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Failures Make You Stronger

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Brian Kim has just posted an excellent article about his Different Way of Looking At Failure. It resonates with some of my thoughts so much, that I decided to make my comments on this a separate post.

I’ve always been a believer that failures make you stronger. I take them as a natural part of my life, and also a crucial part of my personal and professional development. It’s a part of the game you can’t play without. You have virtually no chance to be successful in anything without failing at some stage along your way.

At the same time, the more I talk to people, the more I realize how lucky I am to have such a natural positive look on failures. Most people don’t have it, and it’s rather hard for them to even accept my point of view, let alone to learn the approach and start using it in their lives. So I think that we all can only welcome posts like Brian’s, cause they give us additional understanding of what happens when we fail, and gives us the motivation we need to keep trying until we succeed.

Most failures are rarely irreversible. If you fail once, you’re likely to get another chance to try again later, and its your willingness to give it another go that determines your chances for a success. If you feel too depressed about failing and never find the courage to try again, you may never notice how much you’ve benefited and grown from your failure:

…you will experience pain after you hit failure, but if you rest and feed yourself with more information, knowledge, experience, and ideas, the next time you go at it again, you’ll realize you are stronger than before because of it. It’s that time from the moment you fail to the next time you tackle your goal that makes you stronger than before, provided that you intend to go at it again. If you don’t, you’ll never realize that you were stronger than before and you’ll never start hitting that favorable cycle.

In one of my earlier posts, Quick Recovery, I’ve already given you my advice on failures:

Accept it – everyone fails, and not always it’s due to the personal qualities and features. Quite often there is absolutely nothing you could do. There is nothing anybody could do. So all you do in such situations is to accept this and think one step forward – what needs to be done next to make up for the opportunity you’ve just lost.

I notice now that so far I’ve only spoken of failures as something that happens everyday, perhaps because I’m so used to the idea. But Brian talks about your first failure, which is always the most painful one. That’s an excellent angle, and I’ll definitely write on this topic someday myself.

Your first failure will hurt. Big time. It’ll likely happen during the beginning of your journey, at that long stretch of plateau before you go to the next level. However the moment you experience that failure, the MOMENT you experience that failure, you are stronger than before. It’s only when you go to tackle your goal again that you truly begin to realize it.

You should definitely go and read the whole post yourself, I’m sure you’ll find it useful: Different Way of Looking At Failure.

Five Things About Me You Probably Didn’t Know

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The new wave of tag game had been going around last few weeks, and so it was only a matter of time before somebody tagged me. Thank you, Lyman Reed, for doing so! I’ve really enjoyed reading 5 things about you, and even though I usually find games of tagging a bit childish, I for some reason actually liked this one around, and so I’m in.

Read on to find out five things you probably didn’t know about me.

1) Origins of my name

Since both my first and last name are quite short, it’s usually quite problematic for people to guess where I come from. But it all is quite simple, once I explain. Gleb is a truly Russian name I’ve been given after my grand-father. He had a brother, and they both were named Boris and Gleb after the first Russian saints. The really interesting coincidence though is that myself and my older brother (from my father’s first marriage) are also Boris and Gleb.

Reys is the way I spell my last name in English, although it should have been Reiss as it’s of German origin. Due to some circumstances beyond our control, my father has got his last name changed from Reiss to Reis when he lost his passport a long time ago, and so I inherited the last name like Reis. But since I studied English in school, I liked Reys way of spelling it better, and it’s not this big a deal because neither spelling allows English speakers pronounce the name properly (it sounds like Rays in Russian – Глеб Рейс). I also have many people thinking I’m Spanish and spelling my last name like Reyes.

2) I’ve always liked talking to others

This in itself isn’t probably that big a secret, but not many of you know that you can trace back to my kinder-garden years the fact that I have always found it much easier to talk to girls, and not guys.

Girls always trusted me their secrets and we somehow found such a deep level of understanding that it always felt special. I’ve enjoyed great relationships with my classmates in both school and university, and still find it fascinating how much girls have to say. I’ve obviously been charmed by a particular lady for the past 6+ years, and she’s been a great wife to me, but recently our interest is being taken over by the new addition to our family – baby Elizabeth.

3) I was among the first 5 pioneers in my class

Back in my primary school years, I was among the first 5 pupils to become a pioneer because of my excellent marks. If you don’t know it yet, pioneer movement was a organization for children, similar in many things to Scouting. It obviously was an honor to be accepted. Not everyone made it, but most children eventually did become pioneers, maybe a few weeks or months later.

4) My astrological sign is Libra

If you’re familiar with astrology, this will immediately tell you a number of my character qualities:

  • I like planning everything beforehand, carefully weighing all the options
  • I’m a very romantic person – I often have romantic dreams and write them down in a form of short stories

5) I believe in true love

People who know me personally are probably aware of this, but for others it’s definitely something to note. I believe in true love, and always give all of me to the person I’m with. I find it much easier to go through my life because I’m always in love with so much – my family, my life, my work and many other wonderful things that quietly happen in this world and only get noticed by a few of us.

I am eternally grateful for the love I have in my life, and I cherish every moment I get to spend with my family.

That’s it. Let me know how you found these revelations, I do hope you’ve found them amusing and interesting enough!

In the spirit of the tag game, I would like to learn 5 things about the following 5 people:

Has It Really Been So Long?

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While I check new comments and links to this blog daily, I haven’t posted in a while. I never realized it was this long though. Looking at the archive page just now revealed the horrible truth: there hasn’t been a single post here in December!Many things have happened in the past weeks, and I would like to reflect on them a bit before getting back into my routine of posting new articles.

My mother went back home after spending 3 months with us

These must have been some of the greatest months we’ve had – she helped us tremendously by minding Elizabeth while both myself and Jane were going to work, and I took a week off to spend the last few days with mom and Elizabeth – so we did some shopping together and explored new and not very new (to me, that is) parts of Dublin.

We have spoken of so many things during her stay with us! Once again, I have discovered many things about my mother, which made me love her even more. She has a very strong personality, and it amazes me how she managed to accomplish many things in her life in situations where others could easily give up.

I’m also very happy to see her being proud of me. She loved Elizabeth from the very first sight, and all of us got on really well. Everything in our daily life was new to mom, and not speaking English made things even more challenging. Still, just like I said, she has grown personally a lot, and enjoyed her trip back home through Gatwick and Heathrow much more than her flight to us.

Our little Elizabeth turned 10 months old

It happened just last Monday, and her birthday also coincided with the first full day she had to spend at her creche.

I will have a separate post about the whole creche experience, but for now I’ll just confirm something most parents already know: it’s VERY hard to let your little angel go. I’ve spent a few days leaving her there at the creche for an increasing amount of time (first day – 1 hour, then – 2 hours, last day – 4 hours) to help her get used to a new environment, and she cried. All children do, because up to that point they were lucky enough to only know you and your closest relatives and friends. So it’s hard for both your baby and yourself to get started with creche.

Today marks her full day two at the facility, and all her minders confirm she’s getting used to everything: smiles a lot, plays with toys, eats and even tries some sleep. I guess I’m fine as well – although it is still hard enough to leave her there in the morning and run away even if she cries.

Jane had finished another round of her exams

That was quite an event, cause she had to struggle really hard to find time for her study lately. The last few months she had been studying a few hours every evening, and that’s not an easy task after a full working day and with constant temptations to drop everything and play a bit with your lovely baby girl :)

Again and again I understand that I’m not very fond of such long-term study projects. I much rather prefer a single exam with a given set of topics/subjects, where I can decide myself how and when to prepare. I then get fully focused on my preparation for a few days and then pass the exam.

With studies Jane has, she does at least 2 exams each term and they involve two 300-500 page books of accounting theory and math problems to solve.

We all were glad to have Jane back, and now we enjoy long dinners and evening movies together.

I’ve given a tech talk at work

I was nominated to present a tech talk prepared by our colleague from San Jose, and while the topic was purely technical (Linux), it was challenging enough a speech – mainly because it was supposed to be an introduction to Linux for people not necessarily familiar with Unix. These talks you have to keep well-worded, entertaining and easy-to-follow enough to engage everyone in the audience.

I’ve got tons of positive comments after the talk, and slipped only by 1 minute for a 45minute talk – which I think is a pretty good result. I’ve also visited my local ToastMasters club for the first time, and liked it a lot. I guess I’ll join the group a few more times and then become a member – I really liked the atmosphere and could see the benefits people get from such meetings right away.

 

 

There you have it – a short history of the last 3 weeks. It all happened so quickly! It still seems like most of these events were just yesterday, yet looking at my calendar I can see some of them are almost a month old. Oh well, time waits for nobody! I better get on with new challenges and things to do, and – of course – keep you posted about my experiments.

 

I wish you all a great day (if it’s only a morning – have a good morning, and obviously you’re more than welcome to enjoy your good evening or even good night if that’s the case), and I’ll talk to you later!

 

Please take a moment to leave me a comment, I’d love to hear from you.

Personal Development Pixel page

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Victor Fam has just set up a pixel page for all the websites in the personal development field. The idea is very similar to the Million Dollar page you probably heard about,

I bet most of you had heard about Million Dollar Homepage. If you haven’t heard about it, you can have a look here. This website is basically started by Alex Tew. He is basically a student who try to make $1 million USD with the motivation to pay for his degree studies. The concept is very simple, on this website, there are 1,000,000 pixels. So he sell the pixel at $1 per pixel. After selling all the pixel, he would become a millionaire.

… but Victor is just giving pixels away for free:

My idea here is similar, but with different intention. I had setup a Personal Development Pixels page that host only personal development related sites. If your blog or website are related to personal development, welcome to the Personal Development Pixel page and get some pixels for free. I won’t charge a cents on this. :) I hope to collect 1 million of personal development pixels.

Well done, Victor! I think this is a great idea!

If anyone wants to get pixels for their website logo on his page, here is the link: Personal Development Pixel page

Creative Habit Naming – Part 2

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As you probably remember from the first part of Creative Habit Naming mini-series which was posted last week, I’ve discovered a very simple technique for mastering your habits: creative habit naming.

The idea is pretty simple: when you’re working out a particular habit, every little helps to stay motivated and interested enough. When it comes to mastering habits, creative habit naming is a very effective way of making your life easier.

 

I’ve also identified three main directions in creative habit naming: motivation, progress tracking and positive affirmations. In the first part of the series, I’ve covered the motivational part of creative habit naming.

 

 

Today, I’m going to talk about the second direction you can distinguish – progress tracking.

 

If you were asked to come up with an additional function for a name of any habit you have, progress tracking would probably be one of your very first guesses.

Why? Because tracking your progress is always a good thing, and measuring your performance in mastering a particular habit is just too cool an idea to pass it by.

 

Here are the two most useful ways of naming your habit with progress tracking in mind:

Regularity

As you probably know, one of the hardest things in mastering habits is the fact that it’s so damn hard to stay regularly committed. Honestly now, most of people who don’t exercise or commit regularly to some other kind of habit do this not because they’re lazy, but because it is actually hard to repeat the same set of actions over and over again without seeing great results quickly enough.With most habits, you have to stay committed for quite some time, before you finally start getting some results.

It’s not like you can try it one day, and then immediately see the positive result in just a few moments. It usually takes few days, if not few weeks, to see the first positive confirmation of your habit working towards the ultimate result you desire.

So it only makes sense to name some of your habits in such a way that the name itself will contain come kind of regular commitment.

Think of how frequently you’re going to get back to your habit. If it’s a daily action, or a weekly one – then you probably know what words you need for the name of a habit (daily or weekly, for those who don’t follow me yet).

If you look at naming a habit this way, you will actually remember many good habits you already have, which you stay pretty committed to: your Sunday church, your Saturday golf, your Thursday night out (very traditional thing here in Ireland by the way). It doesn’t have to be a weekday, either. You have many other habits, I’m sure: your morning shower, your daily job (not a very nice habit, I must admit – but hey it probably pays to do so!).

There are also some quite successful extremes which don’t even seem to have anything regular in their names, but they are habits as well: your birthday (I bet this is one habit you always stay faithful to), your anniversary, etc.

 

Count

This is another way of being creative with naming your habits. Just add some kind of count to the name!

For instance, here’s how my ab crunching routine is called: my daily 42 ab crunches. The name suggests, as you can see, the regularity of the habit (I’m proud to say that over the course of 3 months I’ve only skipped two days) and the count of ab crunches I’m doing every particular week.

I started a while ago with 30 reps a day. I did them for a week, and then moved on to 31 reps a day. After a week I’ve increased the number again, and so this week it is 42.

Using count in the name of you habit helps you not only track your progress, but also gives you additional motivation by confirming how far you’ve gone already. By simply reminding myself that it’s 42 ab crunches this morning, I also realize that it’s been 3 months of my exercises.

42 sounds much better than the original 30 ab crunches I’ve started with, and trust me it feels differently too – it’s harder to have 42 reps, but at the same time it feels great to be able to do 42 and still feel like you could do extra 20 just because you’ve improved so much over the time.

 

Another way to use count in naming a habit is to you is as a deadline. For instance, you can have a habit like this:

  • Learn a new language in 2 years time
  • Become a millionaire by the age of 30
  • Learn how to count from 1 to 1000 in Chinese

That’s all for today. Have I left something out? Please leave your thoughts on this topic in comments area, I would live to learn your approaches to creative habit naming. Thanks in advance!

ConceptDraw Anniversary Quiz

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ConceptDraw

 

This week guys from CS Odessa celebrate the anniversary of their flagship diagramming application ConceptDraw VI.

The company marks this occasion with a very simple quiz with three copies of ConceptDraw VI Std to give away. You have time till 22/11/2006 to answer quiz questions and get a chance to win your prize.

For all of you admirers of professional drawing tools, this is a good chance to win a great piece of software.

Please follow this link to enter the quiz: ConceptDraw VI Anniversary Quiz