Habit Domino, the simplest habit-forming/habit-tracking android app that could possibly work

What started out as an audacious idea inspired by a death in the family, to build a game-like habit-forming/habit-tracking android app (codenamed World of Doers), got refined into the simplest habit-forming/habit-tracking app that could possibly work.

The basic premise of Habit Domino is that once you've committed to forming a habit, the simple act of recording the routine and visiting the app once a day, has a sort of domino effect, driven by awareness and emotion, that gets you to complete the routine consistently till it turns into a habit.

No Graphs. No Reminders. Just commit to forming the habit and visit the app once a day.

Ask for what you want

I've noticed that in most situations my assumption that what I want won't be feasible (for my employer, family and friends, service providers, business partners)  is exaggerated and just plain wrong.

Have the clarity to know what you want and the courage to ask for it and more often than not you will get it.

Overcoming Fear

For most of my early years, I was afraid of the dark and would not move around the house at night. Till this one day I decided to face my fear and venture into the darkness, and realized that there was nothing there in the darkness to be afraid off. On the contrary, when my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw the house from a new perspective.

Over the years, I've overcome a lot of my fears (funny how every one of them seemed unsurmountable at the time) and each time discovered that when I faced my fear, it disappeared and gave way to a world of possibilities. With every fear that I overcame, I also uncovered a new layer of myself.

There are still a lot of things that I'm afraid off, that are keeping me from fulfilling my potential and experiencing all that life has to offer, but I'm going to take them on, one-by-one, because fear is suffocating; it restricts my creativity.

To be creative, I have to live in the moment, and fear will not let me do that, because fear has its roots either in past experiences or future consequences. Only by living in the moment; breaking free from the past and accepting the consequences of my actions, can I create something new.

Procrastination

Procrastination, it turns out, is an essential skill that we need to develop to accomplish things.

Most people that accomplish something, almost always achieve it by procrastinating lots of other things. So it's not procrastination that is bad, it's procrastinating the wrong things that needs to be fixed.

In the past, I've gone through phases where I do not have any goals (drifting) or phases where I have too many goals (distracted).

Without something to accomplish (drifting), I was procrastinating everything, and with too many things to accomplish (distracted), I was doing only the fun or easy things (instant gratification) and procrastinating everything else.

Here are the thumb rules I use now to figure out what to procrastinate:

1. Choose goals that you want to accomplish. Without goals you won't get anywhere. Duh!
2. If you came up with a lot of goals, get real and trim it down to 2-3 goals at max. If you think about it, most people that you look up to as achievers, have a single minded focus on only 1 or 2 goals.
3. Once you've chosen what you want to accomplish, procrastinate everything that does not help you accomplish it.
4. Life is too short for you not to get distracted by other things that give you instant gratification every now and again, so if you feel like breaking these rules sometimes, go for it - it doesn't mean you have to do it again tomorrow. Break it, enjoy it and move on.

Enough Money

There are two ways to make enough money to do the things that you want to do:

• Make more money
• Spend less money

A lot of people choose to make more money, which is fine if you plan on achieving it by increasing your Passive Income. The problem is, that people choose to make more money by trying to increasing their Active Income. This is a vicious circle.

Active Income requires a linear investment of time. If you want to make more money, you need to spend more time, and when you stop spending time towards making money, well, you don't make any. The more time you put in, the more stressed you get. The more stressed you get, the more money you need to spend to deal with it and maintain your new lifestyle, which in turn leaves you with not enough money. Sound familiar?

The approach of spending less money is chosen by very few people and is an option that almost no one thinks about. It forces you to really think about what you want to do with your life and choose a lifestyle that will allow you to accomplish that.

Passive Income

Financial independence is not about having more money, it's about having more time. More time to do the things that you want to do.

You only get a finite amount of time to spend in this life and with each passing moment, your time runs out. When you understand this fact of life, you realize that time is actually more valuable than money.

So, what do you want to do with your time?

I for one, want to do many things and travel the world, and one way to achieve this time and location independence would be with Passive Income, an income received on a regular basis, with little or no effort required to maintain it, i.e., money received with a non-linear investment of time.

Passive Income is the opposite of Active Income, an income that is received with a linear investment of time, e.g., charging by the hour like in consulting, working for a monthly salary or selling stuff (handicraft, food) you create by hand. Since your directly trading time for money, if you stop investing the time, you stop making money.

From the above, it should be obvious that focusing on Passive Income is a better investment of the finite time you have.

Here are some examples of Passive Income generators:

• Information Products (e-books, audio/video tutorials)
• Software Products
• Royalties  (Books, Photographs, Music, Patents)
• Rental property

Directing Attention

Its astonishing, how little control we exercise in directing our attention. We usually let it go where it wants to; attracted, demanded or manipulated by external sources.

Today, on my way to work, I chose to direct my attention to the shadows cast by the late afternoon sun. I noticed the beautiful silhouettes made by the shadows of trees, flags and the birds flying above. They were always there, but I had never seen them before.

Its scary the amount of detail our senses leave out.

The Art of Achieving

In a cafe mocha (from Barista of course) induced moment of clarity in the middle of the night this Monday (22 Feb, 2010) , I finally understood why, for a while now, I've had this nagging running-in-place-and-not-getting-anywhere feeling. With this new insight, I came up with a simple Personal Accomplishment System for myself. I'll be posting more on this soon, but first I need to check if it works for me.

Work Life Balance

The Four-Day Week Challenge

A lot of the constraints and barriers we place on ourselves are completely unnecessary and even worse, keep us from being happy. My hope is that taking the Four-Day Challenge will help you enjoy life more and pursue what really matters to you.