The power of Silence for Focusing on your business

Focus, Marketing, peak Performance, Productivity, single target market, Uncategorized

For a lot of people who follow Buddhism , today is an auspicious occasion since it Lord Buddha’s birthday. One of the things linked to Buddhism and the overall philosophy of religions that originated in the Indian Sub-Continent is the practice of “Dhyan” and Yoga. While there are a lot of people who follow and practice Yoga across the world “Dhyan” is something that is missing in our lives. “Dhyan” involves sitting in pin drop silence and just focusing all your energy to think.

We all (me included) are so busy running after deadlines all day that we don’t give our brains the bandwidth to actually do what it can do best – which is THINK. When you get into the “Dhyan” stage you are able to connect a lot of the dots which otherwise seem impossible to connect.

I have many times earlier, mentioned a practice by Dean Jackson called the focus finder. Its a very practical way to do a brain dump and then get on to the activity of Thinking.

Today I was a little frustrated that I was not being able to figure out a solution for identifying a Single Target Market. I keep giving you folks a lot of inputs on why you should go about identifying the Single Target Market and the incredible benefits it can have in your marketing.

But today I had a mind block and I was not able to think through on what would be my STM. After lazing around mindlessly and watching un-necessary web series for about an hour, I decided to just sit down with my notebook and pencil and started jotting down thoughts as they came to me about my “bullseye ” (the STM)

While doing this my brain also kept throwing up additional items that I could include. But I had to make my STM as sharply defined as possible. So I kept listing down, all the people whom I would not be able to help.

Automatically I ended up putting a lot of AND statements to ensure that there were as little possibilities as possible for some additional markets creeping in.

Once this was done I went two steps further, I even identified the the markets, one variable away and two variables away. This would help me, in case, the STM I have defined is not viable economically and I have to expand it a little bit.

While I spent close to 2 hours dilly – dalling, I was able to achieve all this in a matter of about 45 minutes, when there was pin drop silence and I was only focusing on this activity. These 45 minutes were more precious because of the immense productivity I got.

If feasible I would suggest everyone to regularly do these focus exercises, they can increase productivity levels dramatically and because you take out everything from your brain and put it on paper, there’s no chance of missing things.

Till next then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Habits & Procrastination – Part 2

Brain size, Habits, Human Brain, peak Performance, procrastination, Productivity

Yesterday I wrote about one intersection which I think that exists between the book Tiny Habits by B. J. Fogg and The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. Like I have said multiple times earlier, I find the work of both the authors, amazing to say the least. I have read more books by Steven Kotler (SK) , than by B. J. Fogg (BJF).

Now one of the things BJF talks about to make something a habit is that after doing the habit you reward yourself by pushing a fist in the air or anything else which gives you a feeling of accomplishment. that happiness feeling caused by the feeling of achievement causes the feeling to become permanent over a period of time.

I think SK looks at the neurological aspects and says something similar. When we feel good various chemicals like dopamine (he’s listed another 5-6 of them like oxytocin, serotonin etc. ) get released. These chemicals make you feel good and while you are feeling good you tend to achieve more. So when you do a tiny habit like BJF says and then do a happiness gesture, the mind catches it and it makes you feel good and the brain remembers the feeling.

What BJF is doing is however having a prompt to do an action – a very small action at that – the tiny habit forming action – and making the process more mechanical and therefore repeatable so there’s no chance for the brain to scuttle your plans and make you procrastinate.

I would love to take the best of both the books and see how I can profit from it. I consistently want to figure more and better ways to improve my performance levels, so let me see how combining the 2 methods from these two authors can help me tame my brain to perform even better feats.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Habits and Procrastination

Energy, Flow, Habits, Human Brain, peak Performance, procrastination, Thinking

I have written earlier about the book Tiny Habits by B. J. Fogg PhD. This is one classic book and it eliminates the ideas of doing heroic things to achieve Peak Performance. I have been deeply impressed with the book and the results it has helped me get.

The logic of the book is very simple, yet profound. Actually most profound things have simple explanations. Here the simple explanation is that if there’s something which requires a lot of ability (also known as hard work for the brain) then chances are, that if motivation is not high, then it won’t happen. So you may have the best intentions, but your brain won’t let you achieve it. This is what I was talking about yesterday .

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, the brain has only 2% of the mass of the body but consumes about 25% of the energy, so its always trying to conserve energy as per Steven Kotter in his book The Art of Impossible.

As per Steven to achieve the impossible one of the key ingredients is motivation. He also looks at the various chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin etc., which when layered give the brain the power of feeling good and hence the motivation to perform at peak.

Where I think the intersection takes place is that if you make something into a habit, then the brain does not use so much energy and you don’t procrastinate even for tasks where the motivation is low and the amount of ability needed is high.

On the other hand when your motivation levels are high and you’re at your creative best, you can get into a “flow” state and achieve massive outcomes.

I would think you should read both the books because both can help you grow your abilities to perform at your peak.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Gratitude – Part 2

Fear, Financial Independence, Gratitude, Happiness, Human Brain, peak Performance

if you do a split of my posts, they can get equally split between Marketing, Financial independence, Human Mind & Performance, Charity / Karma / Gratitude.

I have mentioned multiple times that when I am feeling low, I decide to go and do charity. It gives me a high of a different kind. This is something which I seriously started doing when I heard Joe Polish on his podcast ilovemarketing.com. He had other ideas also about things which you can do when you are feeling low and don’t even have the money to do charity.

While continuing reading the book The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler, I realised that the human performance is very strongly linked to the human mind – nothing new here, but what was surprise was the scientific reason behind why gratitude or doing good for others helps improve performance.

As per the research which Steven talks about – gratitude trains the brain on looking at the positive things, for which you are thankful. The brain is otherwise seasoned to look for things which can ham us, so that it can protect us. When you are in the state of gratitude , the negative things which can harm us, get filtered out by the brain automatically. When the negative things are filtered out, there is reduced fear. Once that happens you automatically get into a good mood and you feel happy.

When we are in a good mood, we feel safe and secure. When we feel safe and secure, our mind is willing to wander and think. Due to this your creativity also gets enhanced. To get into the more technical details of how the neurobiology and neurochemistry work I would highly recommend reading his book.

Coming back to where I started this post, while I was splitting the Human Mind & Performance , from Charity / Gratitude / Karma, it seems from the research that Steven has done that actually these help improve the performance of the human mind.

So actually my blog posts then, have a skew towards the human mind and performance compared to other areas of marketing and finance. This is interesting.

While I have always had an inclination to continuously find ways to improve myself, I had never actually taken the rigorous analysis that Steven has done on improving myself.

Tell me what do you enjoy more – my posts on marketing, financial independence or human performance.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!