Five Things I Do to Improve My Life

Small changes make a big difference. Big changes are difficult but necessary.

There is a lot of advice that you can read if you want to be happier, slimmer, smarter, richer or anything-er for that matter. I’m not here to tell you how to live your life, I just want to tell you about a few things that I do to make my life a bit better. In the end, you can do whatever you want or make excuses to not do the things you know need to be done. 

I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about my time, my days, weeks, months, years and decades. I agonise over decisions I’ve made, people I’ve met, things I’ve said and the ways that I’ve acted in the past. Most of it makes me proud and some of it makes me cringe. Regardless of the outcome, I am always testing and experimenting with ways to improve my life and gain more out of my time. 

I have found that the below five things have added immense value to my existence and that of those around me. 

1. Cut people out

Over the past 15 years, I have worked tirelessly to remove assholes from my orbit. 

Here’s the thing that they didn’t tell you in school about your friends: You don’t have to be friends with people forever. Just because you once had something in common with a friend doesn’t me that you always will. People change and move on and that’s OK. 

You are allowed to break up with friends. It’s not easy but it’s a necessary function of growing up and evolving. 

This applies to your family too. You don’t have to be friends with your family. You don’t have to like them. Hell, you don’t even have to love them. That’s the stuff of movies. 

Your family is made up of completely fallible humans who are exactly the same as the stranger who cut in front of you in line that one time. The difference is that you share DNA with your family. Fundamentally though, your family can be (most likely are) assholes just like anyone else. More often than not, you put up with their shitty attitude because “blood is thicker than water”. That cliché is one of my family’s favourites. I’ve had that shoved in my face more than I care to remember. It usually followed some kind of bust-up where I was on the receiving end of some outburst. Sure, it’s true that blood is thicker than water but to me, that just means blood stains worse than water does.

Cut people out when they treat you like rubbish. Move towards people who support your dreams, who treat you like an equal, who challenge you in a positive way and who know how to respect you and your opinions. 

2. Be more curious

I am obsessively curious about the world, life, love, the universe and everything. There are no boundaries to what one person can learn. We don’t need teachers to teach us anymore, we have the Internet. YouTube is filled with helpful people who have put tutorials online for just about anything and they’re completely free. 

If you have a mobile device, an Internet connection and time, then you can learn anything. 

The more curious you are about the world around you, the more interesting and interested you will become. People will notice this newfound energy and gravitate towards you. Your curiosity doesn’t need to be in support of anything other than your interest. Follow random paths down a rabbit hole and expand your knowledge base. You’ll be amazed at the conversations you can uncover because you took a pottery class for a few weeks, or learned about the migration patterns of a certain bird, or even just watched a show you never thought to watch before. 

I’m all-in on the concept of curiosity. So much so that I am writing my second book about the most curious people and businesses in the world. 

3. Get comfortable looking stupid

Feeling stupid is liberating. I promise. 

In the beginning, I hated the feeling but over time it has become one of my favourite things in the world. I love listening to smart people explain things to me as if I’m really, really stupid. There is something so elegant about hearing an eloquent explanation about a difficult and complex topic laid out in the simplest way possible. 

The interesting upshot to being the dumbest person in the room is that you can also weed out the actors. 

If someone cannot explain a complex theory, problem, solution, argument or issue to you in the simplest way possible then they probably don’t understand it well enough. 

That’s OK, but they’ll probably never admit it to you because their ego wants them to be the smartest person in the room. I used to suffer from this complex; I always had to be the smartest person in the room. Once I realised that the smartest people in the room are usually the ones listening and learning, I started to listen more and talk less. This helped me drop my ego (see below point) and learn from the really smart people around me. 

4. Drop that ego

I have seen ego destroy businesses. I have seen ego shatter friendships. I have seen ego rip relationships apart. Ego is the most destructive and pervasive human trait that I battle with on a daily basis. 

In every part of my life, I have tried to get rid of ego as much as I can. You may think that you don’t have a problem with ego but you probably do because we all do. When you’re fighting with your partner and you refuse to apologise when you’re wrong, dig your heels in and prepare for a week-long fight, that’s ego. If you are angry with someone who corrected you in a meeting (even though you were wrong), that’s ego. 

Everything is simpler without ego. I urge you to spend a week thinking about and removing your ego from the equation when interacting with people. You’ll immediately notice how much simpler every interaction becomes. 

Try it, I dare you. 

5. Shut up and listen

I have struggled with this one for years and years. I like talking. Not because I think I’m right but because I am obsessively curious about everything and read a lot. I have a lot in my brain that needs to get out!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Just because I have a lot to say doesn’t mean I should say it all. Resisting the urge to be the loudest and most talkative person in a group means that I am able to learn from and listen to the smart people that I surround myself with. Tough lesson to come to terms with when I like talking!

This is partly a jump back up to point one; it’s important to listen to people around you and even more so when they are people that you have carefully curated. If you have surrounded yourself with yes-people or morons then it’s likely that you won't want to listen to them. If the people around you are experts, achievers, have no (low) ego and are happy to look stupid too, then you’ll want to listen to them talk all the time. 

You might read the list above and think that these changes don’t apply to you. You’re wrong. Everyone with an ego believes they don’t have an ego or that they deserve to have their ego. Everyone who talks too much believes that they have the most valuable points to make. Everyone who is trapped by their friends and family will tell you that they have no choice but to be around those people. 

You always have a choice. You can’t control what other people do and say, but you can always, always control your own choices. 

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Nic Haralambous is an obsessive entrepreneur and keynote speaker. 

You can book him for your next conference or sign up for his newsletter.

What Is the One Metric That Matters to You?

Photo by Harry Sandhu on Unsplash

Have you ever thought about the one measurable thing that matters most to you?

I read a tweet recently that asked the following questions:

The question caught me off guard in its simplicity and clarity. I often think about my own “victory condition” (hat tip to Rich Mulholland for introducing this concept to me) for certain scenarios in business but very rarely do I hear people talking about this in their personal lives. 

Life is a big experiment. Every day we do things that we aren’t sure of. We make statements that could end well or badly. We get into a car that is statistically likely to end up in an accident eventually. We fly in planes, exercise, eat, drink and are merry. We experiment. 

But experiments are only effective if they have a desired outcome or are being analyzed. I don’t think that we analyze our experiments (life) often enough. 

We plod along eating what we eat, doing what we do, living the life we live without much introspection or review. 

When I invest in or consult with startups I often ask them for a single true metric that represents their business. It could be revenue, it could be a viral coefficient, it could be user retention, staff retention or any metric that moves their needle. Most often the startup has no idea which single metric matters most to them. This isn’t unusual at all but there is a definite correlation between clarity of thought, execution and understanding a single true metric that matters in a business. Thinking about your daily work right now, do you have a single metric that you can look at come the end of the day to decide if your day was successful or not?

I believe the same can be said for your day to day life. What one true metric matters to you? It’s OK if that metric is something simple or complex or if other people scoff at it or copy it. There are no right or wrong answers here. 

I’m more interested in the existence of any answer in my life. 

I value time. 

Time is the one metric that matters to me. 

Do I have the time to do the things that I want? Do I have the time to enjoy the thing I am doing right now? Or am I rushing off to the next meeting/event/sight without taking it all in? Do I have the time to spend with the people that matter to me most? Do I have the time to sit and think about the things I want to think about?

From this one true metric, everything else emerges. 

To have sufficient time I need to have sufficient resources. To have sufficient resources I need sufficient experience to gain the resources. To have the experience I needed to take the time to learn, experiment and gain experience. It all comes back to time for me. 

I’m not sure if this will always be my one true metric, but for right now it makes sense. 

A friend of mine, Rob Hope, replied to the above tweet with a pretty simple answer that I loved: Freedom. 

Freedom is a fantastic true metric to align your life to. However, jumping back to the victory condition, you can only be free if you have defined what freedom means to you in your daily life. Take the time to think about what matters to you and how you define victory in your day, week, month, year, life. 

Then answer me this question: What is your one true metric?

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Nic Haralambous is an obsessive entrepreneur and keynote speaker. You can book him for your next conference, sign up for his newsletter or follow him on Twitter.