How to become the best version of yourself: 12 simple tricks

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-13 00:26

Subtle secrets of success from Rohit Bhargava, author of Always Eat With Your Left Hand.

How to take control of fate

Lead, don't follow someone else

Controlling your destiny from the backseat will not be easy. It happens that you are assigned a specific role and there is no way around it. But in many cases, you still have some kind of choice.

My career in Australia began when I was invited to work on a program for just three weeks. But soon I saw the real reason why I was hired: the project was not meeting the deadline due to poor management.

They actually needed a new project manager. And I took over his job without waiting to be asked. A week later, I officially received this position.

Sometimes the chance to break into leaders is not given to us by someone from above, but goes to the one who took the initiative.

Feel free to your strange habits

At school we are taught that distraction and crawling is bad. Many children are given special medications to keep them calm and less involved in school. Outside of educational settings, however, strange obsessive movements can actually serve an important purpose.

Stop being shy about your habits.

Perhaps the fact that you fiddle with a pen or twitch your leg (or annoy everyone around you with some other incessant body movements) somehow helps you to concentrate.

So buy yourself a little toy like an anti-stress cube, or start drawing pictures during conference calls, or find any other way to support your habit instead of crushing it with willpower or medication. This makes itself felt by your creative energy, and the ability to direct it in the right direction promises you good dividends.

Go away

A few years ago, the BBC produced a documentary about the inhuman working conditions in numerous factories in China, where iPhones and iPads are assembled for Apple. The program talked about the excessively long working day of workers, their uncomfortable living and demanding bosses.

But most of all I was struck by the moment when one worker started talking about the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness that generates work on the conveyor in the same mode, brought to automaticity, for 14 hours, six days a week. The lack of free will destroyed the desire to live in him and even made him think of suicide.

Most of us, fortunately, have never had a chance to find ourselves in such circumstances. But sometimes we also have the feeling that our professional and personal life is an endless run in a circle. If this feeling lasts longer, remember that you have an opportunity that most desperate Chinese workers lack. You can leave and do something else.

How to acquire new knowledge

Ask more questions

One of the greatest joys of being a parent is for me to hear my children ask a lot of questions on a wide variety of topics, from why people speak Portuguese in Brazil to why motorcycles don't have seat belts. Unfortunately, I receive far fewer questions from my students at the university.

As we age, we become less and less curious, and for many reasons.

Sometimes we are afraid that we will look stupid. Sometimes we mistakenly believe that at the right time, information will appear by itself (or at least it will be found on Google). And at times we ourselves do not realize that we do not know something. But it doesn't have to be that way. The first step in acquiring knowledge is to consciously ask questions about topics you are not aware of. And the inextricably linked second step is to listen to the answers.

Buy unfamiliar magazines

A few years ago, while traveling in South Africa, I took to read a magazine called Farmer’s Weekly, which was focused on farmers. One of the articles in it was devoted to, in the author's expression, the "Amish paradox", namely their practice of crop rotation and abandonment of chemical fertilizers, designed so that vegetables and fruits on commercial farms grow larger in less time.

The Amish, on the other hand, grow smaller produce over a longer period and rotate crops on purpose so as not to deplete the soil. As a result, their lands remain fertile for longer.

And although I myself have nothing to do with agriculture, I took away from this article one more general idea: sometimes you need to give up quick profit in order to achieve a more distant goal … and the source of this reasoning was a magazine that most readers would consider useless for everyone who does not work on the ground.

Sit more on the couch

Self-help books will never tell you to spend more time on the couch. But these days, a huge archive of knowledge can really be accessed from the comfort of your couch: you have great documentaries, podcasts, TED presentations and all kinds of videos on all kinds of topics (how to peel a pomegranate!) On YouTube.

So sit on the couch for your pleasure and do not hesitate to stretch these moments … But only as long as they benefit your brain.

And if it all ends with the fact that you drunkenly watch the long-standing seasons of TV shows, you need to tie up with sitting on the couch. Forget this advice, get up and do something else. Now.

How to be more honest

Uncover the unexpected truth

There is truth that we expect to hear. You cannot lie about your education or where the product you are selling was made. But we usually don't expect people to start telling us the truth on their own initiative. Especially if they offer us something for money.

For example, we do not expect the mechanic to tell us how much he will actually put in his pocket from the money he took from us. What if he said? Such frankness would set him apart from the rest and serve as a perfect example of how useful it is to tell the truth before you are forced to do it.

If you have the courage to share what your competitors or colleagues choose to hide, you can be remembered by people for your laid-back sincerity.

Do what you promised

When we talk to other people, we keep promising them something. We say that we will definitely introduce them to someone. We assure you that we will certainly return to the issue with which they asked us to help. We guarantee that we will meet the deadlines. Honesty requires us to keep our promises. And this applies to even the tiniest of them.

When I propose to introduce someone to someone, I always do so. When I promise to remember for someone the name of an excellent book that came up in a conversation, I will definitely send this person a message soon with its title and a link to an online store where you can buy it.

The bottom line is that the habit of bringing the conversation to the point makes you responsible for your words in any other cases. And everyone can hone this skill to complete automatism.

Subscribe with your name

When I give my students the task to write an essay, I, unlike many other teachers, never assign a minimum volume. I only ask them to prepare a well thought out and well formulated text on the indicated topic, and they can determine the length of it themselves. If they are able to convincingly and interestingly speak about the topic of the week in one sentence, I will only be glad.

However, I have another requirement: I insist that each student sign their essay and post it on our course blog. This implies complete transparency: this way all other students can read it, and I will publicly give it a grade of 1 to 5 in the comments on the post.

I do this in order to turn one of the main rules of the Internet to my advantage: everything that you post on the Web affects your reputation. By signing an essay with their name, students take full responsibility for the quality of the published work. And this, as a rule, makes them put more effort into creating it.

I still hope that one of them will be able to present a perfectly verified judgment in one single phrase. But so far no one has succeeded.

How to get your own point of view

Learn to separate opinions from facts

It has always been difficult for all of us to separate what seems to be from what can be objectively proven. The media we use can be biased. Public confidence in them can lead to wrong conclusions and enable anyone to prove any statement they want by simply twisting the "facts" so that they speak in their favor. And if you add to this the epidemic of fake news on the web, we get "the perfect storm, beyond which it is difficult to discern the truth."

But this information environment, where news is circulated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has its advantages. You can always get to proven facts if you set yourself up to form your own opinion based on a critical comparison of different sources.

Don't be a fool

If liberal arts colleges offer anything to their students, it is to teach them how to think. However, learning to think does not require a college degree (although the self-discipline required to earn a degree can be a valuable skill in itself). This requires you to have enough confidence to form your point of view, and to ask as many questions as possible to make it justified.

To be a fool means to persist in your conviction, despite the lack of facts and evidence and the inability to argue your position.

If I spoke badly about the taste of cauliflower and claimed I hated it, but never tasted it … I'd be that fool. It is stupid to ignore objective information and insist on something simply because you want to, without having any evidence or personal experience. You can and should be smarter.

Take an unpopular position

One of the characteristics of a sycophant is blindly agreeing with whatever the boss says. However, psychologists who study human behavior have found that it is natural for all of us to agree with a large group of people. Psychologists call this the “spiral of silence,” in which group members, out of fear of being isolated, begin to lean toward the views of the active majority.

The best way to combat this effect is to deliberately take an unpopular position from time to time in order to create conditions for yourself in which you must desperately defend it.

This little trick, which can make your surroundings terribly angry, works wonders in developing a strong point of view, because it forces you to consider other people's opinions and see the world through the eyes of someone whose beliefs are different from yours.

Even more paradoxical and discouraging secrets of success can be found in Rohit Bhargava's book Always Eat with Your Left Hand. Everything in this book is exactly the opposite of what your parents, teachers, colleagues, and bosses have told you over the years.