yeah, I'm thinking along these lines too. Thanks for the input.
7 karma · joined October 3, 2018
So don't rush, do the home cooking and cold showers and exercise, but don't add the swimming pool yet, because you will be less likely to keep up and as a result skip few days. Skipping will bring out negative emotions and an urge for escapism and you'll be a lot more likely to revert to your bad habit - weed.
Take it slow and enjoy the ride.
A better strategy is to focus on developing habits that will bring more positivity into your life and as a result - weaken your bad habits. This will give you more mental power to deal with whatever shit that is making you unproductive, lazy and procrastinator.
Examples of habits that bring immediate positive effects are:
- movement. Not necessarily exercise. Could be also just taking a 5min stroll around the block after the morning shower. - gratitude practice. Take an actual paper notebook with a pen and each morning after having breakfast, write down 3 things you're grateful for, 3 things that will make today great and maybe some positive self-talk. - meditation. Some people find it hard, but the best solution for beginners is to use guided-meditation apps. Good and paid ones are Calm, Headspace. If you want free one - Insight Timer. Believe me, guided meditation can give you a perspective you are looking for. - improving your social circle. Just signup to some meetups on something that you always wanted to learn. Photography, carpentry, cooking, whatever. go out there and meet people who are already doing what you wish you were doing. This will positively affect your mindset and you might even want to model them. Just don't go to the super pro meetups, because you might be discouraged by their level and think 'I'll never get there' and other kind BS talk.
And look, I'm not even sure you're gonna read this. But I promise you, if you spend at least 3 minutes everyday, taking a small step towards where you want to be - the effects will compound and you'll find yourself at much better situation in a month. Forget about quick fixes, forget about end results. Focus about doing something small today, and then tomorrow.
Good luck brother.
James Clear, the above author has the blog where he writes about habits extensively: www.jamesclear.com
Tiny Habits is a habit program created by Stanford Prof BJ Fogg - www.tinyhabits.com
21 Day Hero (shameless plug) - is a place where you start building habits through 21 day challenges. We're transitioning however to full-on habit building journey, through an app and other tools/programs - www.21dayhero.com
Selfication - http://www.selfication.com/ - is also a great blog in the behavioral science direction
Best apps out there is Fabulous, Spar!, Habitica, Pacifica and many others.
If you want this all in one - our team actually have this secret habit landscape map done, which includes all books, apps, researchers, blogs in the habit space. Haven't shared publicly yet. But can email it to you if you wish
I work on a habit building platform so read almost all books and papers on habit building and behavioral science. This recent book by James Clear has summarized the key points of what's known about building and replacing habits. It's easy to read and most importantly - practical.
The sole purpose of sharing this 'conventional wisdom' was to give perspective because I always appreciate when somebody shares theirs with me. More often than not we get so focused on our own initial plan that we fail to see shortcuts that actually makes sense.
What I would do is to employ a technique called 'habit stacking'. Meaning:
- Take the habit you already have - that is playing video games in your spare time.
- Make a small commitment to yourself, that whenever you will feel the urge to play a video a game, instead of following the usual routine: turning on the console --> choosing a game --> playing it, you will add 5 minutes working-on-my-side-project habit right before. So your routine becomes: feeling the urge to play video games - working on the side project for 5minutes - turning on the console --> choosing a game --> playing it
That's it. You're taking the habit you have, and inserting a new, desired habit right before it.
Some extra tips:
- 5 minutes working on your side project could be spent researching, ideation, sketching, coding etc.
- I know 5 minutes looks ridiculous and it would take ages to produce any tangible result, but at this stage, don't focus on the result, focus on becoming a person that works on his side project regularly. 5 minutes every day is regularly. You might feel the urge to keep on working for more than 5 minutes, but make a conscious effort to stop after 5 minutes - this way you will develop a craving.
- print out the calendar of the next 2 months, stick it on your fridge and mark X on the days you actually worked on your side project at least 5 mins. Try building a chain. If you miss a day - don't stress, come back to it the next one.
- of course, 5 minutes is just an example - you can do 10, 15 or 3 or whatever. It just has to be an amount of time that looks ridiculously small and you'll be able to do it, even if you're unmotivated.
- Do this for 1-2 weeks and then increase your base time from 5minutes, to let's say 10. Repeat that for another 2-3 weeks and you'll see how you'll end up having a habit of working on your side project before playing video games. It's nothing wrong about wanting to unwind after a day at work. We're not robots. But if you want to have positive changes in your behavior - don't approach it with all-in-or-nothing attitude - this fails 99% of the time.
Good luck!
some good resources overall:
DESIGN INSPO RESOURCES:
TOOLS:
Colorzilla - to get the colors of the website you like
https://www.coolors.co - check which colors go well together
https://www.thenounproject.com - for icons, black and white
https://www.iconstore.co - free icons set
fontfaceninja chrome addon - to find the font on the website you like
https://www.uigradietns.com - generates the gradients
- As someone said already - if your MVP takes 12months to build, it's probably too big, especially if it's a B2C Website. Think of the very essentials your service/product will need and launch it as fast as possible. Then go to get as much feedback as possible from your target audience. You'll be surprised how what you think people need, might be the opposite of what they actually need.
- Are you using all of the off-the-shelf solutions already available to speed the website development? In my previous startup, our CTO has insisted in building a marketplace website from scratch, which ended up being a very lengthy process and it was always buggy because he needed to code even such basics like responsiveness from scratch. I later found a WordPress template for a marketplace that would have done 90% of what we need and we would have had it done in 1 month, instead of 6. So really look at platforms like Wordpress - they are a lot more powerful than you think and are really good for prototyping at least.
- If that website is something so huge and no-way can be stripped down - try to think from a different perspective. What is the purpose of the website? Is it to get you leads? Provide a service? Sell something? Maybe it can be already done by existing platforms like Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Messenger Bots, Course using thinkify etc. etc. Is the website the only way to reach that goal?
These are the tips on how to make things faster than 12 months. By doing it - you will be able to test it quickly and will know if your idea is even worth changing your lifestyle or risking your financials and family love (probably nothing is really worth risking losing family support).
If you talked to your users, build an mvp, and it seems to be clicking with your target audience - then start thinking how to bootstrap most effectively. One of the best ways - to launch any sort of paid product and try to get a small income stream from your business already, this might help you to reduce your workload at the day job and then focus more on the main idea. Also, think of getting an intern. There are tons of great people out there who are willing to trade their time for nothing but real life experience (ofc, check your local laws are you required to pay your interns or not).
Anyway - wishing you all the best in your entrepreneurial journey. It's not possible to lose, because even if you fail - you learn.