more good habits without much conscious effort. Everybodys journey is slightly different, the sequence of habits you will develop will vary from my sequence, but you will develop more habits.The first habit I added to my routine after getting into my pushups routine was a morning prayer. I had problems remember to do it. When I prayed during my pushups, both routines solidified immediately. Later, I implemented some time management tactics, introduced more exercises and changed my diet.It was never a struggle for me. Each step seemed a natural consequence of the previous one.And then the dam broke and I was flooded with good habits.Method 3. Extrapolate.This is how you can convince yourself about the importance of practically everything, including the examples of healthy lifestyle and education. You simply reflect on your current lifestyle and visualize how your life will look like if you continue the current path for the next 10, 20, 50 years.Its not a mystical ritual, its common sense. Normally, you dont think in a long enough time horizon. You are used to what your life looks like even if its slightly uncomfortable. But if you put your life and your actions in the perspective of decades, the level of pain that will accumulate becomes apparent.(source pixabay.com)Extrapolation exampleWe had always struggled financially. I was used to it. Compa ring our situation from 2012 to the one from the beginning of our marriage, we improved significantly. When I was a student at the university, most of the time I had no idea how we would make it to the beginning of the next month. In 2012 I had a stable salary and a permanent full-time contract.We only couldnt save enough money to make a difference. We lived pretty comfortably, we even owned a flat. I had our finances (barely) under control. I kept monthly budgets and managed to save 24% a month.Then I extrapolated our situation till retirement. Ugh. $40,000 was the most we could count on when we reached retirement age and our flat wouldnt have been even fully paid off.THIS situation was unbearable. It pushed me over the fence. I had no idea how to make or save more money, but I knew I have to take action or the outcome would be absolutely not acceptable.- - - This stuff works. I developed a keystone habit. I extrapolated and got convinced by my own reasoning, not someone elses. T he thing that got me to extrapolate was a book?- ?interaction with someone outside my social circles.And I became fanatical about the importance of habits. I changed my life.Use those three methods. Change your life.Originally published at Quora.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people

8 things you should know about Leonardo da Vinci

8 things you should know about Leonardo da Vinci8 things you should know about Leonardo da VinciThis year marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vincis death. Widely considered one of the greatest polymaths in menschenwrdig history, Leonardo welches an inventor, artist, musician, architect, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, historian and cartographer.Though his artistic output welches small, Leonardos impact was great, reflecting his deep knowledge of the body, his extensive studies of light and the human face, and his sfumato (Italian for smoky) technique, which allowed for incredibly lifelike images. Leonardo regarded artists as divine apprentices, writing We, by our arts, may be called the grandsons of God.Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreTwenty-first-century scholars at MIT ranked him the sixth fruchtwein influential person who ever lived. Like Rembrandt and Miche langelo, he is so renowned that he is known by only his first name. Yet despite his fame, there are things about Leonardo that many people today find surprising.Shady parentageLeonardo was born out of wedlock on April 15, 1452. His father, Piero, was a wealthy notary, and his mother, Caterina, was a local peasant girl. Although the circumstances of his birth would place Leonardo at a disadvantage in terms of education and inheritance, biographer Walter Isaacson regards it as a terrific stroke of luck. Rather than being expected to become a notary like his father, Leonardo was instead free to develop the full range of his genius. People surmise that it also imbued him with a special sense of urgency to establish his own identity and prove himself.Physical beautyLeonardo created some of the worlds most beautiful works of art, including the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. In his own day, he was known as an exceptionally attractive person. One of Leonardos biographers describes him as a person of outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did. A contemporary described him as a well proportioned, graceful, and good-looking man who wore a rose-pink tunic and had beautiful curling hair, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his chest. Leonardo is thought to have entered into long-term and possibly sexual relationships with two of his pupils, both artists in their own right.From scraps to notebooksThe paintings generally attributed to Leonardo number fewer than 20, while his notebooks contain over 7,000 pages. Theyre the best source of knowledge about Leonardo, housed today in locations such as Windsor Castle, the Louvre and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. Their diverse content ranges across drawings most famously, Vitruvian Man notes of things he wanted to investigate, scientific and technical diagrams and shopping lists. They comprise perhaps the most remarkable monument to human curiosity and creativity ever prod uced by a single person. Yet when Leonardo penned them, they were just loose pieces of paper of different types and sizes. His friends bound them into notebooks only after his death.One of his best-known notebook drawings is the Vitruvian Man.Outsiders educationAs a result of his illegitimacy, Leonardo received a rather rudimentary formal education consisting primarily of business arithmetic. He never attended university and sometimes referred to himself as an unlettered man. Yet his lack of formal schooling also freed him from the constraints of tradition, helping to instill in him a determination to question authority and place greater reliance on his own experience than opinions expressed in books. As a result, he became a firsthand observer and experimenter, uninterested in serving as a mouthpiece for the classics.Prolific procrastinatorAlthough Leonardos mind was extraordinarily fertile, he was also an inveterate procrastinator and even quitter. He frequently took months or yea rs to begin work on commissions, sometimes keeping patrons at bay with lofty pronouncements regarding his creative process. A giant equestrian statue for the duke of Milan, requiring 70 tons of bronze to cast, might have been his grandest work if it had ever been completed. Yet a decade after the 1482 commission, Leonardo had produced only a clay model which was subsequently destroyed when invading French soldiers used it for target practice.Rivalrous motivationsLeonardos life overlapped those of two other Renaissance giants Michelangelo and Raphael but it was Michelangelo who stoked an intense rivalry. The contrast between the two men could hardly have been sharper. Leonardo was elegant and evinced little interest in matters religious, while Michelangelo was deeply pious yet neglectful of his appearance and hygiene. Michelangelo created some of the greatest paintings in history, including the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and many considered his David the greatest sculpture eve r produced, a triumph he lorded over his older rival.Royal admirerSoon after King Francis I of France captured Milan in 1516, Leonardo entered his service, spending the last years of his life in a house near the royal residence. When death came to Leonardo on May 2, 1519 at the age of 67, it is said that the king, who loved to listen to Leonardo talk so much that he was hardly ever apart from him, cradled his head as he breathed his last. Years later, reflecting on his friendship with the great man, King Francis said, No man possessed such a knowledge of painting, sculpture, or architecture as Leonardo, but the same goes for philosophy. He was a great philosopher.Skyrocketing valueIn November 2017, one of the paintings attributed to Leonardo, Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World), set the record for the most expensive painting ever sold, fetching US$450 million. Painted in oil on walnut in about 1500, it depicts Jesus offering a benediction with his right hand while holding a crystal line orb that appears to represent the cosmos in his left. The painting had suffered from neglect and poor restorations and was long assumed to be thework of one of Leonardos students, selling as recently as 2005 as part of the estate of a Baton Rouge businessman for less than $10,000. Its currentwhereabouts are unknown.One of a kind, admired then and nowIn November 2017, one of the paintings attributed to Leonardo, Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World), set the record for the most expensive painting ever sold, fetching US $450 million. Painted in oil on walnut in about 1500, it depicts Jesus offering a benediction with his right hand while holding a crystalline orb that appears to represent the cosmos in his left. The painting had suffered from neglect and poor restorations and was long assumed to be the work of one of Leonardos students, selling as recently as 2005 as part of the estate of a Baton Rouge businessman for less than $10,000. Its current whereabouts are unknown.Just a h alf-century after Leonardos death, the biographer Vasari beautifully summed up his enduring significanceIn the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill.Five hundred years after Leonardos death, these words still ring true.This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people

Do you know when to quit The answer lies in these two costs

Do you know when to quit The answer lies in these two costsDo you know when to quit The answer lies in these two costsWinners never quit, and quitters never win.