I am probably the laziest person I’ve ever met. I need constant daily motivation to avoid becoming a complete bum. The 5 tips below help me motivate myself to get stuff (eventually) done.
1) Break big steps down
Having goals is nice and all but if you’re like me, your brain shuts down if the goal is too big.
For example, if my goal is “write a blog post today”, it will probably take me months to write it. But if I trick myself and say “write a blog post title today” or “write one sentence today”, then I can do it without any trouble.
Doing just a little bit boosts my confidence and pushes me to keep doing more. Look up the Kaizen principle and thank me later.
2) Shrink your to-do list
Having 30 things to do every day makes me feel productive – when I get them done. It also makes me feel like a loser if I end up putting them off to a later time. I limit how much I have to do per day to keep myself from avoiding it completely.
It’s easy to commit to doing one or two tasks per day that you know you can finish. Be honest with yourself and be flexible. Although it’s fun sometimes, you don’t have to be your own worst enemy all the time.
3) Have a positive attitude
This is very common knowledge but that doesn’t diminish its importance. I do my best to have a positive attitude every single day and it really helps.
Does this mean every single day is perfect and my life is just “Hakuna Matata”? I wish. It means I look at what I can do. I look at what’s possible and do my best to push through to get to what I want.
4) Surround yourself with the right people
As much as I like saying I don’t need anyone, we need people. Humans are tribal by nature and need to feel connected. The right people can really enhance your life experience.
Some people help me feel like I can build a spaceship in my garage; I really like those people. I like to keep motivated people around me because they help me grow and motivate myself.
5) Do what you enjoy
There is nothing as demotivating as a boring routine. Find an activity that makes your heart happy and do it. You don’t have to do it for a living, do it for pure fun.
That activity will motivate you to do your other work and will open up so many other doors for you.
Share this with your friends if these tips motivated you to not be a bum today.
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
I get the question “how do you travel so much?” so often that I decided to share my secrets with the world. You’re welcome fellow humans. If you’re rolling your eyes, you should know that I’m a Leo so I can’t really help how humble I am.
Let’s start with the most important secret:
1) Budgeting
Not trip budgeting, life budgeting. If you don’t have enough money to travel, one of the reasons could be where you generally spend your money.
Do you really need the latest gadgets as soon as they come out? Do you HAVE to have those fancy overpriced shoes? When you decide to spend, do it on experiences not things – experiences last longer.
2) Travel like a local
Wherever you’re going, seek the less touristy areas and spend most of your time there. Not only will you save money, you’ll also get a more genuine experience of the place you’re visiting.
What’s traveling if you don’t get lost in the weird part of town?
3) Pack light
Take only what you need, your chances of getting stranded for a year while on vacation are pretty low. And if that does happen, you can always find a job there and buy new things.
On most of my trips I only take a backpack packed with the essentials.
4) Find a trip package
Find out if there are packages on sites like Expedia that combine flights, hotels and car rentals. Sometimes these can save you a lot of time and money, but you really have to dig to find them.
5) Take your time doing research
Is it better to get a hotel or Airbnb? Are there any minimally sketchy hostels? Should I take the bus or the train? Should I use Uber or risk getting kidnapped by a cab driver?
Depending on where you’re going, these are things you need to consider. Every location is different, don’t assume that the whole world behaves the same way your hometown does.
6) Find the free activities
Nature. Nothing beats the beauty of nature. (Most of the time) nature is free since it’s a bit hard for most countries to charge you for seeing it. And if they do happen to charge, the prices are usually very low and usually worth it.
If you live in the US, a good idea for a cheap fun trip with lots of scenery is a National Park. There are 58 National Parks spread out across the US, find one and go!
7) Travel with a group
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Taking a trip with a group of friends can really help you cut costs while having an enormous amount of fun. Yes it can be stressful to please everyone in the group, but that’s part of the fun. It also gives you lots of stories you can tell when you get back!
8) Allow yourself to spend
Money comes back but your time won’t. Pushing off a trip you can take right now to a later time is probably worse than procrastinating in school.
The older you get, the busier you get and the harder it gets to travel. Your taste will also get more expensive as you get older so the same trip could cost you double or triple if you delay it.
Take as many trips as you can right now, future you will thank you for it. If this motivates you to take a trip, share your story with me!
Some of the reactions I got when I first really got into climbing are “Why would you do that”, “Isn’t that dangerous” or “How is that even fun”.
Every time I would get one of these reactions from someone, I would invite them to come climb with me. One trip to the climbing gym would change their mind almost immediately. Almost everyone I take is always very impressed at the intensity of the workout and the enjoyment they got out of it.
It’s true that climbing is inherently dangerous, but in my opinion the rewards make it all worth it. I’m going to go over three reasons that make climbing special to me and hopefully convince you to at least try it out.
1) It Teaches Life Lessons
Yes, I said life lessons. Let me explain. When I first started going to my rock climbing gym (Summit Gym), I was hit with the shock of being new at something again. Improving my skills was very difficult and the gains were very, very slow.
But with each time I tried a route, it got slightly easier. And with each attempt I made, the easiest way to climb a route became clearer. It was exactly like solving a puzzle or a complex problem.
I had always heard that the first step in doing something was the hardest, climbing made me believe it. The first step in doing anything is getting over the mental block that you can’t do it, then you just follow the route to the top.
I also learned to be very persistent and patient from climbing. It sometimes takes me several attempts over the course of a few days to top a route. But after that, the route suddenly becomes easy, as if I’ve always known how to do it.
2) It’s A Great Stress Reliever
When I’m climbing, it’s not possible for me to think about anything other than climbing. I have to stay in the now to be able to perform.
I’m so focused on staying attached to the rock that my mind won’t let me think about anything else. All I can think about is where my foot or hand needs to go next, and how I can get in a position to rest my arms or keep my balance.
Because of this, climbing makes me forget all other thoughts or worries and subsequently makes me feel very present. This, in turn, relieves stress and almost always makes me feel a lot happier when I’m done.
3) It’s An Amazing Workout
After every climbing session, my whole body is in pain. Not the bad pain, the good pain, the pain of “I just accomplished something”.
That’s because to climb properly you have to use your entire body. It takes arm strength, leg strength, core strength, balance, flexibility and decent analytical skills to be able to climb successfully. Climbing gives me the best physical and mental workout I can ever ask for.
To summarize
These aren’t all the reasons why climbing is great or why I love climbing, they’re just the top reasons that I think most people can relate to.
There are so many other ways to get the rewards that I get from climbing, but for me I wouldn’t do it any other way. Give it a try, you might fall down and hate it – or you might fall in love.
An experience is worth a thousand books. That was the thought on my mind when I was on my way back home from this trip. The feeling I had was amazing, incredible, phenomenal; it was my best experience in a long time.
It all started a month before when I had started looking into where and how to try ice climbing for the first time. After a lot of research (about 20 minutes of browsing through 1st time lesson options on google), I chose to try ice climbing through REI Adventures and I’m glad I did. The entire experience (even though things didn’t go completely as planned) was incredible. I have been rock climbing on and off since 2009, so the idea of ice climbing for me was always something intriguing that I wanted to try.
I signed up for the trip and was sent a giant list of gear that I didn’t have. I wasn’t even sure what some of the gear did and I had definitely never used most of it before. So, I went to the REI store closest to me and one of the employees walked me through what to buy step by step. After about 2 hours of walking around, explaining and trying things on I had most of the equipment I needed. I opted to buy some of the equipment (the stuff I knew) online through REI Garage and others.
A few days before the trip, I received my REI Adventures welcome package which had a t-shirt, a neck gaiter and a notebook. I was ready to go. Of course, me being who I am, I couldn’t possibly just go to one place. This was my itinerary:
Day 1:
Dallas, TX to Boston, MA
Boston, MA to Lincoln, NH
Day 2:
Ice climbing in the White Mountains, NH
Day 3:
Ice climbing in the White Mountains, NH
Lincoln, NH to Montreal, QC, Canada
Day 4:
Explore Montreal with a childhood friend
Day 5:
Montreal, QC to Boston, MA (With a stop at Haskell Free Library in VT)
Boston, MA to Dallas, TX
I spent most of day 1 travelling. I drove, flew and walked until I finally reached the Holiday Inn Express in Lincoln, New Hampshire. As a treat on my way into the hotel parking lot, I passed by the gorgeous ice castles in the town and I was already falling in love with the atmosphere.
Day 2 started at 8 AM. We were told what to pack and what to expect as well as shown how to use our equipment, since the majority of us were beginners. We headed out at about 9:30 AM to the area where we were supposed to climb, but it was packed because it was a holiday weekend. Someone had jokingly said “all of Massachusetts is up here this weekend”.
Our guides took us to a different area and we finally started climbing at about 10:30 AM. There was only one route set up and 10 of us, so the wait to climb was very long. The guides decided to split us in half and took part of the group to a different route so we can all get ample climbing time.
Everyone seemed a bit disappointed at their first try, but the disappointment diminished the more we climbed. It was really hard, I had seen videos of professionals doing it and they made it look super easy. A fellow climber told me “that’s what professionals do, they make things look easy.” I tried the route multiple times and I did slightly better each time. It was getting late and a snow storm was supposed to hit so we packed up and left at about 3:30 PM. Although I was far from the best climber, the first day of ice climbing was amazing.
In the evening, we had dinner as a group, exchanged contact information and really built a better bond with each other. We headed back to our Holiday Inn Express to sleep and get ready for the next morning to meet at 7 AM.
Day 3 started right on time and even though everyone was yawning, the energy was super high. Everyone was excited to get a full day of climbing. We were the first at the location we tried to climb at the first day, so our guides set up 4 different routes for us.
The day was absolutely exhausting yet incredibly enjoyable at the same time. The progress I saw in the 2 days of ice climbing was absolutely unreal. The main way ice climbing is different from rock climbing is that in ice climbing, you have way more gear that you need to trust.
At first it can be quite a bit daunting, but once you learn to trust the gear (and your legs) the improvement is very noticeable. After a successful day of climbing, everyone went back to their respective states as the REI trip was over. The bond we had built however, will stay with us for a long time.
I continued on with my trip, driving to Montreal, QC. The drive took about 3 hours and was very easy (compared to ice climbing). I saw my childhood friend, we had dinner, then I went straight to bed.
Day 4 of my trip was spent exploring Montreal with my friend. Montreal has a very unique and beautiful vibe. It feels European yet North American, very French yet very English, very Canadian yet very independent, cold but very warm and welcoming – I loved it.
Everything was frozen and the snow was piled everywhere in the city. I was experiencing Montreal in its natural state, not the touristy, fun version of it. I ended the day with a trip to Mount Royal Observatory and a nice French dinner in Downtown Montreal.
Day 5 was the day to head back home but I had one last stop to make. The Haskell Free Library in Vermont was a place that had always intrigued me.
Actually it wasn’t the library itself that intrigued me – it was the idea of any city, town or building that defied international borders and existed where it shouldn’t. I love places where things crisscross and mix. Why? Because they show how superficial and unimportant borders really are.
The experience of being able to stand in a building that’s half in the US and half in Canada showed me how much the idea of borders is insignificant. I think there will be a point in the future, when humans will get over their differences and live together as one people, one society, one planet.
Thinking about all of this on my way back home made me realize that all the studying, reading, researching and learning I had done meant nothing if I didn’t actually experience things.
You can be a genius by reading a lot but you can be an expert (and a lot happier) by experiencing a lot. Climbing a mountain, whether real or metaphorical, is a life changing event and I highly recommend it.
Special thanks to REI Adventures and their awesome guides for setting the climbing portion of this trip up. I hope I motivated you to go on your own adventure.
2) Shrink your to-do list
3) Have a positive attitude
4) Surround yourself with the right people
