“Whether artistic or calculated, whether black and white or grey, spend just a minute a day on auditing yourself and figuring out your strengths. If you find your strength is salesmanship, or storytelling, or patience, or organization, or human resources, or caring for the end consumer, or your coworkers, then you need to keep paying attention to it. Or if not, then maybe you need to find someone whose abilities map onto yours” - Gary Vaynerchuk.

I am not a normal person. I know that I’m not perfect and it doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I think I never had any intention in becoming perfect, and naturally, I can’t possibly expect perfection from anybody else.

Now I know, there’s an entire industry that is built on the expectation of perfection. Entire religions were built upon a promise of perfection in the after-life, and I know, I watch all the dystopian movies where the local politician always calls to the extinction of the human race because we are a flawed species.

Says the guy who lacks any shred of empathy.

But I always liked the idea improvement, I think that development in life shouldn’t have to stop, so I bought in the self-help phenomena a few years ago. I bought several books, took a couple classes, watched a few webinars, and purchased some very questionable 10-steps bullet-proof plans. Hell I even designed myself my very own strategy.

Tossing it away however, was one of the best decisions I made in my life, and today I wanted to share that story with you.

The Loser Inside Me

The first thing you need to do to improve anything is to analyze it, even if that thing is you, dear reader.

So one day, I decided to go to a cabin away from everything and everyone, to find absolute clarity and start digging inside myself. I wanted to access myself on 100% truth. If there is one person you cannot lie to, is yourself. The problem is:

There were no cabins.

Being in a metropolitan city at the time, cabins were hard to come by in AirBnb. So I settled for a wooden house. Really, I found a small house made out of wood and I rented it for the weekend.

To help with the process, I also brought some friends, French redheads, bottled honesty. You know what they say, the children and the drunk always say the truth. I’m 6,1 so what? Three, four bottles of wine? Better be safe than sorry, right? Although now I’m worried that this sounds like something that Charlie Sheen would say.

So I sat down, double-checked my gear: Writing equipment, check. Drinking equipment, check. Emotional inventory that doubles back as a boxing sand bag, check….

Before the evening was over I ended up with a Moleskine packed with wisdom and a couch packed with wine-stains.

This is what I found:

Money-management wise, I found quite a few holes, or should I say, there was little solid matter in between the holes. I contracted what apparently is called emotional spending. Which basically is just a 10 Dollar word for stuffing my emotions with.. Stuff! I realized that I spend more when I’m drunk because as it turns out, Jack Daniels was never known for his accounting skills.

Who would’ve thought, right?

And most important of all, I realized that my own instincts could be turned against me, that everything inside you sometimes fights improvement.

Why do you think there are so many poor people in the world? It’s not only because of poor decision making and bad luck, but also because their egos much rather be broke than tired.

So I learned that the human brain just wants to stay stable and anchored in the same mindset, even if it’s against your own self interest. I learned that there was some douchebag in my head starring the wheel, and who just wanted to remain comfortable.

The loser inside me, I wasn’t kidding.

Now, that loser issue was the only thing I didn’t plan a counter-strategy for. The realization alone made alert to any signs of apparent douchery from the co-pilot. Also being in harmony with myself helped a great deal, which I will get shortly.

I’ve also discovered several other small mistakes, like for example that I didn’t seem to stick to plans. I don’t mean plans that I like or that interest me, nor do I mean plans that I gave my word I would follow through, I was still a reliable person.

I’m talking about 10-step plans that I used to read about in self-help: Get the life of your dreams, be the leader of all teams, give your wife some pleasurable screams…You’ve heard that crap, I’m sure.

So I kept copying down plans from life coaches and kept posting them in my wall. I even bought a big board and began to write the steps there, then I started writing those biblical rules in capital letters so they’ll be easier to stick out, and then I started to write them in red. Needless to say, Red, didn’t cut it.

This is what I used to write: 10 Rules to follow religiously.

It turns out, I was a true atheist.

So I wrote that flaw down as well, along with a mid-sized list of things that I could improve

The Master Plan

Now that I have all the ingredients and all the culinary equipment, it’s time to start cooking. I thought that maybe those 7,10,12 steps plans were just not designed for me, maybe everyone is different, maybe there is no one size fits all in self-improvement. Or maybe I should take the scissors and tailor my own suit.

Tailor? I thought we were talking about food!

Ok, I admit, I totally lost the metaphor.

After a lot of analysis and calculations, this is the plan I came up with:

1 – Deal with everything immediately, don’t postpone and don’t pretend that you need more time.

2 – Reverse-engineer everything. (In case you were wondering about the inspiration behind this post, or this one, or this one)

3 – Priorities are everything, do the 80/20 on a weekly, or bi-weekly basis.

4 – Use the magic of compound interest to your advantage. Let the good habit compile and compound.

5 – 1 is better than 0. Start small, put one running shoe next your bed, one foot after another and you’re there.

6 – Track your progress.

7 – Trick your own ego to work for your best interest.

8 – Make sure you have consistent energy and motivation to be always at your peak performance.

9 – Never have 10 step lists again.

Contrary to what you’d expect, I did follow through on the plan, for six months in fact. Meanwhile I couldn’t believe the bad luck I was having and that categorically refused to give me a break. I know it sounds like a poor excuse but that’s how it seemed like at the time. No permanent damage though, I was always able to find a solution instead of complaining. And in the end, everything worked out.

But deep down, I felt as if something was conspiring against me to defeat me. What I didn’t know is that it was me who was trying to defeat me.

I wasn’t in my element, and so I felt as the living reincarnation of Job. (Job from the bible of course, I don’t know anyone called Job).

Little did I know that sometimes, some things happen for a reason.

It’s Always in Front of Your Eyes, But You Don’t See it

At the time I was following my very own 9-step strategy, I was working on an important project for several months already and it took most of my time. So every time I get too tired, I’d just close my eyes, and go to where I want to go in my head, like that taxi scene from Micheal Mann’s movie Collateral where Jamie Foxx closes his eyes and goes to Tahiti in his mind.

In my case I was then picturing a comedy series that I had been writing on-and-off for a while. A comedy about an alien form outer space that comes to our planet and starts picking on all the funny aspects of our lives, our relationships, decisions...etc.

And then I'd find myself laughing alone, then I write the best parts down, sometimes I get so absorbed that I forget I have to get back to work, until something interrupts me.

And then again, and again… Every time. And always postponing what I really like to do to an unknown date in the future- to be determined later.

No matter how many times I found myself laughing and smiling about a scene that I just created in my head, no matter how many times I seemed to enjoy the process, I never seemed to put two and two together.

And then it dawned on me.

I suddenly realized that maybe, just maybe, this is what I should do with my life, that I had to start being the person I want to be now, and not later. I guess that "later" is the easiest lie in the world.

So I faced my demon, stabbed it in the fucking heart.

Then all of the sudden, that 9 steps strategy didn’t matter anymore. I became more aware of who I was and what I wanted and that’s all that mattered to be honest. To be in synch with yourself. It felt like that part from The Alchemist:

“The boy and his heart had become friends, and neither was capable now of betraying the other.”― Paulo Coelho.

Then I started to realize that all I had is to do is to bet on my strengths, instead of trying to fix my weakness. And that I did, and now I’m doing better than ever. In fact I have been doing better and better ever since I tossed that heavy self-help plan away and embraced my own heart.

Good things then started happening to me and great surprises started finding me, like steemit!

Take that robotically designed plan to ‘fix’ my spending habits. I make more money working than what I could save by cooking for myself, and doing three supermarket runs per day. Who’s the loser now?

Plus, I love cooking, I always loved cooking. But for me cooking was for always special occasions only. In all my happiest times, I almost never had the time to cook, because I was busy doing why I loved.

So with that in mind, I leave you today with one pearl of wisdom that I found today hidden in the archives. This is about a legendary comedian, probably the best of all times. He recounts the time when he realized that he started missing someone in the middle all the super-stardom, and then out of the sudden he realizes that the person he was missing was himself.

He talks about how he felt as a victim of his own success, and I think that this is really worth a watch.

I Hope you guys like it!

When the rebel becomes a superstar.