You must trust your product
How you can sell (not literally, but in the broad way) product, you don’t believe in? Well, you shouldn’t. Watch the money.

How TV harms

1. Enormous stress to the brain. It is generally believed that the television emaciate eyes. Yes, this is true, but it is doing something worse. Seeing television with your eyes is not difficult, but brain not only sees the picture, but from the drawings creates life reality. This is a complex and tiring process. Claiming that watching television is a rest is simply a lie. The studies has found that while watching television our brain activity is very high.
   
   Another problem is that people perceive that they see a false picture, but the other parts of the brain behaves as if it were reality. How to prove this? People has nightmares, gets scared while watching horror movies, tries to avoid the flying objects, which coming to their way and so on. Some people cries at the sad end of a movie. Thus, human experiences psychological stress. On the other hand, the comedy makes us laugh.
   
   Thus, a man watching TV in order to rest, only gets even more tired mentally.
2. Many precious time gets wasted. The average American stares to the TV box more than 4 hours a day. This is 28 hours per week – not far away from the standard work week. During a year, people consumes for television 2 months! What do you think can be done within 2 months of each year? Becoming happier? Richer? Better? Learning a foreign language? You can do many things!
   
   A man who has reached 65 years old, will have spent 9 years of his life watching television! Bear in mind that most people will live even longer than 65 years. These statistic really opens eyes, doesn’t it? What do you really want to do with your lifetime, which is being so recklessly wasted? You can choose.
3. Advertising effects. Have you ever wondered why the same advertisement is repeated again and again? Often thought is: “what is the benefit of showing the same promotion? It’s has been long time I don’t pay attention to it”. But the truth is the opposite. The brain thinks so: I hear this information constantly, apparently, it is extremely important. I must not forget it – I will write it not only in consciousness, but also to the subconscious mind. It’s how people becomes victims of advertising.
   
   Another problem is that watching television makes us want things, which we don’t need. Have you ever noticed how adverts seek to show that a man having one or the other thing is superior to others, more successful and so on?
   
   Also, if you were watching television for 1 hour, then advertising took at least 10 minutes of your lifetime. So, per day at least 40 minutes of advertising – almost one academic hour per day, and almost 5 full hours per week. It’s a great amount of time. I hope you’re not one of those people who constantly says that they lack the time?
4. Poor source of information. There will be people who will say: “but I watch only news.” Ask this man a simple question: what was showed in yesterday’s news? Well, if he overcame this question, ask him to remember what was showed the day before yesterday.
   
   Second, information that isn’t used has zero of value. What is the advantage of knowing the fact that some stranger has been killed by an unknown man? What value has knowing the outcome of football game, when you even do not like this sport?
   
   Third, the information is facts, but often there appear only views and opinions. I’m not interested in their opinions. I don’t know those people, how can I trust their words and interpretations of events? I think that the past my article perfectly illustrates how people confuses facts with their interpretations.

Conclusion
There are so few reasons to watch TV that rather to save money and space and not have a TV set.

If you know more reasons not to watch it, please leave them in the comments – I will take them into account and add to article.

This article is closely related to the previous one – “how we improve”. This time I will tell you not about the specific skills and qualities of character, but how we can improve our views and and perception of the world. The article was inspired by Stephen R. Covey book “The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People”.

Firstly, let’s answer the question what does paradigm mean? This term was introduced to scientific work by Thomas Kuhn, in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”

Paradigm – a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated.

In personal development this term means the system of views for understanding the world, or simply the certain world model, which we use to interpret everyday events.

Experiment with drawing having two meanings
The experiment was conducted at Harvard University. Lecturer divided a student audience into two parts. The first half was given the young woman’s images, and for the other – old. In the images you were able to see only one woman. Then the teacher showed a large aggregate picture on the wall, which you can see on the left. Then he asked students what they see. Disputes were started in the audience. Some of the students were furiously trying to convince others that this is the young woman, while others on the contrary – that this is the old one. Eventually, students began to particularly analyse the image, until the whole classroom was able to see both women.

The experiment perfectly demonstrates how it’s easy to confuse facts with their interpretations. In this case, facts were only black and white lines. While the image that we see is our interpretation, based on our paradigms of reality perception.

Thus, people tend to think that sees the world objectively, but in reality it is not the case. We see the world through who we are.

Power of paradigm shift
Paradigm shift is a change in system of attitudes, leading to a new interpretation of the events and circumstances. For example, in the previous example this shift occurred when the students saw the both women in the single image.

Let’s go to to more real life situations. It’s late evening and you’re getting home. A man with three children board a subway. The children act very ravingly and it is clear that they are beginning to increasingly irritate and interfere with passengers. However, the father does not resort to any action to make them stop. Finally, you lose your patience and say: “Hello, your children cause a lot of noise and disturbs the passengers. I think you should discipline them”. It looks like that the man sitting next to you awakens from a dream and says: “Yes, I’m sorry. You see I don’t know what to do or say, we’re returning from the hospital, where their mother has died”. These words suddenly change your attitude. You start looking to the man and children differently. It does not matter anymore that they behave as before, after all, the man still hasn’t resort to any means to change children behaviour. However, it is likely that now your view to situation justifies such behaviour. You may even offer to help them. The shift of paradigm has occurred.

Now let’s imagine that instead of a pleasant appeal to the man, you roughly say to him: “Stop your children from acting ravingly? Are you blind? Don’t you see how they are behaving!?” Well, after these words it’s possible that you wouldn’t even know why the man with children are acting in a such strange way. And probably you would be ashamed after getting aware that you have been such a “fair” guy and told him everything so crudely.

All of this takes place in a much larger scale. For example, R. Kiyosaki book “Rich dad poor rad” radically changed my attitude to money. I’ve started to think that I should have money for a rainy day, that it’s stupid to buy a car on the limits of your income.  That buying on credit is the same as paying for already dead horse, and even more expensive. And the most important thing, I’ve learned from the book, that money must be my employees, who work for me. The money they earn becomes my new employees, who are working for me too and etc.

How to change paradigm – perform its shift

• The diversity in life experience. New experiences, other cultures and other areas encourages us to look at everything differently. Error forces us to edit them and learn from them, so, the next time to do it properly.
• Reading, reading and one more time reading. It’s best to read books, whose ideas are contrary to your beliefs. If you read to understand the different approaches and supporting arguments, then it is likely that your own attitude will change. Probably not radically, but some aspects of the paradigm will change.
• Communicate with many people. It seems like the case with books. Different people see life differently. Understanding their paradigms helps us to adjust our own, bringing them closer to an objective understanding of reality.

Summary
Paradigm – the whole pack of attitudes through which people look at life. People with different paradigms sees the world entirely differently. This means that people think that they see the world objectively, but they see what they are. This leads to errors when interpreting the data, where facts are mixed up with interpretations.

If you want to improve the understanding of the world and bring it closer to the objective reality, you need to compare your paradigms with others existing in the world and select what is real and what is not.

The 10 obvious ways to be productive
I liked this article because it pointed out how people like to lie for themselves. They seek “actionable advice” instead of doing the obvious things. To read more go here – the 10 really obvious ways to be more productive.

If you are doing something interesting, prepare to be criticised
The main idea of the article is reflected into the name of this paragraph. People like to criticise. There are many reasons for it. But I don’t know even one, which would be a good one. Read more – the benefits of pissing people off.

I got cold at the beginning of the week. The body couldn’t stand continuous lack of sleep, working from morning till night. Thus, the last days I was just doing nothing – resting both psychologically and physically. There wasn’t enough will power to wake up early to take exercise, to accomplish daily task and to read. However, now I’m strong again and ready to face further challenges of life.

As the disease consumed much time, in order to fulfil my promises, I’ll do everything simpler than originally planned. This week there will be no post, but the next one will be on Friday – it’s how regularity will be achieved.

Links entry will be created soon after this. And there will appear tiny section of recommended books.

P.S. recreation is another work, which must be done.

How to notice if we are improving
There exists one very simple method – to do any kind of work, task or assignment, which you haven’t done for a while.

First time I felt this very clearly, when I played a computer game after one year break. It’s worth to mention that I have the diploma on my wall for winning the second place in Lithuania and that the game is real time strategy.

Here’s what I noticed: despite the fact that I have lost the huge speed on developing economy and pressing keyboard buttons, couldn’t remember some tactics and benefits of some technological upgrades, however, my thinking was dramatically changed. Even before launching the game, I did fast review of possible strategies and offered teammates a way to play. Throughout a game I was continuously thinking what my opponent will do and how to prepare my defence and attacks to beat his strategy. What could think that the game can tell so much about us? Suddenly it became clear why I failed to go beyond certain limits of professionalism no matter how hard I practiced.

Also, I am often surprised by discovery of certain thinking and behaviour changes. Searching for decisions became process of calculating minuses and pluses instead of using feelings, which often come with a fear of failure. If there is no difference between choices, I can just throw a coin. However, it was a hard task before a few years ago: other people wishes looked like my own (for example, attitude that it is a must to have a Master’s degree), I believed that other people arguments are correct without testing them and did many other things, which now look stupid. Even if I know something I ask about it to make sure that both sides understand it the same way and correctly.

How do we develop ourselves
Of the above examples can be seen that improvement in any area leads to better results in any other. This is well illustrated by an extract from the memorisation expert Tony Buzan book: “it was found that learning music helps to study math, and math – helps to study music, rhythm training makes learning foreign language easier, foreign language studying helps to develop a sense of rhythm, spatial awareness helps to learn mathematics, and mathematics learning – to understand space and so on.
Thus, the more different things we do, the more we improve in every aspect of our life, because we start using both sides of our brains.

Conclusions
All these observations lead to one conclusion. The more different situations we experience, the wiser we become. Also, often without even noticing it.
Every problem of life makes us smarter and better prepared for future changes.

How environment impacts us
There was carried out an experiment. Two fishes of the same species were placed in different aquaria. One fish to a small one, which was slightly bigger than the fish itself. The other fish was put in a huge aquarium. The result was what one could expect: the fish in the small aquarium were few times smaller than the fish in the big aquarium. Fishes unlike people, don’t have ability to think and to affect their environment, but they are great at adapting.

However, people also are able to adapt to circumstances. If you don’t wear a suit, than after putting it on, getting up hairs, shaving and doing everything else to look perfectly, suddenly something happens. Mind changes. We start to like ourselves more, to be more self-confident. We feel some kind of expectations and we strive to fulfil them.

Human expectations, trust and beliefs
I guess that everyone of you have witnessed this type of event. Imagine, that John is an ordinary man. Nothing spectacular, but doing what needs to be done. One day a friend, colleague or supervisor projects to him trust: “John, I know that you’re working very good, but you should be in a better place, you can do more. In every part of your work I see efforts becoming quality”. Add some more people saying similar phrases and suddenly John changes. He works harder, faster and with more passion. Also, it takes him the same 8 hours a day. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily last a long time, but it is clear that other people expectations and trust impacts us a lot, as well as our own projected to ourselves.

In addition, you can do the same with friends, relatives or children. It’s not manipulation – you don’t need to lie. Just say some good words to a person – he must know that he are doing fine and that others value his work. This way he’ll start to do more and more, finally revealing his full potential.

So, if you try to accomplish small goals, then they look like big ones. This way you can’t accomplish anything solid, great or important. If, however, you try to do big things, meaningful goals, then everything is on the contrary – in your favour.

Change environment, and it will change you
Now that you have made sure that environment has quite large impact on us, we should use it for our own good. It’s very simple – imagine what you want to be. Then reflect this visualization to environment and change it accordingly.

I believe many of you have heard this expression „Fake it till you make it”. If you “pretend” to manage your time well, then you become time management expert. If you start being neat and tidy, then you become an orderly person.

Here are some basic things you should do: your job, house, car and everything else should be neat. You must be with dressed hairs, shaved and clean. On the walls hang sheets telling stories of your achievements and goals you’ve accomplished – principle of expectation – if you succeeded in the past, you’ll succeed again.

Conclusion
Fake you are, who you want to be, till you become it. Accordingly adjust environment, you live in. It’s easy, isn’t? Now, however, it’s easier and more pleasant to go towards your goals.

Inspired by the Lithuanian project “Dešimtukas” (“The Decade”), which is about getting to success by training 10 habits every month, I decided that it’s time to give more personality on this page. Firstly, everyone likes to see how theory is applied practically. Secondly, it’s curious for readers to see how it is going for the author. How else would you explain popularity of journals telling, what A human did to B human, and how human B got a thing C.

Firstly, I’ll tell you what to expect from this site and a little bit later about my journey to success and using principles I’m writing about.

What to expect from the website

1. Every 2 months there will be a post about my own personal achievements and short term goals. Also, what updates for the site to be expected.
2. A new category named “Links” will appear. Once a week there will be a post with links to other articles on the web. 2-4 links, which I liked most that week. What readers get from it? Well, I they like my content, when probably they like to read things I like. This way you can save time, because instead of reading lot of articles, you can read the best ones.
3. Steady blog updates – twice a week. Links preliminary will be posted on Sundays and articles on Fridays.
4. There will be new column “recommended books”.

Every four promises will be filled within a month.

Author’s personal development
Slowly, but steadily I’m growing. It’s no easy, but not hard. So, I’m quite far from my limits.

Over a few month, I’ve started to take exercise every morning for an half an hour. The exercise makes me fresh and warm. It was cold the last few weeks so I really enjoyed the “warm” part of exercising

Today, I completed another 30 days trial – reading  every morning for 45 minutes. I’m very glad about it: a good book gives motivation for all day. Also, there were lots of books to be read, and now I have time for them.

We often hear, that successful people wake up very early. Until a regular human starts his workday, a successful man has already completed more work than him throughout all day. I’m starting to see that pattern in myself. That’s why I’m going to start getting up earlier by 30-60 minutes every day, to be able to do my most important day task until a workday starts.

The day task is another habit I have, which is described here. Everyday I assign a task for tomorrow and I do at least one task. It excludes all the tasks I do in a workplace. So, everyday forces me to move a small step to more successful life.

Currently, I’m dropping an annoying habit. After a success, I’ll write about it an article.

And I want to remind, that about the way to success by development habits you can read here.

Procrastination is a disease
Procrastination is one of the mistakes, we can make on our they to success. By procrastinating we are just running from a full-rate life, which we can experience at this moment. Only the small amount of people are able not to postpone tasks every day – most of us are sick.

Why is it the disease? If human always procrastinates, he is just lying for himself. He is running from his wishes and his future. He is trying to stay in his past, to hold status unchanged. Maybe he is afraid of failure. It looks very familiar to psychological invalidity. No matter what it is, do you really want to have it in your life? Consider it – you can choose.

There is no procrastinated tasks
What is a delayed task? It is the task, which should be done tomorrow instead of now? But assignments of tomorrow don’t exist, because tomorrow hasn’t come yet.

What is procrastinating? It’s nothing. In the reality there are only completed and uncompleted tasks.

So, task is completed or not. Black and white. There isn’t a place for grey.

How to stop procrastinating

1. Read again the paragraph “Procrastination is a disease”. Do you really want to be sick with it? To stuck in one place? To achieve nothing? Always to be pity about yourself and say “tomorrow is the day I’m going to start doing X”.
2. Instead of “tomorrow” assign a concrete time, for example, Wednesday at 18:00. Commit yourself to it, brace yourself. Impose a reward for completing a task. And just do it.
3. Do you remember that pleasant feeling, that you’ve done something important? A project or a task is very large, elaborate. There isn’t enough information to understand how much work is needed to complete it. We always want to accomplish any task very well, so we procrastinate again and again. After a while we start to feel discomfort – the conscience is eating us from inside for our laziness. Finally, we do a small part of the task. We start to feel great, because the job is moving forward. Also, we understand that it was easier than we previously thought. It looks like it’s more fun and simple than we originally guessed. Remember the pleasant feeling.
4. Maybe you are postponing a concrete tasks. When ask yourself, whether you really want to do it. Why to do something, which deep inside of you looks like a stupid, unpleasant and unessential thing? Maybe somebody else is trying to make you to do it? In this case write down advantages of doing a task. If the list doesn’t reduce your wish to procrastinate to a minimum level, then just drop out this task and don’t do it.
5. It’s hard to complete a task with one attempt. Assign 30 minutes of your precious time for doing the task. After the time has passed, you can stop doing. This way you can avoid procrastination, which is caused by elaboration and size of the task. Also, we see that the task was easier than we thought. We get a pleasure of moving forward with the task and it motivates us to go further with it.
6. Understand that you are to much valuable to be always worried about things you need to do. When next time you’ll feel uncomfortable because of procrastinating, remember that people who loves themselves don’t hurt themselves like that.
7. It’s better to do something than to try to make it perfect at the very first time and have nothing tangible, nothing completed. So, just do something. You’ll have plenty of time to improve it.
8. If you’re going to start reading, start now. If you’re going to learn more in you profession field – begin now. The only time we have is the present. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow hasn’t come yet.

Conclusion
Don’t lie to yourself and don’t trick your conscience. Just do it. Start today, start now. The sooner you’ll start the sooner you’ll get the desired results. Don’t leave for tomorrow, what you can do today.

The interesting fact is that healthy people act as it is a must be and natural thing. Is it? Well, humans who don’t have it appreciate such “common” things and tries harder to cling to their lives.

I could tell many stories about men, which didn’t have something we feel like “must be and natural”. For example, a woman who was able to see only with an edge of one eye. She got two master’s degrees. She was forced to read holding a book 10 centimetres from her face! After 40 years, when the medicine improved, she regained the ability to see. The dish washing for her was a feast, because there are so many colours in the bubbles. And you still think you can’t get the science degree you want? Which probably would drastically change your life.

Or how about a child, who was born without ears. He was able to hear only when people were talking to his temple or were shouting very loudly – hearing through bones. He never gave up, studied in a standard school and university. When he was at the last semester at the university, there was invented deaf-aid, which was able to make him hear as a common person. He was inspired. He created two years plan, how to enlarge ability to sell devices to people, who need them. After coming with the plan to the owner of the company, which made deaf-aid, he was hired. He helped for a lot of people.

Do you still think that you a poor person? I suppose that you are an idler, procrastinator,  layabout or anybody else, but not a person, who lacks something. You are not a beggar, who need somebody’s mercy. Wake up from your own dream in which you are living and thinking that you are a victim. You have abilities to procure anything you want, live as you like, spend time with people you like, and do whatever you want. Deep inside you know it. Let it be on your conscience. Use your life privileges and talents. You are the master of your destiny.

Conclusion
These Henry’s Ford words perfectly illustrate what I want to tell you: “Whether You Believe You Can, Or You Can’t, You Are Right”. Process it, consider and apply.