Achievement unlocked

The 9th of February, 2016 is my 25th birthday. This is a quarter of a century. I was 2 years old when my father was 25. This is really scary.

The way we perceive time is really fascinating to me. I used to be a very impatient person. Thank God I wasn’t a teenager in the age of instant gratification, I would’ve been a wreck. Well, I guess I was anyway.

My perception of time changed a lot in the last 12 months. I’ve spent most of my time (since last January) without the company of my wife. I’m in London, she’s in Budapest and we meet about once a month. So what’s a month to me? The time between two meetings with my better half.

An interesting trend is that time tends to accelerate as we grow older. It’s not because it really does but because we become convinced that we haven’t got enough of it.

This whole thing really freaks me out

I feel I reached a tipping point. A few months ago I realised that I’m going to turn 25 this year. My mom calls me on the 9th of February every single year, exactly at 10:50AM (CET) to wish me happy birthday. (That’s the time of my birth, she’s a really precise person.)

I’m a really big fan of the Wait But Why blog. So I kinda feel obligated to put this into perspective. Here’s a visualisation of how many times we’ll have that conversation with my mom during my life:

There are two things that scared the shit out of me when I made this graphic based on average life expectancy data in Europe:

1. I’m almost halfway there!
2. Just by looking at the slightly transparent icons made me realise our mortality. Yep, those are the “would haves” if both of us were around by then.

If this doesn’t urge people to make things right with their parents I don’t know what would.

I also realised that I was a prisoner of many habits. Bad habits, mostly. I’ve been a terrible sleeper my whole life. I’ve been poisoning myself with many things occasionally. Bad nutrition. Alcohol. Smoking. Drinking booze until 4am every weekend just to “let the steam blow”. And I usually have a terrible hangover, making me unable to operate as a human being for a whole day. Then I realised if since I started partying which is since I was 17, that means a lot of wasted days from my life. Something like this:

That’s 3172 days. 8 years, 8 months and 12 days. That’s enough to get a PhD in quantum physics and I’d spend that lying on my bed swearing that I wouldn’t drink another bit or have another party with my friends again just to do the same in about a week.

Debugging my brain

So I decided that I had to stop. I wanted to do something more meaningful with my life. I made a list of things I was unhappy about. The list contained things like:

Bad sleeping habits, malnutrition, my body was in a really bad shape (196 cm, 75 kg, couldn’t run 5km without wanting to die), lots of stress, being tired all the time, etc.

I’ve tried changing all of these things a thousand times before and I always failed after two weeks. That was the time when I hit a plateau and my mind started to tell me that I’ve had enough and I lost interest. I needed to systematically debug my brain and get rid of the bad legacy code.

Conquering the body

When I sat down in early January to plan this whole “New Year New Me” thing which is ridiculed all the time, I suddenly remembered this post from Hubspot about not breaking the chain of red Xs.

It worked. I haven’t missed a single day since 11th January. Before, when I got caught up with work, I just decided to skip. Now it’s a no-brainer. I don’t even think about it, if it’s 10pm, it’s 10pm. I’m not going to bed until it’s done.

I’ve also put together a nutrition plan to gain weight. I’ve been 75 kg since I was 18 so it was a real mental challenge. But I did the research and realised that this is really just mathematics. Just input and output. I need to exhaust my muscles and replenish calories with sufficient nutrients and results will follow.

My nutrition plan was to eat 3800–4000 calories a day, with 45% carbs, 35% protein and 20% fat. That was a real challenge but my mood after a few days showed me that I’ve never been a hardgainer. I was just malnourished my entire life.

I not only wanted to gain weight but also to get fit. So I’ve put together a mix of Insanity and dumbbell workouts. Insanity helps me keeping track of my fitness through its fit test, and since I’m not doing the vanilla plan, only having 3 Insanity workouts, this means I have one fit test every month until May.

I’d say that this is really nice progress. I increased the number of reps at each exercise, even doubled at some. Now I weigh 84.6 kilograms and I’ve never been in better shape in my entire life. I’ve always had pretty low self-esteem when it comes to my physique. There’s still room for improvement, but maybe now I won’t die if someone asks me to take their big luggage to the 4th floor.

This also means that I’m living a pretty much simple but really meaningful life without all those poisons. I can run. I can taste and smell again. I haven’t been drunk or smoked or had a crazy “like it’s 1999” party since New Year’s Eve. (Actually this “party like it’s 1999” never really applied to me. I was 8 back then. Having a crazy party meant watching Cartoon Network until 10pm when it switched to TCM, playing video games on my ancient NES and eating crisps and Nutella until I passed out.)

Conquering the mind

I’ve also noticed lots of significant changes the way I spend my days. I’ll address each of these points separately.

Sleep — Bedtime & Morning routine

Before this, I’ve been struggling with waking up at a regular time. I’ve been tracking my sleep cycles using the app Sleep Time from Azumio. It’s pretty good although I’m considering getting a fitness tracker to seamlessly track my sleeping habits, since having this “turn your phone upside down” really makes the whole thing useless if you don’t live alone. Since my wife is moving here in a month, I’ll need a solution for this. Having a fitness tracker seems to be a good idea.

First of all, due to a few little things, my sleeping cycle is pretty much predictable:

• Go to bed before midnight
• Write in my journal before I go to bed (Try OmmWriter, pretty cool stuff if you just want to get your thoughts in order.) I use my journal to reflect on what happened during the day, prioritise my todos for the next day and express gratitude.
• Have a hot shower about an hour prior to going to bed
• Don’t eat 2 hours before bedtime
• Wake up before 8am, start working at 9am sharp (Usually I work from home)
• First things to do immediately after waking up: eyedrops, drinking cold water, washing my teeth, put on my clothes
• Have breakfast within the first 30 minutes once awake
• I also quit eating sugar. I still get enough in through the food I eat so no need to get sugar high.

Productivity — Minimising procrastination

Most people who start using any kind of productivity methods basically end up screwing things up in a systematic way. (I don’t have actual data to back this, maybe it’s just me.) So I decided to take the long road:

• Focusing on ONE thing that I MUST get done no matter what
• Have a list of todos with no more than four items. I tested more and less, usually with less than four I ended up doing a lot of “pseudo work” (When you’re not doing anything productive but your mind still counts it as working for some reason.) and when I had more than four I never got to the end of it. Not finishing a to do list is discouraging, demotivating and just doesn’t feel good in general.
• Always start with the ONE thing first.
• Use a very simple todo list to manage my tasks. For some reason, using Clear with the sound setting set to 8-bit feels REALLY rewarding to my inner child. If you don’t believe it, just try it. It gives you the same sound when Mario gets a coin. Super cool.
• Making terms with procrastination. I still do it. But now I’m in control. I know that I can’t always be “killing it”. Actually I find this “Yeah I’m putting in 168 hour weeks and I’m killing it and I’m a productivity ninja whatevs.” thing pretty disturbing. Because it’s a lie. You’ll end up burning out which is kinda the same as having a hangover you can’t just simply sleep off. So I have my system set up that allows me to push one task every once in a while and still not be late with anything.

I got done an awful lot of things in January. We’re closing a fundraising round, our pipeline basically blew up, we’re rebranding from the 1st March, I’ve designed the new product UI, set up our sales and our inbound strategy and so on. I think all of these things are really, really self-explanatory. This whole habit changing has been the best decision I’ve made in years.

Confidence, general mood

Okay, the last one will be a bit more subjective. But I do feel A LOT better. I stopped drinking coffee not because I don’t want to but because I don’t need to. I’m really energetic even at 7am. I don’t feel like a zombie at 11pm even if I’ve been working for 10–12 hours with a few breaks during that day.

I’m having more success in meetings. This can be caused by a number of reasons which I haven’t really evaluated yet but I believe that being more confident is one of them. I’m just bold enough to play at higher stakes now, I’m building rapport more easily with new prospects and now I enjoy small talks (which I despised my entire life, I don’t know why). I’ll need to do a bit more research on the topic but I think this is somehow related to my elevated testosterone level due to exercise, less sugar, more carbs, and better sleep & eating habits in general.

Cognitive performance

I actually wanted to test this just like I do with my fitness but I didn’t so I’ll only have subjective information. I’ve always been seen as a “bright kid”. I was offered to skip a year in 1st grade but my parents (rightfully) decided not to do it. I’ve always been a really fast learner and seemed to grasp complex ideas pretty quickly. But in the last few years I realised that I’m “not bright enough” anymore. I’m still in my 20s so I should be, and I was convinced that this was because of my lifestyle.

Since I changed my habits, I’ve seen one major change in my cognitive performance that’s measureable and suggests that I was right: I’m completing complex tasks that involve strategic thinking and require a really great sense of logic in about 30–40% less time. Now since about 20% of my work is about really complex tasks that means I save at least a day every month just by switching to this lifestyle. That’s almost two more months of getting shit done in a year.

I’m also more observant and more relaxed which is probably because my habits are kind of keeping my cortisol levels under control. This has been a real issue for my in the last few years. I tended to burn out every three months, when I just couldn’t take any more stress in. Now that I manage it on a daily basis it feels better. Those constant feelings of having butterflied in your stomach before falling asleep? Gone. (Not entirely but they’re locked away.)

Ending thoughts

I was thinking a lot about whether I should write this post or not. I want to write more publicly but publishing on Medium seemed so cliché. I saw a modified Maslow pyramid on Facebook the other day showcasing the “tech entrepreneur’s Maslow pyramid” and there was a “Sharing life wisdom on Medium” on the top. So I guess you could say this post was inevitable after all.

I know that it’s only been a month. I’ll share these thoughts next month as well and see how it goes. It’s really good that I kind of regained control over my body and my mind. Feeling accomplished in one area really helps accomplish more in other areas as well so yeah, I’ll keep doing this.