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.
Legend
- 🏆 Top 10 most impactful in my life.
- 👍 Strongly recommend.
- ✍️ Story from my life.
- 🥧 Easy as pie.
- 🧠 Potential mindset shifter.
- 📖 Includes lessons from an excellent book.
- ♻︎ Habit challenge.
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. 🏆🧠📖
Take The Advent-ure Calendar Challenge
Like an advent calendar, except you get a surprise little challenge every weekday to jolt you out of complacency.
20 challenges. $20.
Fill your next month with adventure:
Society sands people smooth. I call it conformity waste.
The Zag is my running investigation into reversing it: decoding what makes you different and putting it to work. I publish what I find every 2 to 3 weeks. Zero spam.
About the author
I’m on an adventure developing better systems for understanding and designing around what makes each of us different. The Zag is where I share what I’m learning.
