My Personal Development Experiments – June Update

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It’s almost two months since I last shared my personal development experiments… and I can’t wait let you know about several of my new experiences!

I didn’t post a May update, because I was very busy, and right in the middle of a big experiment (the first one I’ll mention today). But hey, you got your share of Vladdyland in my quest for the manliest shave of them all

Today, I’ll tell you about my experiments with:

• super-concentrated studying (or using time effectively)
• building a daily habit – flossing
• blindfold eating

… and a few other small things. So let’s jump right in!

1. Super-concentrated studying (or using time effectively)

I just finished my second year of university.

It was pretty different from last year, because I now know  exactly how I want to earn my living – helping other people with personal development. So I aligned my university goals with that, and had one clear goal for this year – just pass.

Based on that, I decided to experiment with a very unusual way of learning (for me). With the modules I didn’t care about, instead of learning throughout the year, as I normally would, I would simply ignore them during the year, then cram to pass the exam.

Mind you, I still got fully involved with quite a few of my modules – because I found them really interesting. But with 2 or 3 modules, I really didn’t care, because they were about as much in tune with my life goals as moving to the Sahara desert if you want to be a penguin breeder.

And so I ignored those modules during the semester, only going to a single lecture every two weeks, because I had to hand in an attendance sheet. (And I didn’t pay attention there either.)

Then I did a super-concentrated learning session shortly before the exams, and long story short, I’m almost certain I passed! Hooray!

What’s the moral of this story? Once you know exactly what your goals are, you can apply your time and energy where it will give you the best return on investment, in terms of overall satisfaction with life.

For me, this means I managed to avoid wasting lots of energy on maths modules I wasn’t interested in, and I could instead spend them on blogging and life coaching, improving many people’s lives in the process.

2. Building a daily habit – flossing

I am a big fan of the 30-day trial. It’s one of the best ways to develop a new habit.

That being said, I recently realized I have always been using the method for trying out a habit, to see if I like it. Yet when I first heard of the method, it was presented to me as a great way of developing a habit that you already know you want.

So when I finished my last 30-day trial – keeping a daily journal -  I decided to use my next 30-day trial for developing a habit I’ve wanted to build for quite a while: flossing.

I started flossing every morning, and keeping track of it on my daily to-do list. And it worked!

Long story short, I kept up the habit every single morning, even after I stopped keeping track of it on my daily to-do lists around day 35 of the trial. Now I’m on day 56 and counting.

With most simple habit changes, willpower is not the problem. Forgetting is the problem. Sure, you get super-excited about it when you start… but around day 15, your initial excitement has worn off, but the habit isn’t established enough yet to become automatic.

That’s another reason I love keeping a daily to-do list. That way you can remind yourself to keep up the 30-day trial until your new positive habit has become automatic!

3. Blindfold eating

Several years ago, I heard about a restaurant in New York where you eat in complete darkness.

Since this short-circuits your main sense, you become incredibly attuned to all your other senses, and even such a simple food as plain yoghurt gains completely new dimensions of taste and smell.

I immediately decided I had to try that sometime!

Fast forward a few years… and I finally had a chance to try this! Now, I didn’t travel to a big city where they actually have a proper blindfold restaurant. That’s beyond my means at the moment. Instead, I decided to do blindfold eating in a completely normal restaurant… and it’s even more awesome than I imagined!

…

This happened when I was staying with my girlfriend in a small-ish city in eastern Germany.

We went to an Indian restaurant (because we both love Indian food), during mid-afternoon, to avoid both the lunch-time and dinner-time rush of people. (And thus get a better chance of the waiters spending the extra time to help us eat blindfold).

We arrived, and explained our plan to eat blindfold to the waitress. She was intrigued by the idea, and didn’t have any objections, so we sat down and proceeded with our evil masterplan…

First we both chose several yummy foods from the menu… and let the waitress randomly pick one for each of us. That way, we would be sure to eat something tasty, while at the same time not knowing exactly what we were eating. (And as it turned out later, it was harder to guess than we expected.)

When the food was ready, the waitress came to tell us, so we could put on our blindfolds. And then she brought us the food, giving both me and my girlfriend each of the two foods on our plates (since we wanted to try the same foods and compare our thoughts).

Yummmm.

MMMMMMmmmmmmm!

YUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!

(That’s the best way i can think of to describe the experience.)

(Basically, imagine eating the tastiest food you know, and then multiplying the intensity of the experience ten times. That’s how awesome it tasted!)

So we ate, and compared our thoughts, trying to guess what we were eating. Mostly, we had no idea.

After the meal was over, and we were both completely stuffed, we asked the waitress to bring us the menu again, so we could guess what we had eaten.

We discussed it, definitely agreed on one of the meals, disagreed on the other, so we both told the waitress our guesses. Turns out that of four guesses, we only guessed one meal correctly

We will definitely be doing this again. We’ll probably try getting together a group of friends and arrange a rotating order, to get different people cooking on different weeks, and get everybody enjoying the awesomeness of blindfold eating!

If you’ve ever tried blindfold eating yourself, please let me know in the comments!

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A few small things (piano playing, barefoot walking, blogging…)

Another thing I’ve been doing a lot recently is piano playing. I don’t mention it much (unless you follow me on twitter), but I love playing the piano, and I have been doing it a lot recently.

I recorded myself performing quite a few songs, so you can check out my youtube channel. There you can see me play the tetris theme song, or Chopin’s waltz. Op 69 No. 2, or a song I composed myself based on a melody I heard in a dream. Actually, you really want to check out that one

…

With the weather getting warmer, I’ve also been walking barefoot a lot more!

Again and again, I keep being amazed by how much fun it is to feel the different city surfaces under my feet. I always realized walking barefoot on grass is awesome, but the city is surprisingly fun too!

And broken glass is much less trouble than I thought. It’s usually swept away into cracks and to the sides by passing pedestrians, and even when it’s not, it usually doesn’t get stuck in your feet. In the last two months or so I’ve been walking barefoot, I only got a single piece of glass stuck in my foot, which took about 30 seconds to remove at home.

Also, if you enjoy barefoot walking or running, Born to Run is a must-read book.

…

And lastly, you might have noticed my blogging schedule has been a bit erratic lately. I’ve had a heavy exam period, then an internet outage… but everything should be back to normal now, posting once a week over the holidays.

As always with my experiments, if you have any related experiences of your own, (especially with blindfold eating or barefoot walking), please share them in the comments!