Introduction to The Life Actionbook

The following is an excerpt from The Life Actionbook: Tools and Actions for Personal Development

One of my tenets of writing is only to write what I would want to read for myself. Nobody is perfect. I know that I am far from perfect and have a lot of work to do. That is why I wrote this book. It is not a traditional self-improvement book. I won’t stand on a pedestal and try to be your guru. I won’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. I won’t try to advise strangers without knowing anything about their unique situations.

That said, I do want to help you. I want to help you as much as I want to help myself. Self-help books get a bad rap. When I was younger, I would always walk past the self-help section at bookstores thinking, “I don’t need help. Those are books for people with problems.” But as I got older, I realized that everyone has problems. Life itself is a game of solving problems. The self-help section of the bookstore is like the answer book that sat hidden in the first drawer of the teacher’s desk in grade school. It turns out that those people in the self-help section at bookstores were the smart ones. They recognized their problems and decided to do something about them. That’s a lot more than most people are willing to do. Most people let their problems be. They take the easy path, which is to do nothing.

We no longer call these books “self-help” books. People don’t want to be helped. But they do want to improve themselves or develop their skills. So now we call them “self-improvement” or “personal development” books. Same thing, but with a friendlier connotation than “self-help.” Their purpose remains the same—to provide answers to the problems that crop up in life.

This book doesn’t have one-size-fits-all answers. I don’t know what your situation is, so I can’t point you to a particular solution. In this book, I show you many possible solutions. It’s your job to choose the ones that may work for you and apply them to your life.

This book is a workbook (of sorts) for finding the areas for improvement in your life and fixing them. Each chapter discusses one area of life. You will take a short self-assessment quiz. If that area of your life is not up to par, the rest of the chapter will provide ideas for habits, hacks, tools, supplements, and resources that you can use to improve yourself.

While I want to refrain from giving advice where possible, I do have one crucial piece of wisdom that everyone should follow. Adopt a kaizen approach to life. Kaizen is the Japanese word for “improvement.” When used in a business context, it refers to the continuous improvement of all aspects of the company including processes, employees, and even the CEO. You should be continuously improving your life. Each day you wake up is another opportunity to be a better person than you were yesterday. It’s another chance to eat better, interact with others better, perform better, live better.

Who Are You? (And Why Should I Listen to You?)

I grew up in a middle-class, suburban American family. My grades were okay in school, but I was never exceptional. I went to college and graduated. Then I got married and worked a stable government job for ten years. Somewhere in between, we bought a house and had three kids. Thus far, I’ve lived a successful life with no regrets.

But something was still missing. I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing. I started thinking, “so do I just keep doing this for the next 30 years and then retire?”

When I was working my 9-5 job, I began the habit of reading popular non-fiction books on my daily Metro commutes to and from work. In 2011, I came across a book that changed my mindset and my life. The book was The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss. It wasn’t so much the content of the book that changed my life, but the subject matter that intrigued me. I found a new passion. That passion was what Ferriss called “lifestyle design.”

Lifestyle design is a new breed of self-improvement. You start with the end in mind. What kind of life do you want to live ten years from now? Once you know that, you can figure out what you need to do to get there.

After reading hundreds of books related to redesigning my life, I quit my job in 2016 to set my plans in motion. I began focusing less on the reading and more on the actions. This book is a collection of actions. Each one of them has worked for someone in the past. It might not work for you, but it is worth trying. I wrote this book for myself so that I could have my notes on actionable items all in one place. I hope it is useful to you as well. Let’s take action together.

An Actionbook

The term “workbook” calls to mind a physical book with thin gray pages, questions, and lots of lines for you to write on. The book you’re holding is most likely an ebook or a small physical paperback. There are no lines in it. It’s not a workbook.

Think of this book as an “actionbook.” Instead of reading through it while working, I want you to read it while taking actions. If you’re reading a physical copy, feel free to write in it, highlight passages, put sticky notes in it, or mangle its pages. If it’s the electronic version you’re reading, have a notebook handy, so you can take notes or doodle while you read. Make a note of which sections you completed or skipped. Mark which suggestions you’ve tried. Did they succeed or did they not work out for you?

The important thing is to take action. Don’t read this book and put it away without having made any changes in your life. I assure you, there is much better literature out there than this book. Try the various suggestions. Some of them will drastically improve your life. But they won’t have any effect if you don’t take action.

Disclaimer

You are in control of your own life. You make decisions every day that affect your future well-being. As mentioned before, this is not a book of advice. It is a book of ideas and suggestions for things you can try. I am not a doctor, lawyer, or accountant. I am a researcher and author. While I go to great lengths to ensure that the information in this book is factual and current, in the end, any action you take is your decision.

Every person is different. Starting a new jogging habit might be helpful for most people, but it may be dangerous to some people with heart conditions. Drinking more green tea may help most people, but may be hazardous to people with liver disease. Use your judgment when making lifestyle changes. When in doubt, consult a professional. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to life changes.

I gleaned most of the content in this book from other sources. I spent countless hours reading, researching, and trying things so I could curate and compile the best material for this book. All I’m doing is reporting on what better-qualified people are saying. Sometimes I put two and two together and form conclusions or offer personal insights. On those occasions, I try to make it obvious. Read this book as a summary of much of the information that’s out there. Try the things that look safe for you, but skip over any suggestions that you’re wary of.

Habits

Your success, your health, your relationships, and everything else that defines your life are the product of your habits. Everything you do and every decision you make is based on your habits. Eating dinner is a habit. Hitting the snooze button on your alarm clock in the morning is a habit. Even spontaneously deciding to take an alternate route to work might come from a broader habit of mixing things up every once in awhile.

Our brains are continually sensing the environment and coming to logical conclusions about how the world works. In our subconscious minds, we form truths and mental models based on all our past experiences. As babies, we felt hungry, so we cried, and we were fed. From that point, we cried whenever we wanted food. It was a truth to us, until one day it didn’t work. We cried, and we weren’t fed. The thing we knew to be true was proven untrue, so we had to find a new solution. Perhaps it was a pat of the tummy, or reaching for a bottle, or saying “eat.” Once we see a new solution, then we form a new truth to base future habits upon.

We use our knowledge of how the world works to form habits. Our habits influence every decision. And every decision we make affects the outcomes in our lives. That is why to change our lives we must change our habits. We can’t change how the world works, but we can change our habits.

Good and Bad Habits

We all have both good and bad habits. It’s obvious that we all want to have more good habits and drop the bad ones. But it’s not easy to get rid of bad habits. In fact, it can be almost impossible.

One way to get rid of bad habits is to replace them with good practices. It can be too difficult to simply stop doing a bad habit. You need something to fill the void. If you can find a good habit that takes the same amount of time and has similar benefits of the bad one, you can swap the bad habit for the good habit. For example, if you have the bad habit of talking on your phone while driving, you can start listening to podcasts while driving instead. Both activities fill the same amount of time while you are driving. And both actions have similar benefits of filling your driving time with something worthwhile.

While some people may have succeeded in drastically changing their lives in a short amount of time, most people fail at “cold turkey” solutions. Realize that most habits are not all or nothing. If you’re quitting smoking, getting down to five cigarettes a day is better than a pack a day. If you’re starting a jogging habit, getting outside and running once a week is better than none at all. Set your habit goals, but don’t let setbacks derail you. Do the best you can. Even if you fail most of the time with a few minor successes, it’s still better than not even trying.

One Habit at a Time

Many people make the mistake of trying to change too much at once. It often occurs at the beginning of a new year when people attempt to reinvent themselves. They want to lose weight, go vegan, make more money, and quit smoking all at the same time. And they end in catastrophic failure after three days.

Don’t try to change more than one aspect of your life at once. It takes time to turn a lone action into a daily habit. It takes at least a couple weeks to develop a new habit. I suggest developing one new habit each month. Create a 30-day challenge for yourself. At the beginning of each month, decide on one aspect of your life you want to change. Then focus on that single issue for the entire month.

Using a series of 30-day challenges to change your life turns it into a game. You either succeed or fail in each challenge. The habit is either created or not. And the challenge only lasts a month. It is a huge accomplishment if you succeed, but still beneficial even if you fail. You might not achieve your goal, but you will make more progress than if you had not tried at all. Because the experiment is limited to a month, you can learn from it and move on. Each new month gives you the opportunity to start another exciting challenge. Do a year of 30-day challenges. It will transform and your life.

Anchors and Triggers

Another common problem people have when starting a new habit is remembering to do it each day. Sometimes people have trouble fitting a new routine into their busy schedules. The solution is anchoring.

To anchor a habit, you attach it to an existing routine. For example, if you want to build a habit of doing thirty push-ups every day, you can anchor it to your daily shower. Resolve to do thirty push-ups before you get in the shower. Your daily shower is already an established habit, so you will not forget to do it. If you make doing push-ups part of your shower routine, you will remember to do them.

Triggers are like anchors but tend to apply to bad habits instead of good ones. A trigger is something that makes your bad practices more likely to happen. Your location, time, emotional state, people around you, and things you’re doing can all trigger bad habits. It’s harder to avoid drinking alcohol when you’re sitting at the bar. It’s easier to overeat when you’re at a buffet. It becomes much more difficult to avoid wasting time on the internet once you start checking your social media accounts. Identify the triggers for your bad habits and avoid them. Better yet, preempt them with good habits.

Once you’ve identified a trigger for a bad habit, think about what triggered the trigger. For example, if you’re trying to quit soda and eating greasy foods makes you feel like drinking it, think about what happens before you eat greasy foods. If hunger between meals causes you to eat greasy foods, try anchoring some good habits to your mealtimes, so you don’t get hungry before the next meal. Maybe you can make a habit of drinking a full glass of water after each meal. Or eat more protein during mealtimes. Or after each meal, do something good for yourself that doesn’t allow you to take a snack break before the next meal (like going to the library to study after lunch). Just make sure you’re attacking the root of the problem and not the symptoms.

Accountability

Sometimes the best way to stick with your goals is to tell others about them. If you tell everybody that you will start riding your bike to work every day, you are more likely to do it. Once other people know your goals, you will feel a sense of embarrassment if you fail to achieve them. The threat of humiliation can be a strong motivator.

The most reliable form of accountability is personal accountability with another person. Tell a friend about your goals. The closer your relationship with the person, the stronger your motivation will be. Tell your spouse, roommates, or best friend. You can even hire someone to hold you accountable. Simply pay someone to check in on you daily to make sure you’re working towards your goal.

There are also ways to hold yourself accountable online. Many apps can help you build habits.

• Coach.me (www.coach.me) is a social media habit app where you can add friends, send messages, and ask questions. You choose the habits you want to build and check in whenever you complete it. You can also connect with a coach to provide guidance and motivation.
• 21habit (www.21habit.com) lets you set a goal and form a habit in twenty-one days.
• Strides (www.stridesapp.com) helps you set SMART goals. Set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely goals and track your progress.
• DietBet (www.dietbet.com) makes a game out of losing weight. You put real money into a virtual pot. Send “before” pictures showing your current weight. Then you have 28 days to lose 4% of your body weight. If you succeed, you split the pot with the other winners. Otherwise, you lose the money.

While online accountability may be the weakest form, it can still be useful. The main strength of accountability apps is gamification. They turn habit formation into a game by encouraging you to check in every day and comparing you to others.

Types of Fixes

While changing your habits is the best long-term solution to your problems, there are other types of fixes. Be aware that there are no real shortcuts in life. Each chapter of this book offers four additional classes of solutions: hacks, supplements, tools, and resources.

Hacks

You can think of hacks as short-term solutions. Apply them as a quick fix to a problem. There are often negative consequences for continually using the same hacks over an extended period. For example, downing a cup of coffee and taking a short nap is one way to wake yourself up if you only got four hours of sleep the night before. But, if you get four hours of sleep every night, you cannot rely on these caffeine naps for more than a few days at a time. You first need to fix the bad habit of sleeping too little.

Supplements

Supplements are a “magic pill” solution to your problems. They are herbal remedies, over-the-counter medicines, and specialty foods that can help your situation. Like hacks, I don’t recommend taking supplements as a long-term solution to your problems. Herbal remedies are a form of drug that can have severe side-effects if taken long-term or in large quantities. Even many foods can have side-effects if you go too far with consumption. As always, discuss any dietary changes you want to make with your doctor.

Tools

Tools are gadgets and products you can buy to help you with your goals. If you have some money to spend on improving your life, these tools can make things easier. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” When you have a big task ahead of you, having the right tools can mean the difference between success and failure. Try out whatever means you can afford. Confidently walk into your tasks carrying a sharp ax.

Resources

Finally, I’ve included resources for further reading. This book is just a brief overview of the many facets of self-improvement. There are books, videos, websites, and podcasts that explore the subjects in greater detail. If you want to go deeper into a particular topic, check out the resources at the end of each chapter.

How to Read This Book

This book is not your typical personal development book. You should not read it from the beginning to end. It doesn’t have pep-talks or motivational stories. It won’t tell you what to do. This is a book of ideas for things you can try.

Each chapter starts with a quiz to assess your level of mastery on a topic. If you’ve already mastered the subject of the section, you should skip it. There is no use in fixing something that’s not broken. If there is much room for improvement, then read through the suggestions and take action. Choose one tip and try it. For those topics that you haven’t mastered yet, but aren’t entirely failing at, skip them for now and revisit them after you’ve made one pass through the book. Discover your weaknesses first, then find ways to improve in those areas.

Realize that everyone is different. Something that is easy for you may be difficult for someone else. If you come across an exercise that looks too challenging for you to try, skip it and move on to the next one. The exercises are only suggestions of things you can try. They are not directives for what you should or should not do. Not every activity will work for you.

Engage in active reading. Keep a notepad next to you as you read. Whenever something catches your attention or strikes you as a good idea to try, write it in your notes. Writing helps you remember and gets your mind thinking down a path of action. It is especially important to write down your answers to the questions at the beginning of each chapter. Remember, this is an actionbook for you to take action. It is not meant to read like a novel.

Details

This book covers nine broad personal development topics: mindset, sleep, time management, career, diet, fitness, social skills, organization, and personal finances. For each subject, I give you several ideas for how you can improve that area of your life. Note that each list of ideas is just the tip of a colossal iceberg of knowledge. There are hundreds of ways you can approach a problem. I only give you a couple dozen. But the ideas you find in this book will at least get you thinking about some of the possibilities.

Every idea given here includes a summary. Due to the space constraints of this book, the summary is often not enough information to make informed decisions. Each idea has enough information to get you started, but you should do due diligence to ensure that the action is right for you. Get more detailed information by searching the internet. For ideas that involve physical movement or ingesting things, be sure to consult your doctor. For ideas concerning legal aspects, ask your lawyer when in doubt. I know we already discussed this in the disclaimer section, but it’s important to repeat. When in doubt about anything in this book, dig deeper by doing your own research and consulting experts.

—An excerpt from The Life Actionbook: Tools and Actions for Personal Development