Comfort 2 Growth

One of my biggest expenses is food. I love to eat! Especially Sushi.

Choosing to eat out can easily cost you $200-300 a month. This figure can vary greatly, depending on your frequency and price range. After it is said and done, there is  simply a premium in  having someone else prepare your food and clean up after you.

Unfortunately, albeit logically, when eating fast food you sacrifice quality and nutritional value for price and convenience. The U.S. culture is addicted to convenience and it is making the majority of our citizens obese.

It seems that a lot of people avoid cooking because it is too intimidating and eating out seems a lot more of a comfortable option.

However, by learning to cook your own meals you can save your bank account and your waist line… Read more…

C2GC Update

It has been 2 full weeks of the Early Rising Challenge. I am very happy with my ability to stick to this challenge; I have been getting up with no problems almost everyday and do not have to nap much.

Waking up early almost doubles my productivity hours from my previous schedule of waking up between 10am-12pm. The increase in hours allows me time to work on this blog, exercise, study and prepare a delicious breakfast.

I wish I was having the same success with the C2GC of Ending Information Addiction. My ability to completely cut out internet surf time and non-essential information updates has improved,  but not nearly to the level I was hoping. It is encouraging that I have made forward progress, now I just need to push harder.

The problem lies when I have short spans of time between my next scheduled actions. If I have 15 or 30 minutes to kill before my next action item, it is very easy and gratifying to surf web. My goal is to use those free moments as productivity bursts.

These 15-30 minute productivity bursts will constitute reading a book, cleaning/organizing my living space, making a phone call to a neglected friend or whatever short-task I can find.

Hopefully these productivity bursts will be the key to furthering my recovery from information addiction.

Weekend Reading Suggestions

Here are a few good links I’ve come across on the web. The range of topics is pretty random, it is only limited to what I find interesting and potentially beneficial. Please share if you have some good ones!

101 ways to be stress free

How Police Interrogation Works – I strongly recommend reading this.

47 Lifestyle Design Resources – Check out these if you are interested in Lifestyle Design. It will become a prevelant topic here.

16 Things I Wish They Taught Me In School

Tyler Durden’s Words of Wisdom

Enjoy your weekend!

How do you decide to spend your time, money or other resources?

People tend to be loss averse. Meaning that we do not want to waste our resources, or feel like we are.

We often form emotional attachments to our decisions and commitments. For example, if you spend a significant amount of time on a project, an emotional attachment to this project will begin to form. This isn’t a bad thing, it just happens. We tend to form bonds with the things that we spend our resources on.

We feel compelled to recover our investment, even if it requires spending MORE money, time or happiness.

From an economists point of view, this emotional attachment to a past cost can be irrational, illogical and negatively affect our future. This has been coined as the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

The idea is that the past, or previous investment, should not be considered when making a decision. It is a sunk cost, it has already been incurred. Since it can not be recovered, it should not factor in to the decision.

There are only two things that should be considered. Current and future costs and benefits.

For example, Imagine you are half way through watching a movie and realize it is terrible.  If you force yourself to continue and finish the movie because you had already spent time/money on it, you would be committing the sunk cost fallacy. You could be investing your time on something better.

Trent at The Simple Dollar, explains it better than I do in this article.

This emotion based fallacy can often be seen in dysfunctional relationships. When an unhappy couple stays together longer because they’ve been together for so long already. They allow their fear of feeling like they’ve waste their time to make them waste even more time.

Moral of this story: Make now-based decisions. Ask yourself: Is this the best decision to make now? Will the next course of action or investment required worth the risk and subsequent benefit?

Does that little voice in your head ever convince you not to do something?

Think about the last time you had to publicly speak or you wanted to approach a cute girl or guy at the bar, did you start talking yourself out of doing it? Did you begin to imagine all the little things that could go wrong or how bad it might hurt if you didn’t know what to say?

The ego is a tool our brain uses to make sense of reality and what is all going on around us. Often times this tool can become a burden. Its fragile sense of self-worth prevents us from taking risks or forces us to do things in order to protect our ego (comfort) boundaries.

Our ego boundary can be defined as our sense of self, the constraints of who we think we are. It defines that voice in our head. The voice that tells us what we deserve, what we should be doing and who we are supposed to be.

A healthy ego boundary can be exemplified by a person who has high self esteem, knows when he is wrong and will admit it. Someone who is outcome independent, meaning that they maintain a positive self image regardless of how a situation turns out, but at the same time recognizes their responsibility or participation in that event. A healthy ego boundary is flexible and does not go to extremes to maintain itself.

On the other hand, an unhealthy ego boundary can be exemplified by someone who will go to extremes to maintain the idea of who they think they are. For example, someone who rationalizes irrational behavior by whatever convenient excuse they can come up with. Someone who always like to play the victim or refuses to admit responsibility for a situation. These people always seem to blame others and think they are right or perfect.

Next, I will present a series of video clips from the movie Revolver which dramatizes a battle of the ego and its boundaries… Read more…