Michael’s Content #1:

The book that I’ve been reading this week is “Feel Good Productivity” by Ali Abdaal. The book’s principal idea is “happiness creates success, not the other way around”. Being happy and having positive emotions while doing work allows you to think more flexibly, and overcome more obstacles. I love this idea, because there are many people that seem to think they need to achieve a certain income or status, and then happiness will magically come to them.

In the book there is a story about different ways to get over procrastination. It details a story where a person has been invited to a dinner, but there is a large pebble in their shoe. Then goes into 4 different methods of tackling this problem.

→ Do Nothing Method (Self Explanatory 👀): Procrastinate leaving for fear of the pain of the trip, until they aren’t able to get there in time, don’t experience the dinner, and don’t get invited in the future by this friend again.

→ Motivation Method (Think of future payoff): They motivate themselves that the dinner will be worth the pain, and head out, but halfway there the pain gets too bad, so they wait until it lessens and the motivation comes back.

→ Discipline Method (Take action despite being unmotivated): They tell themselves that they have already committed to going to this dinner. So they push through, and even though it hurts make it to the dinner, but severely hurt their foot in the process.

→ Unblock Method (Understand where the pain is coming from): They evaluate the shoe, and remove the pebble from it before going out to the dinner.

Sometimes Motivation & Discipline alone aren’t the answer. While they’re good tools, they aren’t able to treat the underlying condition. Pushing through pain doesn’t have to be the way to achieve success.

I’m trying to think through different ways that I can apply this in my own life. I still want to improve my motivation and discipline, but in some situations (like what has happened for studying for some of my masters courses) there have been additional blockers that I need to get over also.

Michael’s Content #2:

Here’s another part of the Feel Good Productivity book that I’m thinking about, but I figured it would fit better in a different section.

SMART vs NICE Goals

Everyone has heard of SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-Bound) Goals before. But this is my first time hearing about NICE Goals, and I thought the difference was quite interesting, and helpful so I wanted to share it.

 NICE stands for:

• N: Near-term

• I: Input-based

• C: Controllable

• E: Energizing

While SMART goals are usually output based, and for longer term objectives (on the order of months or years). NICE goals are input based, and for shorter term objectives (days weeks).

The main input that’s usually being referred to here is typically time. So a typical NICE goal that can be set is along the lines of “This week, I will study 2 hours, each day with my friends”. That it’s just for a 1 week period shows that it’s Near-term, it’s input-based because it’s an amount of time you’re spending, 2 hours is an easily controllable amount (as opposed to saying you’ll spend 8 hours on something), and doing it together with people makes it more energizing.

So overall, use these two goal types together. SMART for future outcomes you want, and NICE for ways to get there. I’m personally going to be combining the NICE goal framework with calendar time-blocking.

If you like this type of content, but don’t want to get his book, Ali Abdaal’s Youtube channel has a lot of good content (here is an example of one of his videos).

Projects:

So, for this section, in the future Juan and I will discuss what updates we’ve had on our different projects. For this specific email though, I’m going to give a small rundown on the different things we’re doing. And then in the future I’ll provide updates on which we’ve actually worked on that week.

 Accountability Groups: See the section below for an overview. But basically we want to grow our group sizes more over time. And for now, start getting people together for our February groups.

 Ambitious Bois Newsletter: This newsletter started because Juan was wanting to do one, but wasn’t sure about the topic, and then he invited me along. I had heard one of the podcast hosts I follow say that “everyone should start a newsletter” so here I am (The newsletter name actually came from our Notion group name, so we stuck with that).

 The Language Project: Our Spaced-Repetition Notecard website. Currently it’s working for Dutch, and next we will be adding in Mandarin and most likely Spanish.

Accountability Groups 

Over the past few months, Juan and I, have been leading some small accountability groups. We want to use these to build better habits for ourselves, and our friends, improve our own discipline and consistency, while incorporating what we’re learning. Juan and I have been holding each other accountable on some minimum daily exercise. And in the past we have also done:

• Digital Minimalism: Limit your screentime across a specific subset of self-selected apps to 30 minutes per day (typically those apps are various social medias)

• Wake Up: We started off a year ago with 5 am wake-up, and kept this up for a month or two, with a handful of people from our HousingAnywhere group. And then adjusted around to 7 am, and 6 am wakeup. And in December I redid this again for the 7 am time, and found this super helpful for myself (especially since I’m not on a office-schedule now).

The system we had this last November & December was that participants would send in 10 euros per day in the month, and then each time they succeeded they’d get that 10 euros back. And if anyone failed, that money was divided up between those who succeeded (in the end I came out by far the lowest, losing a total of 48 euros, but it helped me be more productive at least).

And then I track this all in this Google Sheets file as shown below:

Now for February we are wanting to start 4 different groups, simultaneously:

• Exercise

• Digital Minimalism

• Wake Up

• Daily Tasks (basically you pre-decide three tasks you need to get done the next day, and we hold you to it)

Definitely reach out if you want to join one of these or if you would like more information :).

Thanks for following. We’re going to try to make this interesting. And we’ve committed to sending weekly mails. For all of 2024. But don’t feel forced to stick around if it feels too much like spam. 😝

Feel free to give feedback if you have any. Overall I think this was a bit too long, so for the next one I’ll try to make it more short and to the point.