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.

I even know by careful reasoning what the actual effect is on my life to NOT do those things, in the sense that I know I could be missing out on all kinds of life improvements and happiness. That isn’t always enough for me either. I don’t think it’s enough for anyone to look at a calculation and see that eating out costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars 30 years from now to get them to stop doing it.

But why not? Theoretically I know I would rather have the hundreds of thousands of dollars vs any given meal out. Because of this, I don’t think the loss of perceived opportunity or future gain is enough to motivate you to take action consistently.

It’s like the lazy lurker that just wants you to coast along instead of really push yourself to achieve. Everyone does this because of several reasons, which I believe partly include the following:

1. you think you can always ‘make up for lost time’
2. the cost in your current quality of life is greater than the perceived benefit down the road
3. you want something NOW

Luckily, I have a guaranteed way to defeat your own worst enemy (yourself).

Make it impossible to fail by increasing the pain of failure. Tony Robbins talks about linking pain to certain activities you’d like to stop doing. How I actually applied that, was to create myself a 30 day challenge – I increased the cost of failure, and so I succeeded.

I made an agreement with my friend Lars that I would do several things, and for each failure to do one of those things, I would pay him $50. The things I decided to take on were going to bed by 10pm, waking up by 7AM, and working 8 hours every day, including weekends. I do not recommend the same things. At the time when I took this upon myself I decided I needed to convince myself that I was capable of working hard, given the right motivation to do so. Indeed, I was capable.

It was exhausting, but also tremendously empowering at the same time. I knew I could do anything and succeed at it, by simply increasing the cost of failure. I’m working on some new challenges for myself that are longer term, and more sustainable. The biggest mistake in that first challenge I did, was that the cost was great on both sides – hard to fail because I didn’t want to keep paying out, and hard to succeed because I was burning out.

A couple more things I learned:

• Taking massive action is not the same as creating the results you desire. I was realizing that I was doing so much every day, but I found myself filling up my day with non important work when I had to fill my quota. I was confusing motion with action.
• Working 8 hours every weekend day is not a good idea – especially because of the reduced time I had to spend with my wife and friends.
• Working hard is still tremendously valuable – I (l)earned more in those 30 days than I did in any other month. I earned quite a bit from consulting, but even more valuable was everything I learned doing the experiment. If you read a book one page at a time you will learn much slower than if you read it several pages in one sitting.

So the open rate stats are probably underreported. I’m not sure exactly by how much. To increase the response rate, you need to give your reader a reason to turn images on. Perhaps include a graph, or some other image that adds to the content of the email. Or even a superfluous image of a cat with a line underneath it saying “If you can’t see this cute cat, turn on images in your email client”. If you can increase the value to your customers with images, it will increase their value to you as well.