I love both researching and writing. It would be lovely if I could sit and do it all day, but I can’t. Like many of you, I have to connect my writing journey with other financial areas. That’s why I’m looking for various systems and methods to enhance the writing process.

I’m freelancing since 2015, and I always created lots of spreadsheets filled with the data. That’s my little obsession. Mostly I track time and earnings to calculate the hourly rate and measure my efficiency in the way.

In the first months of writing, my hourly rate was awful. I’m…

Perfectionism is a common problem that we somehow define as an advantage, e.g., on a job interview. For me, it’s a serious mistake, and I would define it as a “progress killer,” but let’s look at Dictionary definition:

a personal standard, attitude, or philosophy that demands perfection and rejects anything less.

The definition indicates our choice while psychology sees it as a “personality trait,” WebMD states:

Perfectionism is a personality style in which a person is overly critical of his or her own performance. …

We often say that everyone wants to succeed. But, what does it even mean?

The Dictionary gives a few definitions of “success,” let’s take the first two:

1. The favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors; the accomplishment of one’s goals.

2. The attainment of wealth, position, honors, or the like.

Unfortunately, as a west world society, we choose and praise the second. We put on the pedestal individuals who achieve wealth and fame — take a look at our celebrities. But do we all want such “success?”

Let’s start with a basic understanding. Don’t think of other people…

Fitness

I’m not writing about the benefits of being Hulk Hogan in his prime, but benefits from hour-long workout 2–3 times a week on a casual level.

We usually start exercising to boost self-confidence, to look and feel better. But aside from new photos on Instagram and more pairs on Tinder, we gain much more enhancements to everyday life that are less visible.

I see that on my example as I have never done any strength exercises until I was 23. In my teenage years, I was playing games or partying, and when it comes to training, I preferred, e.g., soccer…

Writing

A cup of coffee, serious look out the window, and emptiness in the head:

I don’t know what I’m going to write today.

Every coming idea seems stupid, useless, boring, outdated, etc.

Time is running short, and we start stressing — the panic slowly arises. We jump to writing, trying to break creative blockade but delete line after line. Everything around annoys us. We know that we will not make it, yet we are punishing ourselves because we swore we would publish daily.

As a result, our motivation meets the ground, and the day is horrible, at least the “working/creative”…

Personal Growth

The popularity of chess skyrocket in recent times. It’s mainly because of the ongoing pandemic where all games benefit, as we can say from statistics of a leading streaming platform — Twitch. Theverg summarizes:

Twitch had a good 2020. Events were virtual; people stayed inside. The live-streaming site managed to clock 17 billion hours watched last year, which is a full 83 percent higher than 2019’s 9 billion, according to the latest report from StreamElements and Arsenal.gg.

Chess is one of the most viewed categories on the platform in the period.

The next reason is the huge success of The…

What is wisdom? Oxford dictionary gives a very straight definition:

Wisdom is the ability to make sensible decisions and give good advice because of the experience and knowledge that you have

That indicates the practical use of knowledge, not only having it, which is not always the case. We can gather lots of information from books or articles, but not many people can use knowledge, so as not to become a snob, but wise.

Once I heard that wisdom for intelligent people is an ability to understand what motivates people from “non-intelligent” circles. So-called “elites” fail on that part strongly…

Productivity

I am a freelancer since 2016, working mostly in digital marketing. During those years, I went through many ups and downs in my work efficiency.

I remember a 20-years-old version of me when I couldn’t organize myself, so I was “working” whole days with trembling hands from too much caffeine.

As a 22-year old, I started creating highly complicated plans, mostly in google sheets — charts, progress bars, conditional functions, reminders, data from other sources, etc. It ended up sitting each morning for up to 40 minutes filling all the data.

There was also a time where I tried to…