I’ve been particularly impressed by the chapter in Steve Pavlina’s book “Personal Devleopment for Smart People” on Love. He introduced me to the concept of connection with the people, activities and things in my life. I am always choosing to connect with something or another, consciously or not. By improving the things I choose to connect with I can dramatically improve the quality of my life.

What are you connecting with in your life? Run through this exercise to find out if you are wasting your time on things that are not improving your quality of life or empowering you in some way.

You are choosing to connect with something, some attitude, person, thing, etc all the time. Are you doing it consciously and choosing things that are empowering or things that weaken you? Are you choosing to let petty excuses defeat you and allow you to settle for less? Lets find out.

Write down all of the things you choose to connect with over the course of a week:
Something you connect with includes any activity you engage in, and thoughts you routinely think, people you interact with, etc

Here are some of the things I connect in a given week:

• Video games (I like Enemy Territory)
• TV shows on hulu.com (usually crime shows)
• news sites  (reddit)
• social media websites (facebook, twitter)
• misc. web browsing looking for something interesting (delicious.com/popular)
• cooking lunch or dinner with my wife
• listening to podcasts about business (internet business mastery, mixergy, other paid courses)
• blogs (personal development blogs like stevepavlina.com, finance blogs like iwillteachyoutoberich.com, internet business blogs like smartpassiveincome.com, Seth Godin’s blog, and many others)
• consulting clients, including one primary client and several smaller clients
• new technical material (blogs, how-to’s, books, etc)
• idle chatting with friends (best case) or complaining with friends about whatever (worst case)
• writing down ideas as they come to me throughout my workday
• checking email
• worrying about whether or not I will be successful
• day dreaming and looking at shiny things I want to acquire
• thinking about what I really want to accomplish and identifying the blockers to it and systematically removing them

There are quite a few things there – lets ask ourselves if these activities are empowering or weakening me?

Video games, day dreaming, worrying, tv shows, idle chat, incessant checking of email, news, and social media sites are pretty obvious examples of weakening connections. There are a several more things that are stealth weakeners though – things that on the surface appear to be useful or important but really aren’t doing much at all (in fact are just serving as fuel to further delude yourself with.) such as:

Most reading that is unfocused or without specific intent; always looking out for the next personal development, marketing, or personal finance tidbit that will make me successful. If you’re anything like me you either have in the past or currently read at least 10 articles every week, buy multiple paid courses and read through them as fast as possible, minimizing the actions taken, and finding reasons to fail or why it doesn’t work for me.

Continuing to work with the wrong clients (even if they pay in a timely fashion, etc) is hurting you in the long run if it is doing something you don’t want to be doing.

Think about what you are choosing to connect with – you can’t connect with everything. Make damn sure that you are connecting with things that further empower you to achieve your dreams, and let the thoughts, things, activities, and people that drag you down fall out of connection with you.

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