Recent Posts
What types of information should we learn from the successful?
In previous posts, I have shown three things regarding learning information from successful people: Learning from the successful is recommended by personal development authors to become successful yourself Humans seem to have a certain tendency to learn from the...
Becoming vs Achieving: the Superiority of Identity-based New Year’s Resolutions
Here are some stories of people and their New Year’s Resolutions: Mary Mary has gained 10 kgs in the last year. Her New Year’s resolution is to lose all those extra kilos within the year. Joe Joe has been single for some years now. He is determined to change his...
Why people don’t learn enough from the successful
In the previous post, I integrated ideas coming from the literature on Personal Development with ideas coming from Cultural Evolutionary Theory. The main conclusion from that post was the following: people don't learn enough from the successful. This has been...
Learning From the Successful: Personal Development vs Cultural Evolution
Some of the most popular books on Personal Development and Cultural EvolutionIn a previous post, I described different strategies to select your learning sources. One of these was the strategy of learning from the successful. In a series of posts, I’ll get deeper into...
Living Better with Less Technology: A Self-experiment
In a previous post, I described my experience with the diffusion of mobile phones and the internet and my past struggles with having a healthy relationship with these technologies. I believed that the way I was using my smartphone and laptop was damaging my...
FREE FOR YOU: ONE-ON-ONE COACHING SESSIONS
To celebrate the launching of The Adventure of Success, I am offering completely free 50 one-on-one coaching sessions 25 face-to-face in Plymouth (UK) 25 online via Skype I am offering help with any of the following topics. Self-improvement & Personal Development...
The Diffusion of Mobile Phones and the Internet: A Personal Perspective
This post is the first of a series of posts in which I am going to address some of the problems of smartphones, social media, and the internet. Specifically, I am interested in discussing how these digital technologies affect productivity, social relationships, and...
The Compound Effect of Learning a New Skill
Group learning to dance bachataWhen we are learning a new skill, we usually expect that our results are going to be a linear function of the time we invest and that our progress is going to be quite fast. In this post, I will argue that these two expectations often...
Why Fear-setting is More Important than Goal-setting
Tim Ferris' book, The 4-Hour Work Week, has been enormously influential to me. I still remember the sensations I experienced when I was reading it. It was a very sunny day. I was lying down on a sandy beach in St Ives in Cornwall, England. Between swim and swim,...
Social Learning: How to Select Your Learning Sources
Social learning means learning from the actions and advice of others. It has the advantage of taking less time and effort than learning from the results of one’s own actions. There are many things you could learn from others and there is limited time to learn it all....
Health, Money, and Time as Sources of Individual Power
When talking about self-improvement or personal development, people often focus on specific goals they want to achieve. Little attention is paid to the fundamentals. For me, one of these fundamentals is the concept of ‘sources of individual power’. In this article, I...
Overworking: how to fix it to be productive long-term
The problem with overworking You are a self-directed professional: an entrepreneur, a researcher, an artist, a freelancer, an author, a blogger, etc. You make most of the decisions regarding how much you work and how you distribute your time between different...
