Christopher Maxwell

As the leaves begin to turn orange and red, and the leaves fall off the trees it’s mother earth giving us a cue to slow down and release what we no longer need to hold on to. For that reason, I’m slowing down for the winter as well. I hope you’ve been able to grow from my posts. I’ll see you in spring when it’s time to blossom and explore again.

Products exist to help us, whether that feeds our bellies or warms us, or at a higher level, helps us with our transcendence. The point of a product is not just to buy and be of no value. We buy products because they assist and aid us in our transformation. They help us get our jobs done better. When we get our jobs done better we can evolve and getter better results as long as the products work.

Addition by subtraction is a concept where you increase, addition, your results by removing unnecessary actions or things. By removing things you can increase the amount of focus and energy you put into the other things. This allows you to do the things which generate the most results and remove the things which don’t add results. When it comes to deciding what to remove, you look for asymmetrical values. You keep the actions that get 1 input and produce 10 output, of course, these numbers are, in this case, arbitrary and will depend on your situation.

Correcting errors usually take more time to fix than doing the thing properly. Rushing through things increases the likelihood of making a mistake. If this mistake or error makes you dependent on someone else it’ll take even longer. What might have taken five minutes if done correctly and thought about twice could end up taking hours just to correct, let alone all the stress and wasted thought which would be caused by thinking about how things went wrong and how you need to correct them.

Animals don’t live every day the same, they change their behavior based on environmental factors. The same with us humans, we need to change our behavior based on environmental factors. As humans, most of us do change our behavior based on the environment. But a lot of us in the western world are stuck in perpetual summer. We try to live every day like it’s a wonderful summer day, not because we want to wear shorts in the winter, but because we eat virtually the same foods every day, live the same routine, work the same hours, sleep the same hours.

Improving 1% every day for a year will lead to a total of 37 times improvement in just a year! Wherever your current situation, if you want to become a better version of yourself, there might be a giant gap. In order to bridge the gap between who you are and who you want to be you can accelerate this progress with compounding. First, we’ll look at what compounding is. After that, we’ll see how it applies to personal growth.

Your brain can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. We want to be clear-headed and present, but sometimes our mind thinks about all the things we need to get done and we get overwhelmed. In order for us to de-load our brains from information overload, we need to disconnect from the future and past for a while and connect with the present. First, we need to understand what stress is and how our minds can’t distinguish the difference between real physical stress and imagined stress.

Creating change requires you to know what that change is. Once you know what change looks like you need to know how you’ll get there from where you are now. One way is to come up with ideas on how to get there. Those ideas might come from yourself and your experiences. Or those ideas might come from someone else and their experiences. But those ideas are not always true. And even if they were true once upon a time, they might not be valid in this new situation or circumstance.

Humans are amazing creatures. We are capable of creating the most inspiring and jaw-dropping feats imaginable. However, a lot of the time we get stuck and don’t use our full potential. One way to get unstuck is to free up mental space and focus on what we humans are designed to do, create. What we often do is waste mental space on remembering things. Instead of using our mental capabilities for remembering things we should free it up to process things.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Become present, learn from your past, design your future.