Ideas For Taking Your Life in Extraordinary Directions

My goal with The Zag is to help you enjoy an extraordinary life by resisting the suck of the status quo.

Every ten(-ish) days, I share a new idea in my “Consider This” newsletter.

But why wait?

Here’s a slew of my most extraordinary ideas.

Strategies

Before making any change, consider these frameworks. They help you pick the right intervention and achieve the results you want. 

• My top 40 rules to live by, ranked.
• Learn the physics of comfort zone expansion.
• Rather than get out of your comfort zone, make it sweat.
• Diagnose the ruts you’re in.
• Accept you can’t do anything you put your mind to.
• Choose radically moderate goals for optimum efficiency.
• Devise a “life workout plan” for yourself.
• Focus on systems over goals. 
• Create a 30-day challenge anti-failure plan.
• Do the opposite of minimizing regrets.
• Tend to a flourishing “garden” of daily habits.
• Pump up your flatness for more enjoyment.
• Fill your dream life with desirable difficulties.
• Define your “perpetually perfect day.”

Extraordinary Physical Health

• Brush your body with daily mobility. ♻︎
• Try the Alexander Technique to use your body more effortlessly. ♻︎✍️
• Ditch the gym to work out outside. 🏆
• Speed up your strength development with sprinting.
• Lift and throw rocks for fitness.
• Don’t eat anything for a long time. ✍️♻︎🏆
• Go for a barefoot walk. 🥧
• Go for an urban hike. ✍️👍
• Begin training to be an “old-lympian.” 🧠
• Replace your fitness routine with your lifestyle. ♻︎
• See if sleeping on the floor might loosen you up. ✍️
• Re-condition yourself to breathe through your nose. 👍♻︎✍️📖
• Set an accurate baseline with a DEXA scan. 

Extraordinary Relationships

• Focus on being uniquely useful. 📖🧠
• Show appreciation every day for a month. ✍️👍
• Try a 2-hour cocktail party. 📖
• Make someone’s day by asking them for help (the right way). 📖
• Host a “Priya Parker” dinner party. 👍📖
• Plan an unconventional wedding. ✍️
• Use W.A.R.T. to treat your nasty nagging habit. 
• Try the belief remodeling approach to change minds. 📖
• Learn the basics of giving expert massages. 
• Exchange daily gratefuls with your partner. 🏆♻︎✍️
• Give better gifts than Santa. 📖 
• Help others work better with you by providing them with your personal user manual.
• Become a parent. 

Extraordinary Adventures

• Experience the “3-day effect” of escaping into the wild. 🏆✍️📖
• Capture memories with a rap video. ✍️
• Conduct a blind taste test. 👍🥧
• Acquire the taste for a food you hate. 👍✍️
• Eat something messy with your hands. 🥧
• Create a palate-training regimen. ✍️📖
• Be a real man and pee sitting down at home. ♻︎🥧
• Change how you use toilet paper. ♻︎🥧
• Get more out of life by living between two cities. 
• Travel off-the-beaten path to transform yourself. 🏆✍️

Extraordinary Learning

• Create your own info-ligion. 🧠✍️
• Reformulate your information diet. 👍♻︎✍️🧠
• Think about your problem in many different ways. 🥧🧠
• Do a pod-fast. ♻︎✍️
• Read a “sledgehammer” book. 📖
• Practice the “inner game” strategies to learn with more ease. 📖🧠
• Challenge your news consumption with these thought experiments. ♻︎📖🧠
• Do these exercises to actively stretch your mind open. 👍🧠

Extraordinary Career & Finances

• Work toward affording patience to explore the extraordinary. 👍🧠
• Ask yourself these questions about your career choice. 🧠
• Plan a career break. 
• Rather than wait for retirement, pretire. 🏆✍️
• Assess your financial introversion/extraversion, then work with it. 🧠

Extraordinary Productivity

• Stop working and start performing. 👍♻︎
• Keep a log of everything you do. 🏆♻︎✍️
• Consider these 10 “time bombs.” 🧠
• Take the “keep it in your pants challenge” to look at your phone less. 👍♻︎✍️
• Schedule “pre-fun” into your life to accomplish more important but not urgent things. ✍️🥧
• Get more of what you really want by asking two simple questions. ♻︎✍️🥧
• Try these easy but productive things to do when you’re feeling lazy. 🥧
• Find and remove your “life whacks,” the opposites of life hacks.
• Apply these to-do list dos and don’ts.
• Begin evolving a system for organizing your life. 🏆♻︎✍️
• Limit yourself to a four-day workweek. ✍️

Extraordinary Sense of Self

• Swallow advice you need but don’t want to hear. ✍️
• Perform a “snakes & ladders” big decision audit. ✍️
• Look beyond what scares you most in life. 🧠
• Find and release self-limiting handbrakes. 🧠
• Gift your future self a reality check. 🏆
• Set your direction with a GPS (general personal strategy). 📖
• Define your own way to keep score in life. 🧠
• Set your own definition of “winning at life.” 🧠
• Draft a not-so-corny personal mission statement. 🧠
• Try these exercises to improve your relationship with your future self. 🧠 
• Apply a simple storytelling framework to your life. 🏆🧠📖