In various books, the 10.000h rule circulates again and again to learn something new. It takes incredibly many hours to learn something really well from 0 on. Josh Kaufmann proves that 20h is enough to reach a good level, as long as you only focus on the absolute basics.
My friend and I considered 5 km jogging as impossible for a long time, as it was always the case at school that the coupe test with its 30 minutes jogging through at a time was the purest torture every year anew. Now we are jogging 10 km for fun without giving it much thought. Started with 10 minutes three times a week.
This post is about a small guideline which I think is very interesting and which I will test for myself in the next weeks.
Skills that really have live changing characteristics and are lived by many high performers:
Learning to learn
Public Speaking
meditation
Forming good habits
good listening to others
Mathematical thinking
Coordination and flexibility
In this post, I will deal with meditation.
Meditation
Many books that speak of life-changing actions, with little time involved, almost always include meditation. Who takes the time to think of nothing for 15 minutes? We are driven by push messages that always keep us on a level of information. Even if they are not really important and keep us from what we are doing.
I had my first experience with meditation during my studies when I let my cousin, who learned hypnosis, hypnotize me for fun. Afterward, we meditated together. Even though I felt fresh and full of energy afterward, I did not pursue this technique any further. That was about 2.5 years ago.
For beginners, a guided meditation is recommended, because it is very difficult or impossible at the beginning to fade out or switch off the thoughts directly. It’s okay to just notice your thoughts at the beginning and perhaps steer them in the desired direction. Meditation, as well as jogging, takes only a few minutes a day and despite its advantages, many of us do not take this time.
The goal of mediation is to order thoughts and become clear. It takes some time to learn this ability. Many do not try and go directly to the next topic – hey a new cat video has been uploaded to Youtube.
In the beginning, it is difficult to concentrate only on breathing. No matter how strange it feels, the emotions must not reach the head, we want to control it. The more we practice, the better we become in it.
Important: create an undisturbed environment. Free from a mobile phone or a person who only needs something in the next few minutes. Meditation doesn’t have to take place sitting down, it can also be lying down, as I preferred in my first session. It was simply more comfortable.
The first 8 hours of this training session:
20 minutes of meditation for the next 24 days.
Since we always have to control ourselves, I will collect my results here and write the days down:Â Doku
Since I read Tim Ferri’s “4h working week”, I document all my self-tests in order to lie less to myself and to look back on the past days.
Things where meditation can change life:
- faster falling asleep with better sleep quality
- stress reduction
- the clearer the emotions, the body, and the mind become. From all this follows a better decision making.
- Context change: many of us work in parallel on countless things and meditation should help us to approach these topics in a better-structured way.
What resources can I use?
Guided meditation from UCLA-Health
For my German colleagues:
7-Mind
As always thanks for reading and have a nice day 🙂