“I, Human” Collection — The Overachiever
By: Luca Rossi
Tags: Success, Personal Development, Productivity, Self Improvement, Life

Habits, Routine, and Productivity

I’m not a big fan of plans and goals, because life is too uncertain and unpredictable. In order to be a real overachiever, you should adopt a bottom-up approach, directing your focus to your daily habits.

The outcomes of your habits build up day after day, yielding immense returns over the long term. It’s up to you whether these daily outcomes are good or bad.

This story has been published on Better Humans, but it’s too related to the others to be ignored. If the lockdown did a good thing for me, it was giving stability and structure to my routine. I started focusing on good habits that could be easily included in my day until they became my second nature.

In this story, I share my daily routine while giving you a blueprint to build one for yourself.

Every year, on June 3rd, I receive an email. It comes from my past self. In one year, some things change a lot, some things stay the same, some things change slowly, some things change fast.

Reading from another you can really mess with your mind in a good way. In this story, I show you what I learned from writing to my future self every year, and why you should do it too.

If you are reading this, chances are that your interest in self-development, at some point, led you to the discovery of mindfulness meditation. You tried it on your own. Sometimes it feels good, sometimes it feels boring, but most times you can’t do it at all.

I was in the same place, until I discovered that not only it’s okay to suck at meditation, but you are supposed to. In this story, I show you the real purpose of (secular) meditation, and how you can do it effectively.

This is another story I published on Better Humans. When we procrastinate, we often attribute it to a lack of willpower, but this is not always the case. You can have all the willpower you want, but there are more subtle reasons why we can procrastinate.

In this story, I show you the 4-step process to locate and eradicate these causes. I also argue that procrastination can be good, and sometimes you should channel it instead of repress it.

This is hands down my most idiotic story so far, after this one. This is the story of that time when I bought a rubber pirate duck and tried to hit on the cute cashier in the process.

While narrating this absurd sequence of events, I talk about the Socratic Method and explain why you should buy a rubber duck yourself and talk to it.

Back to serious stories and the problem of procrastination. What if willpower is the issue? What if you feel so stuck in work and life that you can’t find the motivation to accomplish anything?

In this story, I show you a technique I use in those days when I feel extremely unmotivated, when I feel like my life goals and my daily work are unaligned. The secret is to step back, look at the whole picture, and get control over your life in a fun way.

If you find yourself giving up on your second drink because you don’t have enough money, consider this. That second drink is not the problem. Your whole approach to saving is.

What you have been taught about saving is probably inefficient and ineffective. I call it a saving lifestyle. In this story, I argue that the saving lifestyle is ineffective, and I show you the two most effective ways to save money.

Many problems in life can be solved with randomness. By using lists and a Random Number Generator (RNG), you can accelerate your decision making, beat procrastination, work on long-term neglected issues, improve your creativity, and do many other things.

This is not a magical solution to all your problems, but it can considerably help, and in this story I show you how.