A question that I am often asked and one that I have seen countless times on message boards across the Internet is whether a person should do cardiovascular exercise before or after a resistance training workout? Before going any further, I want to clearly state that it is my position that everyone should engage in a cardiovascular exercise of their choice for 5 to 10 minutes prior to any workout, be it a cardiovascular, resistance or flexibility workout. This is vitally important for several reasons as a proper, light-intensity cardiovascular exercise will warm up the muscles, ligaments, joints and tendons that will be used more intensely in the following workout routine. Warming up with cardio also increases the core temperature slightly, increases circulation, slightly elevates the heart rate and helps to prepare the heart for an increased workload, it helps increase lung functioning and helps you to mentally focus in on the upcoming workout routine. The most important advantage to warming up with light intensity cardio is the substantial decrease in risk of injury. If the body is not properly warmed up, you are much more likely to experience an injury to a muscle, joint, ligament or tendon.

Now back to the question of whether you should do cardiovascular exercise prior to or after a resistance workout? There is no single best answer here and instead, you should evaluate your individual fitness goals. If you goal is to increase endurance, stamina or overall cardiovascular health, then I suggest doing your cardio workout prior to weight and resistance training. By doing the cardio workout first (after your 5 to 10 minute warm up of course), you are able to engage in a more intense cardio session, which possibly might include some intervals in which you really push up to your lactic acid threshold or VO2 max level. It is much less likely that you would be able to achieve high intensity cardiovascular work after you have engaged in a weight training session. So, in short if your goal is to increase cardiovascular fitness levels, you should perform cardio workouts prior to resistance training.

On the other hand, if your goal is fat and weight loss, a current mode of thinking in the fitness community is by doing a cardiovascular workout after a resistance workout, you increases the rate of fat metabolism (fat burn as it is often referred to as). The theory is that by engaging in an intense resistance workout, you will deplete the glycogen stores in the muscles during this workout. Once the glycogen stores are depleted, the body begins to utilize fats in the body for fuel. Endurance athletes have long know this, yet typically in order for this to occur in endurance training, an athlete has to continuously run for approximately 90 minutes to fully deplete the muscles of glycogen. Therefore, I remain somewhat skeptical that many average people working out are pushing themselves to the point of glycogen depletion during their resistance workout, particularly workouts of less than an hour in duration. For more advanced trainers, I do believe that it is possible and therefore can be an effective means of decreasing body fat perhaps for these individuals.

I tend to look at it like this, if you are engaging in a cardiovascular and resistance workout on the same day back-to-back, one or the other will be of a lesser intensity level naturally. Again, evaluate your personal fitness goals before deciding whether to do your cardio workouts before or after resistance training. If you are trying to build muscle, you want to have as much muscle strength as you can available for your resistance workouts, therefore doing cardio before weight training would be counterproductive to your muscle building goals. If you are looking to gain endurance or heart health, place your focus on the cardio workouts and do them first. Remember, regardless of which you end up doing first, it is more important to properly warm up with a minimum of 5 to 10 minutes of cardio (even if it is only a brisk walk on the treadmill) in order to prepare the body for the workouts ahead, to get your head in the right space in order to bang out a productive workout, and most importantly to decrease the risk of injury. This debate won’t mean a thing if you get injured 5 minutes into a workout and are sidelined for the next 8 weeks rehabilitating an injury!

Dr. Chris is the owner of Prana Chiropractic and Wellness Center in beautiful Fletcher, NC. Dr. Chris hold a Doctor of Chiropractic Degree, along with a Master of Arts Degree in Counseling, and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Human Services. Dr. Chris has published dozens of health and wellness articles over the years.

One of the hardest things in life is to know when to keep going and when to move on.

On the one hand, perseverance and grit are key to achieving success in any field. Anyone who masters their craft will face moments of doubt and somehow find the inner resolve to keep going. If you want to build a successful business or create a great marriage or learn a new skill then “sticking with it” is perhaps the most critical trait to possess.

On the other hand, telling someone to never give up is terrible advice. Successful people give up all the time. If something is not working, smart people don’t repeat it endlessly. They revise. They adjust. They pivot. They quit. As the saying goes, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” 

Life requires both strategies. Sometimes you need to display unwavering confidence and double down on your efforts. Sometimes you need to abandon the things that aren’t working and try something new. The key question is: how do you know when to give up and when to stick with it?

One way to answer this question is to use a framework I call the 3 Stages of Failure.


The 3 Stages of Failure

This framework helps clarify things by breaking down challenges into three stages of failure:

  1. Stage 1 is a Failure of Tactics. These are HOW mistakes. They occur when you fail to build robust systems, forget to measure carefully, and get lazy with the details. A Failure of Tactics is a failure to execute on a good plan and a clear vision.
  2. Stage 2 is a Failure of Strategy. These are WHAT mistakes. They occur when you follow a strategy that fails to deliver the results you want. You can know why you do the things you do and you can know how to do the work, but still choose the wrong what to make it happen.
  3. Stage 3 is a Failure of Vision. These are WHY mistakes. They occur when you don’t set a clear direction for yourself, follow a vision that doesn’t fulfill you, or otherwise fail to understand why you do the things you do.

In the rest of this article, I’ll share a story, solution, and summary for each stage of failure. My hope is that the 3 Stages of Failure framework will help you navigate the tricky decision of deciding when to quit and when to stick with it. It’s not perfect, but I hope you find it to be useful.

Stage 1: A Failure of Tactics

Sam Carpenter became a small business owner in 1984. Using $5,000 as a down payment, he purchased a struggling business in Bend, Oregon and renamed it Centratel.

Centratel provided 24/7 telephone answering service for doctors, veterinarians, and other businesses that needed the phones to be answered at all hours, but couldn’t afford to pay a staff member to sit at the desk constantly. When he bought the business, Carpenter hoped that Centratel “would someday be the highest-quality telephone answering service in the United States.” 

Things did not go as expected. In a 2012 interview, Carpenter described his first decade and a half of entrepreneurship by saying,

“I was literally working 80 to 100 hours a week for 15 years. I was a single parent of two kids, believe it or not. I was very sick. I was on all kinds of antidepressants and so forth…

I was going to miss a payroll and lose my entire company. If you can just imagine a nervous wreck, physical wreck, and then multiply that by ten, that’s what I was. It was a horrible time.”

One night, just before he was about to miss payroll, Carpenter had a realization. His business was struggling because it completely lacked the systems it needed to achieve optimal performance. In Carpenter’s words, “We were having all kinds of problems because everybody was doing it the way that they thought was best.”

Carpenter reasoned that if he could perfect his systems, then his staff could spend each day following best practices instead of constantly putting out fires. He immediately began writing down every process within the business.

“For instance,” he said. “We have a nine-step procedure for answering the phone at the front desk. Everybody does it that way, it’s 100% the best way to do it, and we’ve taken an organic system and made it mechanical, and made it perfect.” 

Over the next two years, Carpenter recorded and revised every process in the company. How to make a sales presentation. How to deposit a check. How to pay client invoices. How to process payroll. He created a manual that any employee could pick up and follow for any procedure within the company—system by system, step by step.

What happened?

Carpenter’s workweek rapidly decreased from 100 hours per week to less than 10 hours per week. He was no longer needed to handle every emergency because there was a procedure to guide employees in each situation. As the quality of their work improved, Centratel raised their prices and the company’s profit margin exploded to 40 percent.

Today, Centratel has grown to nearly 60 employees and recently celebrated its 30th year in business. Carpenter now works just two hours per week.

Fixing a Failure of Tactics

A Failure of Tactics is a HOW problem. In Centratel’s case, they had a clear vision (to be “the highest-quality telephone answering service in the United States”) and a good strategy (the market for telephone answering services was large), but they didn’t know how to execute their strategy and vision.

There are three primary ways to fix Failures of Tactics.

  1. Record your process.
  2. Measure your outcomes.
  3. Review and adjust your tactics.

Record your process. McDonald’s has more than 35,000 locations worldwide. Why can they plug-and-play new employees while still delivering a consistent product? Because they have killer systems in place for every process. Whether you’re running a business, parenting a family, or managing your own life, building great systems is crucial for repeated success. It all starts with writing down each specific step of the process and developing a checklist you can follow when life gets crazy.

Measure your outcomes. If something is important to you, measure it. If you’re an entrepreneur, measure how many sales calls you make each day. If you’re a writer, measure how frequently you publish a new article. If you’re a weightlifter, measure how often you train. If you never measure your results, how will you know which tactics are working? 

Review and adjust your tactics. The fatiguing thing about Stage 1 failures is that they never stop. Tactics that used to work will become obsolete. Tactics that were a bad idea previously might be a good idea now. You need to be constantly reviewing and improving how you do your work. Successful people routinely give up on tactics that don’t move their strategy and vision forward. Fixing a Failure of Tactics is not a one time job, it is a lifestyle.

Stage 2: A Failure of Strategy

It was March of 1999. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, had just announced that his company would launch a new service called Amazon Auctions to help people sell “virtually anything online.” The idea was to create something that could compete with eBay. Bezos knew there were millions of people with goods to sell and he wanted Amazon to be the place where those transactions happened. 

Greg Linden, a software engineer for Amazon at the time, recalled the project by saying, “Behind the scenes, this was a herculean effort. People from around the company were pulled off their projects. The entire Auctions site, with all the features of eBay and more, was built from scratch. It was designed, architected, developed, tested, and launched in under three months.” 

Amazon Auctions was a spectacular failure. Just six months after launch, management realized the project was going nowhere. In September 1999, they scrambled to release a new offering called Amazon zShops. This version of the idea allowed anyone from big companies to individuals to set up an online shop and sell goods through Amazon.

Again, Amazon swung and missed. Neither Amazon Auctions nor Amazon zShops are running today. In December 2014, Bezos referred to the failed projects by saying, “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions.” 

Undaunted, Amazon tried yet again to create a platform for third-party sellers. In November 2000, they launched Amazon Marketplace, which allowed individuals to sell used products alongside Amazon’s new items. For example, a small bookstore could list their used textbooks directly alongside new ones from Amazon. 

It worked. Marketplace was a runaway success. In 2015, Amazon Marketplace accounted for nearly 50 percent of the $107 billion in sales on Amazon.com. 

Fixing a Failure of Strategy

A Failure of Strategy is a WHAT problem. By 1999, Amazon had a clear vision to “be earth’s most customer centric company.” They were also masters of getting things done, which is why they were able to roll Amazon Auctions out in just three months. The why and how were handled, but the what was unknown.

There are three primary ways to fix Failures of Strategy.

  1. Launch it quickly.
  2. Do it cheaply.
  3. Revise it rapidly.

Launch it quickly. Some ideas work much better than others, but nobody really knows which ideas work until you try them. Nobody knows ahead of time—not venture capitalists, not the intelligent folks at Amazon, not your friends or family members. All of the planning and research and design is just pretext. I love Paul Graham’s take on this: “You haven’t really started working on [your idea] till you’ve launched.”

Because of this, it is critical to launch strategies quickly. The faster you test a strategy in the real world, the faster you get feedback on whether or not it works. Note the timeline Amazon operated on: Amazon Auctions was released in March 1999. Amazon zShops was released in September 1999. Amazon Marketplace was released in November 2000. Three huge attempts within 20 months.

Do it cheaply. Assuming you have achieved some minimum level of quality, it is best to test new strategies cheaply. Failing cheaply increases your surface area for success because it means that you can test more ideas. Additionally, doing things cheaply serves another crucial purpose. It reduces your attachment to a particular idea. If you invest a lot of time and money into a particular strategy, it will be hard to give it up on that strategy. The more energy you put into something, the more ownership you feel toward it. Bad business ideas, toxic relationships, and destructive habits of all kinds can be hard to let go once they become part of your identity. Testing new strategies cheaply avoids these pitfalls and increases the likelihood that you will follow the strategy that works best rather than the one you have invested in the most.

Revise it rapidly. Strategies are meant to be revised and adjusted. You’d be hard pressed to find a successful entrepreneur, artist, or creator who is doing exactly the same thing today as when they started. Starbucks sold coffee supplies and espresso machines for over a decade before opening their own stores. 37 Signals started as a web design firm before pivoting into a software company that is worth over $100M today. Nintendo made playing cards and vacuum cleaners before it stole the hearts of video game lovers everywhere. 

Too many entrepreneurs think if their first business idea is a failure, they aren’t cut out for it. Too many artists assume that if their early work doesn’t get praised, they don’t have the skill required. Too many people believe if their first two or three relationships are bad, they will never find love.

Imagine if the forces of nature worked that way. What if Mother Nature only gave herself one shot at creating life? We’d all just be single-celled organisms. Thankfully, that’s not how evolution works. For millions of years, life has been adapting, evolving, revising, and iterating until it has reached the diverse and varied species that inhabit our planet today. It is not the natural course of things to figure it all out on the first try.

So if your original idea is a failure and you feel like you’re constantly revising and adjusting, cut yourself a break. Changing your strategy is normal. It is literally the way the world works. You have to stay on the bus.

Stage 3: A Failure of Vision

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Massachusetts in 1803. His father was a minister in the Unitarian Church, which was a relatively popular branch of Christianity at the time.

Like his father, Emerson attended Harvard and became an ordained pastor. Unlike his father, he found himself disagreeing with many of the church’s teachings after a few years on the inside. Emerson debated heavily with church leaders before eventually writing, “This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it.” 

Emerson resigned from the church in 1832 and spent the following year traveling throughout Europe. The travels sparked his imagination and led to friendships with contemporary philosophers and writers such as John Stuart Mill, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. It was later written that his travels to Paris sparked “a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed him away from theology and toward science.” 

Upon returning to the United States, Emerson founded the Transcendental Club, which was a group of New England intellectuals like himself who wanted to talk about philosophy, culture, science, and improving American society.

Emerson’s deep questioning of his life and values, which began with his work as a pastor, intensified during his international travels, and continued with his Transcendental Club meetings helped him realize the desire to become a philosopher and writer. He spent the rest of his years pursuing independent ideas and writing essays and books that are still valued today.

Fixing a Failure of Vision

A Failure of Vision is a WHY problem. They happen because your vision or goal for what you want to become (your why) doesn’t align with the actions you are taking.

There are three primary ways to fix Failures of Vision.

  1. Take stock of your life.
  2. Determine your non-negotiable.
  3. Navigate criticism.

Take stock of your life. People rarely take the time to think critically about their vision and values. Of course, there is no requirement that says you must to develop a personal vision for your work or your life. Many people prefer to go-with-the-flow and take life as it comes. In theory, that’s just fine. But in practice, there is a problem:

If you never decide on a vision for your life, you’ll often find yourself living someone else’s dream.

Like many children, Emerson followed the path of his father to the same school and the same profession before opening his eyes and realizing it wasn’t what he wanted. Adopting someone else’s vision as your own—whether it be from family, friends, celebrities, your boss, or society as a whole—is unlikely to lead to your personal dream. Your identity and your habits need to be aligned.

Because of this, you need to take stock of your life. What do you want to accomplish? How do you want to spend your days? It is not someone else’s job to figure out the vision for your life. That can only be done by you. My suggestion is to start by exploring your core values. Then, review your recent experiences by writing an Annual Review or doing an Integrity Report

Determine your non-negotiable. Your “non-negotiable” is the one thing you are not willing to budge on, no matter what. One common mistake is to make the non-negotiable your strategy, when it should be your vision. It’s very easy to get fixated on your idea. But if you’re going to get obsessed with something, get obsessed with your vision, not your idea. Be firm on the vision, not on this particular version of your idea. Jeff Bezos has said, “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.” 

The key is to realize that nearly everything is a detail—your tactics, your strategy, even your business model. If your non-negotiable is to be a successful entrepreneur, then there are many ways to achieve that vision. If Amazon’s non-negotiable is to “be earth’s most customer centric company,” they can lose billions on Amazon Auctions and Amazon zShops and still reach their goal.

Once you are confident in your vision, it is rare to lose it in one fell swoop. There are so few mistakes that lead to the complete annihilation of a dream. More likely, you failed at a strategy level and felt demoralized. This crippled your enthusiasm and you gave up not because you should, but because you felt like it. Your emotions caused you to turn a Stage 1 or Stage 2 failure into a Stage 3 failure. Most of the mistakes that people assume are Failures of Vision are actually Failures of Strategy. Many entrepreneurs, artists, and creators get hung up on a particular version of their idea and when the idea fails they give up on the vision as well. Don’t develop a sense of ownership over the wrong thing. There are nearly infinite ways to achieve your vision if you are willing to be flexible on the details.

Navigate criticism. Criticism can be an indicator of failed strategies and tactics, but—assuming you’re a reasonable person with good intentions—it is rarely an indicator of a failed vision. If you are committed to making your vision a non-negotiable factor in your life and not giving up on the first try, then you have to be willing to navigate criticism. You don’t need to apologize for the things you love, but you do have to learn how to deal with haters.

The 4th Stage of Failure

There is a 4th stage of failure that we haven’t talked about: Failures of Opportunity.

These are WHO mistakes. They occur when society fails to provide equal opportunity for all people. Failures of Opportunity are the result of many complex factors: age, race, gender, income, education, and more.

For example, there are thousands of men my age living in the slums of India or the streets of Bangladesh who are more intelligent and more talented than I am, but we live very different lives largely because of the opportunities presented to us.

Failures of Opportunity deserve an article of their own and there are many things we can do as individuals and as a society to reduce them. However, I chose not to focus on them here because Failures of Opportunity are difficult to influence. Meanwhile, your vision, your strategy, and your tactics are all things you can directly control.

A Final Note on Failure

Hopefully, the 3 Stages of Failure framework has helped you clarify some of the issues you’re facing and how to deal with them. One thing that may not be apparent at first glance is how the different stages can impact one another.

For example, Failures of Tactics can occasionally create enough havoc that you mistakenly believe you have a Failure of Vision. Imagine how Sam Carpenter felt when he was working 100 hours per week. It would have been easy to assume that his vision of being an entrepreneur was the failure when, in fact, it was merely poor tactics causing the problem.

Sometimes you need a few tactics to create enough whitespace to figure out your strategy or vision. This is why I write about things like how to manage your daily routine and how to figure out your priorities and why multitasking is a myth. No, these topics aren’t going to create a world-changing vision by themselves. But they might clear enough space in your calendar for you to dream up a world-changing vision.

In other words, you might not be walking the wrong path after all. It’s just that there is so much dust swirling around you that you can’t see the path. Figure out the right tactics and strategy—clear the dust from the air—and you’ll find that the vision often reveals itself.

Intro text we refine our methods of responsive web design, we’ve increasingly focused on measure and its relationship to how people read.

A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. Even the all-powerful Pointing has no control about the blind texts it is an almost unorthographic life One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar. The Big Oxmox advised her not to do so, because there were thousands of bad Commas, wild Question Marks and devious Semikoli, but the Little Blind Text didn’t listen.

On the topic of alignment, it should be noted that users can choose from the options of None, Left, Right, and Center. In addition, they also get the options of Thumbnail, Medium, Large & Fullsize.

And if she hasn’t been rewritten, then they are still using her. Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia.

A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul

On her way she met a copy. The copy warned the Little Blind Text, that where it came from it would have been rewritten a thousand times and everything that was left from its origin would be the word “and” and the Little Blind Text should turn around and return to its own, safe country.A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of mere tranquil existence, that I neglect my talents.

But nothing the copy said could convince her and so it didn’t take long until a few insidious Copy Writers ambushed her, made her drunk with Longe and Parole and dragged her into their agency, where they abused her for their projects again and again.

Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth.

What to do in Uluwatu Bali

Walk down the Uluwatu beach

A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table – Samsa was a travelling salesman – and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.

Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite sad. “How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense”, he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to sleeping on his right, and in his present state couldn’t get into that position. However hard he threw himself onto his right, he always rolled back to where he was.

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. “What’s happened to me? ” he thought. It wasn’t a dream.

His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table – Samsa was a travelling salesman – and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame.

Hidden beach paradise that Balinese would never tell you

Before you get started, please be sure to always search this Documentation, and also watch our Video Tutorials. If you have further questions beyond the scope of this Documentation, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll do our very best to reply as promptly as possible.

Lonely girl waiting for a loved one on the beach

It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth. One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment.

It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer. Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite sad.

As a rule, we are incredibly hard on ourselves when it comes to being wrong and making big decisions in life.

In cases like these, when we are attempting to do something that is complex and multi-faceted, I believe that being wrong is actually a sign that you’re doing something right.

Here’s why…

First Choice vs. Optimal Choice

For some reason, we often expect our first choice to be the optimal choice. However, it’s actually quite normal for your first attempt to be incorrect or wrong. This is especially true of the major decisions that we make in life.

For example…

  1. Finding the right person to marry. Think of the first person you dated. Would this person have been the best choice for your life partner? Go even further back and imagine the first person you had a crush on. Finding a great partner is complicated and expecting yourself to get it right on the first try is unreasonable. It’s rare that the first one would be the one.
  2. Choosing your career. What is the likelihood that your 22-year-old self could optimally choose the career that is best for you at 40 years old? Or 30 years old? Or even 25 years old? Consider how much you have learned about yourself since that time. There is a lot of change and growth that happens during life. There is no reason to believe that your life’s work should be easily determined when you graduate.
  3. Starting a business. It is unlikely that your first business idea will be your best one. It probably won’t even be a good one. This is the reality of entrepreneurship. (My first business idea lost $1,400. #winning)

When it comes to complex issues like determining the values you want in a partner or selecting the path of your career, your first attempt will rarely lead to the optimal solution.

5 Lessons On Being Wrong

Being wrong isn’t as bad as we make it out to be. I have made many mistakes and I have discovered five major lessons from my experiences.

1. Choices that seem poor in hindsight are an indication of growth, not self-worth or intelligence. When you look back on your choices from a year ago, you should always hope to find a few decisions that seem stupid now because that means you are growing. If you only live in the safety zone where you know you can’t mess up, then you’ll never unleash your true potential. If you know enough about something to make the optimal decision on the first try, then you’re not challenging yourself.

2. Given that your first choice is likely to be wrong, the best thing you can do is get started. The faster you learn from being wrong, the sooner you can discover what is right. For complex situations like relationships or entrepreneurship, you literally have to start before you feel ready because it’s not possible for anyone to be truly ready. The best way to learn is to start practicing

3. Break down topics that are too big to master into smaller tasks that can be mastered. I can’t look at any business and tell you what to do. Entrepreneurship is too big of a topic. But, I can look at any website and tell you how to optimize it for building an email list because that topic is small enough for me to develop some level of expertise. If you want to get better at making accurate first choices, then play in a smaller arena. As Neils Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, famously said, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

4. The time to trust your gut is when you have the knowledge or experience to back it up. You can trust yourself to make sharp decisions in areas where you already have proven expertise. For everything else, the only way to discover what works is to adopt a philosophy of experimentation.

5. The fact that failure will happen is not an excuse for expecting to fail. There is no reason to be depressed or give up simply because you will make a few wrong choices. Even more crucial, you must try your best every time because it is the effort and the practice that drives the learning process. They are essential, even if you fail. Realize that no single choice is destined to fail, but that occasional failure is the cost you have to pay if you want to be right. Expect to win and play like it from the outset.

Your first choice is rarely the optimal choice. Make it now, stop judging yourself, and start growing.

Why do we make unhealthy and unproductive choices — even when we know we should do better?

If you ask most people, they will say that poor choices are a result of a “lack of willpower.”

But research from Columbia University is beginning to reveal that willpower doesn’t quite work that way.

In fact, you may be surprised just how much small daily decisions impact the willpower you have for important choices. And most importantly, it turns out there are simple choices you can make that will help you master your willpower and make better decisions on a more consistent basis.

Why Some Criminals Don’t Get a Fair Hearing

In a research study published by the National Academy of Sciences, psychologists examined the factors that impact whether or not a judge approves a criminal for parole.

The researchers examined 1,112 judicial rulings over a 10-month period. All of the rulings were made by a parole board judge, who was determining whether or not to allow the criminal to be released from prison on parole. (In some cases, the criminal was asking not for a release, but rather for a change in parole terms.)

Now, you might assume that the judges were influenced by factors like the type of crime committed or the particular laws that were broken.

But the researchers found exactly the opposite. The choices made by judges are impacted by all types of things that shouldn’t have an effect in the courtroom. Most notably, the time of day.

What the researchers found was that at the beginning of the day, a judge was likely to give a favorable ruling about 65 percent of the time. However, as the morning wore on and the judge became drained from making more and more decisions, the likelihood of a criminal getting a favorable ruling steadily dropped to zero.

After taking a lunch break, however, the judge would return to the courtroom refreshed and the likelihood of a favorable ruling would immediately jump back up to 65 percent. And then, as the hours moved on, the percentage of favorable rulings would fall back down to zero by the end of the day.

This trend held true for more than 1,100 cases. It didn’t matter what the crime was — murder, rape, theft, embezzlement — a criminal was much more likely to get a favorable response if their parole hearing was scheduled in the morning (or immediately after a food break) than if it was scheduled near the end of a long session.

The figure below depicts the odds that a judge will make a favorable ruling based on the time of the day. The dotted lines signify food breaks taken throughout the day.

This graph displays the odds that a criminal will receive a favorable response from the judge based on the time of day when the hearing occurs. Notice that as time goes on, the odds of receiving a favorable response decrease.

What’s Going on Here?

As it turns out, your willpower is like a muscle. And similar to the muscles in your body, willpower can get fatigued when you use it over and over again. Every time you make a decision, it’s like doing another rep in the gym. And similar to how your muscles get tired at the end of a workout, the strength of your willpower fades as you make more decisions.

Researchers often refer to this phenomenon as decision fatigue. When the judge on a parole board experiences decision fatigue, they deny more parole requests. 

This makes sense. When your willpower is fading and your brain is tired of making decisions, it’s easier just to say no and keep everyone locked up than it is to debate whether or not someone is trustworthy enough to leave prison. At the beginning of the day, a judge will give each case a fair shot. But as their energy starts to fade? Deny, deny, deny.

Here’s why this is important for you…

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?

Decision fatigue happens every day in your life as well. If you have a particularly decision-heavy day at work, then you come home feeling drained. You might want to go to the gym and workout, but your brain would rather default to the easy decision: sit on the couch. That’s decision fatigue.

The same thing is true if you find it hard to muster up the willpower to work on your side business at night or to cook a healthy meal for dinner.

And while decision fatigue is something that we all deal with, there are a few ways that you can organize your life and design your day to master your willpower.

5 Ways to Overcome Decision Fatigue and Boost Willpower

1. Plan daily decisions the night before.

There will always be decisions that pop up each day that you can’t plan for. That’s fine. It’s just part of life.

But for most of us, the decisions that drain us are the ones that we make over and over and over again. Wasting precious willpower these decisions — which could be automated or planned in advance — is one reason why many people feel so drained at the end of the day.

For example, decisions like…

What am I going to wear to work? What should I eat for breakfast? Should I go to the dry cleaner before or after work? And so on.

All of those examples above, can be decided in 3 minutes or less the night before, which means you won’t be wasting your willpower on those choices the next day. Taking time to plan out, simplify, and design the repeated daily decisions will give you more mental space to make the important choices each day.

2. Do the most important thing first.

If there was the most important court case in the world, when would you want the judge to hear it?

Based on the research above, first thing in the morning. You’d want their best attention, energy, and focus to go toward the decisions that were most important.

The same thing goes for your work and life. What’s the most important thing for you right now?

Is it getting in shape? Is it building your business? Is it writing that book you have inside of you? Is it learning to eliminate stress and relax?

Whatever it is for you, put your best energy toward it. If you have to wake up 30 minutes earlier, then do that. Start your day by working on the most important thing in your life.

I’ve written previously about the importance of morning routines and time management, this research on willpower is just another reason to work on the most important things first.

3. Stop making decisions. Start making commitments.

I think advice like, “you just need to decide to do it” gets dished around too much.

Yes, of course you need to decide to do the things that are important to you, but more than that you need to schedule them into your life.

We all have things that we say are important to us.

“I really want to scale my business.”

“I really want to lose 40 pounds.”

“I really want to get started on XYZ.”

Unfortunately, most of us simply hope that we’ll have the willpower and motivation to make the right decisions each day.

Rather than hoping that I’ll make the right choice each day, I’ve found much more success by scheduling the things that are important to me.

For example, my schedule for writing is Monday and Thursday. My schedule for weightlifting is Monday, Wednesday, Friday. On any given Monday, I don’t have to decide whether I’m going to write. It’s already on the schedule. And I’m not hoping that I’ll have enough willpower to make it to the gym. It’s just where I go on Mondays at 6pm.

If you sit back and hope that you’ll be able to make the right decisions each day, then you will certainly fall victim to decision fatigue and a lack of willpower.

4. If you have to make good decisions later in the day, then eat something first.

It’s no coincidence that the judges became better decision makers after eating. Now, if you cram french fries into your veins every day, then I doubt that you’ll enjoy the same results. But taking a break to feed your brain is a wonderful way to boost willpower.

This is especially important because although it’s great to do the most important thing first, it’s not always possible to organize your day like that.

When you want to get better decisions from your mind, put better food into your body.

5. Simplify.

Whether you are trying to reach the highest level of performance or just want to start eating a healthy diet, the biggest frustration for most people is the feeling that you need to use willpower on an hourly basis.

Find ways to simplify your life. If something isn’t important to you, eliminate it. Making decisions about unimportant things, even if you have the time to do so, isn’t a benign task. It’s pulling precious energy and willpower from the things that matter.

Willpower is one area of life where you can most certainly improve your output by reducing the number of inputs.

The Bottom Line

Willpower isn’t something you have or something you lack. It rises and falls. And while it’s impossible to maximize your willpower for every moment of every day, it is possible to make a few changes to your day and your routine so that you can get the most of your decisions and make consistent progress on the things that are important to you.

Children in every family are very precious. Education is an integral part of their growing process. It is often proved that children with utmost focus and concentration succeed well at their academic front at the same time improving their intellects at the good extent too. At this outset, we bring you 10 valuable tips to improve your child’s concentration and focus.

1. Diet: When we talk about child’s growth, it is directly connected with their diet. Here, it is imperative to know that nutrition is the primary key in improving the child’s concentration levels. Children eat better can focus well on their daily activities. Your child’s cognitive functions are ruled through micronutrients such as copper, zinc, iron, selenium and Vitamins A, C, D, and E. Make it sure that your child’s diet is rich with certain nutrients those can impart good concentration and focus. Children with the good levels of concentration and focus will excel well in their every activity that included studies too.
2. Routine: The Growing process of the children is very sensitive. Here, it is certainly parents’ responsibility to make their growing not alone healthy, but also of good in a way, they will be exposed to certain good patterns. Here, setting a routine is the greatest help. Parents should ensure setting the best routine into their daily activity, which can help them well to focus in the right manner. A best-set routine can help a lot for the child’s overall development yet being the best source to enhance their performance besides too. Some of such routines are like setting particular timings for doing homework, playing, eating, sleeping and some more. This kind of well-set routine will make them always well prepared in a way to face the targets with determined focus.
3. Non-Academic Approach: Academic and non-academic approaches should be made as a part of daily routine for children. Add some puzzles, quizzes and some more as the non-academic approach. These activities will teach well to the child more about focus automatically. Importantly, these activities will improve exceptional problem-solving skills to the child. Academic tasks often make the child exhaustive. When you add exposure to the motioned non-academic practices, they will help the child improve well on concentration, which down the line can result in a great help at the academic front.
4. Small Tasks: Big tasks are not a great interest for children. They tend to be bored while exposed to big tasks. This kind of situation will affect drastically on the child’s focus levels. It is always wise to break any of the big tasks into multiple small tasks with a deadline. This will motivate them to solve those tasks with determined focus and concentration. This is the best way to improve your child’s concentration and focus too.
5. Mitigate Distractions: It is very common in children to get distracted very quickly. If you want your child to improve focus and concentration then it is imperative to reduce or eradicate their distractions with the best possible ways. The ambience is another important cause here to distract children. Avoid loud sounds, TV, music and such from the ambience while your child is focusing on something. Always observe what all causing distraction is and eliminate them as much as possible from the ambience.
6. Rest: Your child must have ample rest every day. Make it sure that your child is having ample night sleep and add some additional rest in the day time too. This could lead to convenient activity for child apart from the availing ample rest, which can help them to focus and concentrate well on their work.
7. Time Gaps: It is imperative to allow some time gap between tasks for the children. For example, doing homework continuously can make them lose their focus and concentration. Let them complete their homework volume in bits and pieces ensuring time gap between one after one. This kind of working ensure focus yet improving it in the right way too.
8. Praising: You must appreciate your child in every activity. Children take this kind of praising as the greatest motivation. A well-motivated child often tends to focus and concentrate on the tasks given to gain the praising again. You should keep up this well in your child with appropriate praising as inappropriate appreciation can lead into the wrong direction too. Praising is the best way to improve the child’s focus and concentration, but do it in a balanced way without fail.
9. Activity Changes: It is very common to change activities in the child’s daily routine. But caution is very much essential here. Children are just growing and they find it difficult to accept changes. Sometimes, these changes can affect drastically on the child’s focus and concentration. It is imperative to add activity changes by duly informing in advance. You should make them well prepared for the change in a way their focus and concentration will not be affected.
10. Stories: Storytelling or reading out stories to the children showing very good positive impact since ages. Make good use of this reading out stories in a way child’s focus and concentration can be improved. Listening and comprehension skills will improve to a good extent while reading out stories. This is mainly due to the kind of focus and concentration paid by the child to the activity. So, reading out stories is a proven practice to improve your child’s concentration and focus.

Two of the things in this life that none of us can do without are food and drinks. We must have food and drinks to survive but they also play a major role in our social lives. Interactions such as family gatherings, dating, or just sitting down with a friend for a drink or a cup of coffee. And how many business deals, both large and small, have been consummated over a lunch or dinner? The answer is “countless.” Restaurants provide the ambiance for social gatherings and business meetings. After all, a great many of our parents had their first date in a restaurant, and got to know each other over food and drinks. Had they not done so, then some of us might not be here today.

In the different countries all over the world, with all of our cultural differences, food and drinks are what bring people together. In Hawaii they have the Luau, Germany has Oktoberfest, Russia has Easter Feast, Mexico has Cinco de Mayo, and your own home town has the police officers at the donut shop. Imagine what life would be like if we ate just because we had to. There would be no festivals, no galas, and very few social gatherings. Of course, we would still see the police officers at the donut shop because…..well , just because.

Let’s face it. We just love to eat. We have taken great pains to insure that our food will always taste scrumptious, and is readily available. Gourmet food is a good example. We can even buy gourmet food gift baskets. And take it from one who knows, they are a special treat. As a matter of fact, getting a food gift basket for someone is a good idea. Come to think of it, getting one for yourself could be an even better one.

Being a RitzyShopper you have at your fingertips restaurants, gourmet food, food gift baskets, and drinks such as wine and tea. Take a peek and let your appetite guide you.

By the way, I just couldn’t resist kidding the police just a little bit. I have a police officer in the family and have a great deal of respect for the people who put their lives on the line everyday so I can sit here and write this article. Thank you.

It is enjoyable work as I get to write about different topics related to products marketed by top quality merchants. This particular article dealt with food and drinks.

I remember seeing the movie ‘Scent of a woman’ starring Al Pacino as a retired blind Colonel of the US army. If I remember Al Pacino makes a comment that I wish I had a woman in bed and got up in the morning with her smell pervading the bed. Does smell have a meaning as far as sex is concerned? More so for a man, the smell of a woman can be intoxicating.

The theory of smell or to use the scientific terminology pheromone is nothing new. Basically, it’s a chemical substance secreted by certain animals like insects which often functions as an attraction for the opposite sex.

Can this be extended to the human being as well? Scientists are not too sure but some people do feel it has a bearing on a relationship. It is not an outlandish thought that humans in a subconscious manner may use the scent of the opposite sex partner to forge a closer relationship. Catching on this are some enterprising people in the USA and India who organize get-togethers that help people pick partners based on scent. These parties are different from normal parties that introduce men and women for friendship and marriage.

Many parties are now being organized in New York, Los Angeles and Mumbai where the party takes on a revolutionary hue. I attended one such party which involves the girl’s sweatshirt or T-shirt being put in a plastic bag and given to the prospective men. The men sniff the sweatshirt from a number of them on a table and decide which one they prefer.

In case any man likes the aroma emanating from a particular T-shirt he will inform the organizer of the party. The next involves the man’s photo with a brief being projected on a screen. Now it’s up to the girl to accept him as a date. Such parties require good organizational skills and plenty of pre-party work. I smelled a particular sweatshirt and liked the smell and signaled my acceptance. I was delighted when I was introduced to the girl who was from Assam the ‘Far East’ of India. Whatever the scientific basis of this the fact is that these get-togethers take romance to a volatile level. It’s like going back to the primal age.

Research studies have shown that the reaction of men and women can be dictated by a set of immune response genes. The human nose is able to pick up this incredibly small chemical signal. I will, however, concede that though the scent is a powerful aphrodisiac, yet to rely only on scent is not the end all and be all of life. It is just another part of the varied experience in life.

One of my clients – I’ll call him Jake – had an easy time making friends because he was outgoing, funny and very friendly. He had a hard time keeping friends though because of his lack of listening skills. He constantly interrupted. He would ask someone a question and then start looking around for something more interesting while the person was answering. His problem wasn’t with talking or being social; it was the listening that was so hard. Jake felt like having ADHD made it almost impossible to listen when someone was talking about something that didn’t really interest him or affect him directly.

This may sound corny, but developing our listening skills is an act of self-love. Why? Because we miss out on so much when we can’t listen! If all we hear are our own thoughts, we can’t hear what our child needs to tell us or why our spouse is feeling sad or when a job or assignment needs to get finished. We miss out on close relationships and other pleasures of life.

I know that ADHD and constant/fast moving thoughts make it hard. Some people find that medication helps and others use other strategies to stay focused. Here are some interesting exercises to try. The practices below involve self-awareness and listening to things we may not usually listen to. They can be relaxing and enjoyable if we approach them with curiosity and like an experiment to try. The important part is not getting too frustrated if your thoughts intrude. That’s perfectly normal and part of the process.

Practices to Improve Listening Skills:

1. Start to become aware of what is going on inside of you when someone else is talking. Are you impatient, bored, or restless? Maybe you’re not really listening, but just waiting for a pause so you can say something. Do you suddenly realize that you’ve been zoning out and caught up in your own thoughts or worries? Do you interrupt because you’re afraid you’ll forget what you wanted to say?

See if you can notice when the act of listening takes less effort. Does it have to do with the person who is speaking? The loudness or expression in their voice? Do you listen better when there is an emotional charge to the conversation or topic? Maybe you listen well when there are hard consequences if you don’t. How does the environment affect your ability?

When you get a chance, write down your discoveries.

2. Build up your listening skills through trying the practices below. Just do them for fun and see what happens.

a. Go for a walk through your neighborhood or in nature and make a commitment to stay out of your head and listen to things outside of yourself. Depending on where you are, this could be birds, animals, children, traffic or machinery. It could be the sounds of waves breaking or leaves rustling in the wind. Listen for any surprises. When you catch yourself thinking, calmly note how far you’ve walked and then go back to listening to sounds. (It may only be 5 feet, but that’s OK!)

b. When you won’t be interrupted, listen to a piece of instrumental music you have never heard before. Maybe find some websites that are good resources for the kind of music you enjoy. Relax, close your eyes, and really listen. Can you make out the various instruments? Are there rhythms that change or repeat? When you find your mind wondering, take a relaxing breath and bring yourself back to the music.

c. If you get distracted or irritated by sounds, try a new approach. Every once in a while, take a few minutes to go to them on purpose with curiosity. Don’t label them as good or bad; just keep your ears open. Try not to identify what you hear, such as “the heater” or “the clock”. Try to listen as if you have never heard anything like it before and have no idea what it is. Sounds that were irritating may change into something interesting, musical, or funny with this kind of approach. If you can practice staying aware of what you hear without analyzing, judging, or letting your own thoughts intrude, you may be able to transfer this skill to a conversation.

I hope you find these exercises enjoyable and helpful. They are worth a try because you never know!

Communication between your dog and yourself does not involve an actually language. After all your dog cannot express what they are thinking in words. However there are several means they use that can indicate what they are thinking. This involves using body language.

One way your fury friend uses body language to communicate with you is by the use their tail. The position of their tail and its motion can indicate a number of things. The position of their tail and its motion could indicate submissiveness, anticipation of being greeted by you or another human friend. The position of their tail and it motion could even indicate potential aggression.

Indication of submissiveness

A dog is normally a very submissive create. They seek attention and will indicate this with the position and motion of their tail. Tucking their tail between their legs is one such position. This could be a sign of fear. However when the tail is held low it could also be a sign of submissiveness and they are seeking attention. This attention could involve petting or being cuddled.

Anticipation of Being Greeted By You

Simple wagging of your dog’s tail side to side could indicate anticipation of being greeted by you or a close friend. The fasted they wag their tail the more excited they are to see you. They might also bark at you to get your attention. They might be thinking they are not going to approach them and show the needed affection they desire.

Potential Aggression

Wagging of the tail in a certain position could also indicate potential aggression. This aggression could be the product of fear or the need to protect you from potential danger. If the tail is held high and moving very quickly in a vibrating motion it could mean your dog is getting ready to fight. This could be brought on by another dog in the vicinity. This type of motion indicates an active treat.

Your dog is an intelligent creature and you can learn how to communicate with him or her if you learn what they are trying to say with their body language. This will take some patience and will also involve doing some research. There are many excellent resources on the internet which will give you the needed insight on how to understand your fury friends methods of communication. Of course each dog has their own personality and will define how they will be trying to communicate with you.

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