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There’s a notable difference between being efficient and effective. However, I’m not too concerned about any of them.

I love ice-cream, and I’m pretty good at eating it, but when I do, I prefer to take my time and eat it slow. Why? Well, because I enjoy it and stuffing it down my throat too fast will only ruin it (and potentially give me a brain freeze).

And I enjoy most parts of my job, too. If I take my time to enjoy the work, why should that be such a bad thing?

Even if a job might take me twice as long, the outcome is better, and my energy level is higher than when I started. Sure, someone else might have been able to do the same thing faster, but I will win long-term anyway since my enjoyment will be reflected in my overall output.

If I had the chance to give my younger self a piece of advice, then it would be this:

Pivot more often.

To pivot is to take a new direction which will help you develop faster compared to staying the course.

In our culture, we focus on setting goals and being efficient. But if you want to get results faster, pivoting is what will make the biggest difference, not how hard, fast, and smart you apply yourself.

For example:

If you decide on getting more fit, there’s often a lag between that decision and showing up at the gym. You could probably shorten that time.

When in the gym, exposing your body to new types of exercises might have the most significant effects. You could probably pivot between types of exercises instead of doing the same thing over nd over again.

Another example:

Maybe you’re dreaming of starting your starting a company. If you delay, you’ll probably have more time to think, plan, and prepare. But then when you finally get started, you’ll still have to learn lots of new things as you go.

If you had started your company sooner, you might had made a few more mistakes, but your company would still be way ahead compared to the company you started much later.

One often hears stories of successful big bets with high stakes — and won.

Stories about entrepreneurs who’ve built multinational corporations, starting out with no money in their garage.

The problem with those stories is that you rarely hear about the thousands and thousands of people who fails by applying the same tactics.

Yes, Steve Jobs was brilliant. However, he was also lucky that he wasn’t born in Medieval times. There’s an element of luck in taking risks. If it weren't, it would be a sure thing, and if it is a sure thing, then it isn’t much of a risk, right?

The key to taking risks, I’ve found, is to understand which types of risks to make.

You should look for risks where the worst-case scenario is pretty awesome.

For instance, I moved to New York to help build a new company. It was a big risk since success wasn’t exactly guaranteed. And sure enough, it didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. Meaning: I didn’t get rich.

However, I got tons of valuable learnings and experiences out of the whole thing. Today, I wouldn’t trade away those insights for nothing.

By taking risks where the worst-case scenario is still great, you can fail your way through life — and still come out on top. 

I have a huge whiteboard at home. I feel it helps my thinking if I can draw visuals and the bigger, the better.

One time, I listed my most significant life events.

As I looked upon these developments as bullets on the whiteboard, it occurred to me how much each of these life events had propelled my life and career forward.

But then I started looking at the time space between those events. And then I began to play with the idea of what my life would have been like if I had cut those time spaces in half.

For example:

At a particular job, I stayed for three years, but half of that would’ve sufficed. There was also a few relationship that I could’ve transitioned from sooner than I did. Things like that.

As I did the math there on the whiteboard, I realized I had “lost” seven years of my life, simply by postponing tough decisions for way too long.

The most important thing you can learn is to learn how to learn.

But the second most important thing you can learn is discipline. Few concepts are more misunderstood than what it means to be disciplined:

As human beings, we do lots of things that we don’t want to do. We spend energy, time and money we don’t want to spend. We fight over things we don’t want to fight over. We worry about things we shouldn’t worry about.

The list goes on and on. 

And then, on top of that, we have the things that we want to do, but don’t.

If you’re a disciplined person, you’ll get much more control over these things. And a better life as a result.

But here’s where it tends to go wrong for most people.

Most people believe that discipline is the act of forcing yourself to do things even if you aren’t up for it:

“If I force myself to do this today, then it might get easier tomorrow.”

I learnt discipline in the army. In the army, you don’t do things with the expectation that it will eventually become 'easier'. Because the more you can learn to handle today, the more you can take on tomorrow.

It’s not supposed to get easier; it’s supposed to get harder.

Professional fighters know this, also. Much of the battle is won during the years and months of meticulous preparations leading up to the fight.

With clear goals in highly competitive environments, the need for discipline emerges. Hence, discipline is nothing but the removal of everything that stands between you and your objectives.

Becoming more disciplined is not about summoning “strength of character” (whatever that is), but rather having the determination and accountability to remove all unnecessary distractions.

Motivation is something that has to come from within. No-one else but yourself can motivate you. 

What you might pick up from others is inspiration. 

Personally, I love feeling inspired. Unfortunately, inspiration always run out, sooner or later, and when it does, all you have left is your motivation to keep you going. 

If you were running only on inspiration in the first place, then you'll find yourself in big trouble.

If you're planning on starting a new habit or make a long-term change, make sure to find your motivation, rather than looking for inspiration externally. 

Trust me on this. I've started so many things based on inspiration, only to fail as soon as I find myself not being all that inspired anymore. 

Sometimes you hear about someone diagnosed with a terminal disease. That’s terrible, of course.

But I can’t come to terms with how people describe it: 

He or she is dying.

I don’t mean to sound callous, but who isn’t? On a large enough timeline, all our lives are but blinks of an eye.

Life is a terminal disease.

Sure, one of these days we might be able to download our brains onto hard drives and upload them into ‘younger’ homegrown genetic clones.

If so, my bet is that our biology will try to fight back. Of all the mutations Mother Nature has nurtured into survival advantages for various species, the one thing she’s never allowed for is cheating death. There must be a logical reason she hasn't tampered with that particular genetic switch.

Hence, I refuse to describe anyone as ‘dying’. Everyone is alive until they’re not. Dying, for lack of a better word, is redundant.

I think all of us should be more concerned with living a full life in a day than believing that anyone will live forever.

If nothing else, the fact that one's life is finite is the best reason I can think of to celebrate victoriously each second of drawing breath.