Do you feel like you’re going nowhere? Learn these to thrive like you never have before.

It’s hard to believe 2019 is close to ending. If you’re anything like me, whether 2019 went well or not, you want to make 2020 better. Many think there’s a limit to how good a year can be for them, but I assure you this is not the case.

You can always thrive more. Never accept mediocrity. You only have one life, so there’s no reason not to make the best of it.

“You only have one life, but if you do it right, once is enough.” — Mae West

2017 wasn’t a glorious year for me. It wasn’t bad, but nothing to brag about. Near the end of that year, however, I decided to get out of that mediocrity. It was almost an accident, really.

How were 2017 and 2018 for you?

Back in September of 2017, I went to live in Cambodia to work remotely on my startup. In the course of the next 12 months, I also lived in Spain, India, Canada, and Colombia. I started 3 businesses, wrote 4 books, wrote 300+ articles on productivity, learning, life lessons, etc, became a top writer in 16 categories on Medium.com (including top 1 in Travel, Education, and Inspiration), became healthier, opened my own light coaching program, learned 36 new skills, etc.

Reading that, you may not guess that I’m actually a software engineer by trade, building video games for a living.

Needless to say, I did thrive in 2018. So, did I manage to make 2019 better in the end? To some degree, yes.

A year ago, I wrote this piece, which went viral:

The 3 Most Important Skills to Learn Now to Thrive in 2019

It was the first time one of my articles exploded. It’s the one that put me on the map. As such, I had to live by it. In 2019, I did more of what I talked about in that article.

The result: a pretty fantastic 2019!

And I know that can happen to you too, to levels you may not even imagine possible (I certainly didn’t).

So, why am I writing this now? We’re just in October after all!

Truth is, to become who you want to become, you’re going to need to change, and change doesn’t happen overnight. Two to three months from now though, that’s reasonable. I’ve been there and know other people who have also been there.

But trust me, it’s not easy. What I’m proposing in the following paragraphs is no shortcut to success. It’s a set of skills that, once learned and honed, can lead you to any success you may strive for.

Of all the skills that contributed to me thriving in 2019, I narrowed it down to the three most important in my opinion. This also comes from compiling and testing theories in some of the best self-help books in the world.

In 2018, I listed the following 3 skills as the top ones to learn:

3. Learn to take action.
2. Learn to adapt to change.
1. Learn to learn.

In 2019, I’m adapting this list based on new experiences and research. I ordered them from least to most important in my mind:

Skill #3: Habit Management

I didn’t realize the power of habits until I accidentally built a set of good habits. Nowadays, as much as I can, I try to turn every positive thing I can into a habit and stay as far away as I can from bad habits.

These two are very important. That’s what I call Habit Management. It’s about building, maintaining, and dropping habits.

How do I learn this skill?

1: Track the doing or non-doing of your habits.

Here’s a template I built and use weekly for tracking habits:

I rotate the habits regularly. Sometimes there are fewer, sometimes there are more. A lot of times, if I’m at the end of the day and I still have a few to do, I feel an urge to check those boxes! It has been quite game-changing for me.

The hardest one from my list, as you might guess, is the grouping of all the bad habits into a single bucket. If I do a single bad habit on a given day, I can’t check that box. That, my friends, is hard!

2: Know your why.

“What is your burning desire?”, as Napoleon Hill would say. Why do you do what you do? Most people can’t properly answer that.

In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic book, The Little Prince, the little prince asks the railway signalman where people are going when they get off the train, noticing how much in a hurry they were. The signalman tells him: “they are going nowhere at all.”

I like this metaphor. In adulthood, we seek jobs without meaning. We don’t know why we do what we do. We work to make money. So what? Boring if you ask me. There’s more to life than that!

When you know why you do what you do, you can more properly decide which habits are good and which habits are bad for you. Until then, you are just like these train passengers who are going nowhere at all.

3: Shape your environment.

Your environment is the most powerful factor in your success or failure in keeping your habits. You think you have control over your own actions, but that’s simply not true. No mind is strong enough to resist the urge to do your bad habit if it’s right there in front of you at all times.

When I can’t control myself playing video games, I make it impossible for me to play them. I leave my Nintendo Switch at the office or in the mailbox.

If you’re addicted to porn (many are but won’t admit it), there are apps to block your favourite websites. Let someone else set the password so you’ll never be able to unlock them ever again!

If you can’t stop smoking, don’t keep a pack anywhere near you. Don’t get into social situations where you would normally smoke. At least, not after at least a month of not doing it.

Be aware of the impact your environment has on you. Brainstorm what you can change to help you with your habits — good or bad.

Powerful quotes

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.” — James Clear

“The difference between who you are and who you want to be is what you do.” — Charles Duhigg

Skill #2: Time Management

What’s one resource we all have and can’t get more of? Time, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you have the same amount of time as someone in the opposite situation you are in. That’s what I call fair!

Life is shorter than most people realize. People who manage their time well tend to thrive a lot more than people who use it meaninglessly. Most of the time, that’s when someone spends too much time on short-term benefits over long-term benefits.

How do I learn this skill?

1: Use the Eisenhower Matrix the right way.

Here’s what it looks like:

From top-left to bottom-left, we’ll refer to the quadrants this way:

Quadrant I: Urgent and Important
Quadrant II: Important but not urgent
Quadrant III: Not important but urgent
Quadrant IV: Not important and not urgent

Quadrant I activities are things you have to do otherwise bad things will happen. Contrary to popular beliefs, you want to keep this at a minimum. These are reactionary actions mostly caused by bad planning. When people say they’re busy, it’s because they have too many things in that quadrant. Or they think they do.

Quadrant II activities are where the fun is. These are things you do when you complete the quadrant I activities. Any personal growth activities go here. Many people push these activities thinking they are not that important. They’re wrong. They’re less important in the short-term, but in the long-term, these are the tasks that make the difference between you thriving or not.

Quadrant III activities are things you have to do but don’t work towards your personal goals much. To you, they’re tedious and meaningless, but because they’re urgent, you tend to do them when you really should be delegating them to someone else.

Quadrant IV activities are things you once thought were useful but you just procrastinate doing. When you know why you do what you do, you can more easily identify them and never waste time and energy thinking about them.

The overall strategy is:

Limit quadrant I activities by planning and delegating better
Increase quadrant II activities. The more you do, the fewer quadrant I activities will show up.
Surround yourself with people who can take care of your quadrant III activities. Remember, your quadrant III activities might be someone else’s quadrant II activities!
Be aware of quadrant IV activities and don’t do them.

2:Balance short-term vs long-term

Most people tend to focus on activities that benefit them in the short-term. I have the opposite problem. I’m almost always focusing on the long-term. There are pros and cons to each.

Pros of focusing on short-term gains:

Instant gratification. Life almost always feels good.
It’s less stressful at first.

Cons of focusing on short-term gains:

It’s addicting. You tend to forego future gains, limiting your possibilities of thriving.
You miss out on things that take you out of your comfort zone (missing important life lessons).

Pros of focusing on long-term gains:

You tend to be healthier and have better habits.
You tend to be wealthier later in life.

Cons of focusing on long-term gains:

It’s damn hard to delay gratification! It may seem like you’re working very hard for no returns.
If you need money now to survive, you can’t focus too much on the long-term.

So, how do you balance it out then?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here — it’s up to you to figure it out. But, when you list down your activities in quadrant II, take some time to figure out how the activities benefit you both in the short-term and the long-term.

The reality is, the best way to thrive comes from having prepared before, which means, long-term activities matter more in the end. Short-term activities and reactionary activities you put in the quadrant I. Do as little as is required to live a satisfactory life so that you can later have a better one.

I know this can suck for some of you who have spent too much time focusing on the short-term, but the reality is that instant gratification is not thriving — it’s the illusion of thriving.

3: Know your hacks.

No time-saving hack will ever remain timeless, but knowing the current ones that can save you time will allow you to focus more on the quadrant II activities and less so on the other ones. In the following article, I listed 84 of my favourite hacks on how to get more time in your day:

84 Productivity Killers and How to Avoid Them

Here are the easiest [do/not do] things to save the most time:

Watching instructional videos at 2x;
Going to meetings that have nothing to do with you or don’t have an agenda;
Working on your hardest problems when you’re sleepy;
Starting the day without knowing what you’re going to do;
Driving or commuting during rush hour;
Going to a further away store to save pennies;
Having a TV in front of a couch;
Snoozing;
Going to school for a piece of paper;
Not recalling or implementing what you previously learned;
Doing what you went to school for even if you lost your “passion”;
Not revisiting your self-awareness regularly;
Not taking a damn break when you need it;
Not listening to other people’s constructive feedback;
Only thinking about yourself; and
Reading articles like this one and doing nothing about it.

Powerful quotes

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” — Stephen Covey

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker

Skill #1: Learning Management

The number one skill to learn to thrive in 2020 is learning how to manage your learning. You thrive based on your capacity to do things. The more things you can perform better at, the easier it becomes to thrive.

How do I learn this skill?

1: Learn how to learn.

A skill is a series of connections in your brain. As you practice a set of actions, your brain creates these connections for you.

While that may seem like great news, that’s not always the case. The brain doesn’t discern what is good and what is bad for you. That’s how bad habits get created. It just records your actions and stores them in your memory.

It’s also the reason why we think that new skills are hard to learn: we don’t make the right connections in our brains. We don’t do the right actions that make the learning of a new skill easier.

When you deliberately focus your efforts on doing the right actions to learn something new, you direct your brain to create the connections you want it to make.

So, what are the right actions?

1: Think things through

Think about the following: What would it mean to master the skill? Can I break it down in small sub-skills? What resources can I use to learn it (notice the plurality)? How can I track my progress? How can I be deliberate and consistent in my practice?

Create a plan out of the answers from these questions.

2. Build SkillUp Trees

To learn new skills, you have to know what you’re currently capable of and analyze what you should learn next. It’s unrealistic to think that you can learn portrait photography in 15 hours if you’ve never picked up a camera before.

Let’s use this very simple skill idea to illustrate the concept:

Walking: Sit still -> Crawl -> Stand on two feet -> Move legs while standing -> Body balance

From the Walking branch, we can branch further to the following branches:

Running: Walking -> Leg and arm coordination -> Leg pushing (strength) -> More advanced body balance
Jumping: Walking -> Flexing legs -> Leg pushing -> More advanced body balance
Riding a bicycle: Walking -> Sitting on bicycle -> Leg rotation movement -> Hand guidance -> Hand and feet coordination -> Motion momentum -> etc.

You can’t learn the “Running” skill if you don’t know the “Walking” skill.

3. Follow-through

Execute your plan from Step 1 above (think things through) for about a week. Reflect on your learnings. What went right? What went wrong? How can you improve? Adjust as needed. Always record and measure how well your practice session went.

Add some accountability to help you follow through. Share your progress with your entourage or online.

Remember, the first time you’re going to do anything in life, you’ll be bad at it, and that’s normal. It’s the people who pick themselves up after their “failures” who learn best.

As needed, update your SkillUp Tree when progress has been made. It’s incredibly rewarding to visually see how your learning has progressed. Whatever you do, don’t stop when it hurts. That’s when the learning truly happens.

4. Follow this course

The Learning How to Learn course on Coursera is the most popular one of all times for a reason. It gives a clear explanation as to how learning happens in your brain. Being aware of it can greatly help you learn better.

2: Remain curious.

Photo by Tanaphong Toochinda on Unsplash

You don’t know what you don’t know. But what if you could to a certain degree? At what period of your life did you learn the most? How many new skills did you acquire as a baby and as a toddler?

Right, a lot more than nowadays.

I’m no neuroscientist, but I’d be surprised that the reason is that babies create neural connections faster. Curiosity is a major factor. Babies try things, without fear of failing. They try and try again until they succeed. They question everything. They don’t assume that they know the answers.

That is the key.

In adulthood, we all think we know the answers to everything — or that if we don’t we can Google it. I have bad news: Google won’t make you more skilled. The best it might do is make you more knowledgeable, but only if you take the time to truly understand the result of your query.

So, be like a child again. Here are a few strategies to increase your curiosity:

Every day, write down a list of 3 things you take for granted but have no idea why they work or why they behave as they do. For example, how does an elevator truly works? Why do banana peels become brown almost immediately after opening the banana? Why is ink so hard to erase?
Every day, write down a list of 10 new ideas on paper. Write anything that comes to mind. Ten is intentionally difficult, so don’t aim for less — your brain has to work!
Observe people’s behaviour and try to imitate them. Do not do that while they’re still near you though! Take notes, and one day, try to see how it feels to behave differently than your usual self. You’ll gain new perspectives and increase your curiosity.

3: Increase your capacity to retain important information.

I used to think that I had a bad memory. It’s probably not the first time you hear someone say that. It’s very frequent. We forget someone’s birthday and all of a sudden we’re convinced that our memory is malfunctioning.

I have good news: it’s functioning exactly the way it should. And you can use that to your advantage.

Your brain has evolved to focus on survivability. Therefore, it was equipped with the ability to forget information it deems unimportant for your survival. We forget because we need to.

The question then becomes: how do we make something a necessity for us to remember?

What would you rather remember? You nephew’s birthday or that if you eat a special type of mushroom, you will die? This is an extreme example to illustrate the idea.

If we look at the forgetting curve above, you’ll understand that if you do nothing about something you learn, you’ll forget most of it by the end of the week.

But you can counter that! Here’s how:

Use Spaced Repetition. The short version of it is, you don’t need to recall what you learn as frequently as you would think. With every recollection, you increase your retention. For best results, space your repetition out. The consensus amongst researchers is that you can recall immediately after learning something, then 24 hours later, then 7 days later, then a month later, and then once in a while, and by that point, you’ll pretty much retain the information for life.
Teach others. You retain at most 10% of what you read. Even worse, you retain only 5% of what you learn during lectures. How bad is that? According to some studies, you retain 90% of what you teach. I’ve certainly seen the result of this myself. Now, when you read a book or watch a documentary or tutorial online, do it as if you would teach it to someone else. Then write down the lessons and pass them along.
Sleep on it. You’re familiar with this one, aren’t you? Did you know that neural connections get created when you rest? And what better way is there to rest than by sleeping? Your subconscious is very active. It works best when you’re not trying to cram too much information at the same time.

*I go deeper in this video.

Powerful quotes

Whatever you do, don’t stop when it hurts. That’s when the learning truly happens.

The more you learn, the larger your library of sub-skills. The larger your library, the faster you learn.

Runner-ups

Choosing only 3 skills was difficult. There are so many important factors to thriving that 3 just can’t cover everything. As such, and briefly, here are two I strongly considered putting on the list (I also strongly considered them last year too):

Become Truly Self-Aware

Check out Ryan Holiday’s book: Ego Is The Enemy

Develop Influence

Check out Brendon Burchard’s book: High-Performance Habits

Conclusion

Ready to start your journey to make 2020 your best year yet?

I hope you learned something important here and that it’s going to push you to action. Too many people read articles and books, never acting on them. Don’t let this article just be another one of those.

In 2019, I realized the best way to thrive is to make the best of what’s available to you. It’s not about doing new things and stopping other things. It’s about finding balance and managing these things properly.

The 3 most important things to manage to thrive in 2020 and beyond is your habits, time, and learning. That will equip you to thrive not only for 2020 but for the rest of your life.

So start now before it’s too late!

You can do this!