I challenge my self to write 50 posts in 50 days. Every day one lesson, one tip, or one tool that I use and which help me in my life and capoeira. Enjoy and hope it will be beneficial for you, too. This originally was written for my students.
Before writing this post, I went to Google to quickly check if there is anyone who wrote about this before, and guess what: the first result is a video “Buy An Alarm Clock. It Will Change Your Life”. Anyway, I’m going to write my own story and experience with an alarm clock.
I’m a fan of cold showers.
Many research shows (links below), that lowering the water temperature below 15°C (60°F) and having a shower has many benefits for your health:
If quitting smoking for me was almost unintentionally, overcoming alcohol addiction was a voluntary and conscious choice. I tried twice and both times were successful (a joke intended).
I consider my self lucky because I tried a lot of things early in life. Good stuff and bad stuff. I started living abroad without my parents from age 10, and somehow I believe it was one of the best parental decisions. That “independence”1 taught me a lot. There were lot of fails, wild teen’s spirit, but some good moments too.
Humans are creatures of habit. The research shows ~45% of our daily activity are habitual, performed automatically without much thought. Or as Fyodor Dostoyevsky puts it: “It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a person’s life is made up of nothing but the habits they accumulated during the first half.”
Another daily habit I have been working for couple of years now is budgeting. Not the expense tracking, but budgeting.
Expense tracking is simply recording all of your spendings: writing down them everyday, going through all your accounts and receipts, etc…
It may sound boring, and you might say: “C’mon, Alex, now I should remember and write down every penny I spent?”. And probably most people don’t do it regularly, or only when times are tough. But this is a good first step to raising awareness about your finances and spendings. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Knowing the truth about your current situation makes you closer to the financial freedom.
But this is only the first step. The next level is budgeting.
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
Francis Bacon
Reading a book is the most efficient way to get condensed knowledge, learn new concepts, and get inspired.
For many years I do “50 books a year challenge”, which is reading one book per week. It’s not always perfect, and some months I slack. But I have this intention and it’s in my Morning Ritual to read at least one hour a day.
When it comes to personal development, there are four plates you have to keep spinning all the time: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Sometimes they are spinning slower, sometimes faster, but you have to keep them spinning.
Every day during my Morning Ritual, I try to work on every “plate”. I start with meditation, then a breathwork routine, and journaling. This mostly relates to my spiritual, emotional, and mental aspects of life. But then it’s time to get physical.
“We are almost like antennas, and around us all there are thousands of vibrations and thoughts which enter our minds. When you are driving your car, all the radio stations, and their waves are hitting your car and your antenna outside. But it’s the station you put on the radio that blocks off the rest of them and lets one come in. Same thing with your mind. All around you there are vibrations of success and failure, health and sickness, positive and negative. We need to learn how to tune our “radio station”, to choose “music” in our lives.”
Mestre Cueca
Journaling is another powerful tool, which I use every day. For me, it’s a form of active meditation. I do it for clarity, for self-improvement, and to enhance my creativity. There are many techniques you can try. I’m going to share the few I use.
Every morning, right after 15 minutes of meditation I do a breathwork routine. This routine wakes me up completely and sets my mind for the next task of the day (usually it’s journaling or writing).