I will always remember those conversations with my father that we had in the car after he was picking me up from school. In them we always talked about very profound and relevant topics, such as issues that close people had at the time, our problems or even where we saw the correct balance in life. My Dad always treated me as an adult and these conversations were no exception. In fact, he managed to teach me his method to solve problems: Drawing them. At first I laughed, maybe as you just did. However, I could have never imagined how momentous and influential the use of this method could have been for my future. I was proven wrong since that day because I have to admit that I base 90% of my decisions on this method and it has been the key for the biggest accomplishments of my life. In this blog I would like to share this method with all of you for your own benefit, but first I would like to introduce you to several concepts and practices that you should understand fully to be able to implement it. I have always enjoyed analyzing and understanding how the world works through mathematical concepts, these allow predictability and the ability to replicate them over and over. In a world where everyone works harder, wants to be happier, earn more money, have more fun, learn more, add more value, it is impossible to strive and keep achieving without a change in the rate in which tasks get done and the time they get. Being more productive is a well-known goal for personal development, however, the change in a rate is called exponentiality and it is a concept among many others that is already existing but is not being used by us, people that want to keep improving themselves over and over. The search for exponential phenomena in our lives can not only boost our development and growth, but also help us to get rid of exponential risks or consequences. We should want to be exponentially better because this will make a minimal effort result in massive results in every aspect. The technique of drawing a problem is based on plotting graphs or imaginary diagrams through the use of methods from different disciplines of science that allow us to relativise and look at a problem or decision from another angle, an angle that can be as accurate as mathematics but as broad as psychology at the same time. In case that the search for exponentiality has not yet started for you, I have brought you several examples of how this phenomena works, the benefits of understanding it and taking advantage of it, all centered around the most famous topic in the personal development industry: GIVING UP. Giving up is something that has happened to all of us throughout our lives, probably more than once. Even though it is obvious that not continuing will never bring you results, it is sometimes really hard to keep on track, since the difficulty is too high and the effort outweighs the potential outcome. Who has not been in that position? That time when all of your thoughts around a topic were negative and became more and more frequent, that time when the results did not match the effort behind them, that time when you really thought you had to give up. I have definitely been in that position and what I have learned is that the advice of keep believing in whatever you are doing is the most useful since life and projects are not linear, they are exponential. And giving up at one point may result in total regret since the next goal can be much closer, thanks to this phenomenon. To prove this I would like you to think about a time in which you have been successful and other time when you have failed and given up something that you completely controlled. Have the results come linearly, speaking in terms of time? Have the most important milestones come to you in set periods of time? I can assure you, the answer is no. Life and nature are exponential not linear, an example of this is when I go out to run, something that I do not enjoy at all and think about giving up all the time. If you measure the time that passes from the first to the second time that I think about giving up, it is very short and makes it very hard. However, if you measure the time that passes from one to the next, the thought of giving up once I’m more than half an hour in, the time has increased by thousands of times. Imagine that every point in the graph was one time, there is a clear tendency that we are not aware of, that also proves how giving up can be a terrible idea. Something really similar happens with results and effort, no matter how big your efforts are, the results will come exponentially, and I am pretty sure that this has happened to you sometime when lots of results came together while the effort was being constant or even less, for example at the end of the semester. Imagine that you have worked very hard and your results are very far apart from each other, just like the first points. However, if you keep working and don't give up, the results eventually come in shorter periods of time as the last points do, but if you give up and cut the graph before the results come in shorter periods of time, you will never discover the last parts of the graph with in this case (Inverse exponential) are the most interesting for development and growth. In summary, giving up is a very costly decision that we should think twice before taking according to the math behind the patterns results follow, taking the advice of believing in you and trusting the process is very valuable and not something we should not believe. However, there are points in which it is no longer worth continuing and this can turn out to be an exponentially better decision. Remember, if you have a problem or a decision to outweigh: Just DRAW it.
Luis D
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In life each one of us makes millions of small and big decisions. We make small decisions like what to wear and we make big decisions like whether to go to college. Which decisions we make can and will change our lives, either in a good or a bad way. Even the smallest decisions, for example what to wear to a job interview, can the first impression on the interviewer is. Even more important are the big decisions. Who you are choosing to be friends with or where you’ll go to school and college, will have a influence on what you’ll work as, how and where you are going to live and it might even determine who your family is going to be. In the course of our life we will make a lot of bad or wrong decisions. But making wrong or bad decisions is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing that we could do is not learning from those bad decisions. Even though there are a few irreversible decision, you can still learn a great deal from those bad decisions. If you learn from those decisions you will make a lot more good and better decisions. because if you have done a mistake once or twice, you will probably not make them again. All that means that even if you make more mistakes than others in the early stages of your life you can still learn from those and turn your life around by making better decisions than others. The most important part about making big decisions is, that you should always take your time, because they can and will literally change your life. There is a study by moran cerf from the northwestern University, in which he found out that people only have a limited amount of decisions per day. Those decisions could even be small decisions, like what to wear or what to have for dinner. But if you have reached that certain amount of decisions made in one day and you want to make a big decision that could change your life, that decision you force yourself to make will probably be bad. And that’s why you should always take time to make important decisions. Henri R
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