On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

BREAKING NEWS!
Today, a Dutch bloke that goes by hard to pronounce name of Lodewijk, supposedly broke a chain of over 100 days of not running. Today at about 6:07am he tweeted ” off for a morning run“.

So he said it, but did he also do it? Stay with us to find out, after the break.

Blog performance

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging the past few days. I already wrote about my feelings in Birth of a Blogger, and my decision there is right, but incomplete. Even after deciding to start another blog, I’ve been not so satisfied with myself. I’ve got the feeling that I’m holding myself back by the way I defined this blog. Anyway, I’ll post about it this week. I started to write here, but it was getting too much to fit into a weekly review.

The stats are looking good. Subscribers up again (when will I break through the glass ceiling of 1000 subscribers?). The daily visitors are nice, especially when you know that there is NO stumbleupon traffic there this week. They used to be my biggest source of visitors, but what you see here is search engine traffic and referral traffic from other blogs. Technorati is still on a downward slope. Oh well, it’s great skiing on slopes.

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Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility. - Albert Einstein

Everyday people from all layers of society are using a variety of techniques to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These techniques can be classified as evasion, avoidance, denial or even obstruction of responsibility. They might seem to accomplish this, but they don’t help you forward in any way. And…c’mon, if you’re doing it, it doesn’t feel all that good, now does it?

In this post we’re going behind the scenes to take a look at the dynamics of why people shy away from responsibility. We’re also taking a look at what reality looks like as a result. And there’s also a sneak preview of what that reality would look like if you change the meaning of reponsibility.

Not all responsibilities are created equal

Everybody is responsible for something. A lot of the responsibilities are acquired, but the responsibility for your own life is definitely yours to take. Yet even though it’s the core responsibility, a lot of people shy away from that one too. To understand why people do this we need to understand the underlying thought processes.

Responsibility is a concept, it’s not tangible and as such we cannot see, hear or touch it. The meaning of these conceptual words (meta model words in NLP) is learned by experience, usually early in life during childhood. At one time a situation happened and you learned the meaning of that word “responsibility”. That very situation is now attached as a subconscious “video”, whenever you hear that word. New situations get added to that meaning as you progress through life, but you mainly build upon that first experience.

Unfortunately that first experience is usually a negative one. Something went wrong and someone was held responsible for it. Or maybe worse…you were held responsible for it. And you learned something: responsibility is no fun!

If you’re lucky, you learned the meaning of responsibility while you were receiving praise. Someone praised you for a good result and told you you were responsible for that wonderful result. It happens, but it’s rare. But it results in a totally different notion of responsibility and a very different attitude towards it.

The dynamics of avoiding responsibility

So it’s not a very pleasant word for most of us. It gets worse though, as we grow older we learn that being responsible for something also means that we are supposed to take control. And when we take control, we will be held accountable by someone else if it’s an acquired responsibility (e.g. your job). And we learn that being held accountable is no fun either. Painful at times even.

Chain of associations

1. Responsibility = being in control
2. Being in control = being held accountable
3. Being held accountable = painful
4. Pain = no good

The resulting chain of association gets stronger, and is reinforced by an instinctive mechanism: Pain avoidance. People are natural pain avoiders, it’s even genetically programmed into our system:

Pain is part of the body’s defense system, triggering a reflex reaction to retract from the painful stimuli, and helps adjust behaviour to increase avoidance of that particular harmful situation in the future.
- excerpt from Pain @ Wikipedia

So it’s not really the responsibility we’re avoiding, but the pain we have associated with it.

Changing the paradigm

Avoiding the pain might work on a short term. Yet at the same time we also know when we should’ve taken responsibility and didn’t, and that resulted in another not-so-nice feeling. And you’re not getting anywhere too.

It’s better to change the paradigm, to lose the association between responsibility and pain. We saw earlier on that it’s possible to have a positive meaning or association with the word responsibility. So we’re going to work on getting more of the positive associations and less of the negative. Easier said than done, right? It’s not really that hard, trust me. We’re just going to stop using the word ‘responsibility’.

The negative assocations we have with that word are too strong to ignore. We can’t just lose them, since we spent so many years training and reinforcing them. And ‘responsibility’ is a nasty word anyway, it’s so passive. It’s derived from ‘to respond’ and you can’t respond unless there’s an outside trigger. We need to find an active synonym.

Taking credit for results is an active formulation. “I take credit!” is something you can say proactively, you don’t have to respond, you can take the initiative. Good? Not yet, better but not good enough. Because ‘credit’ is a nasty word as well, with way too many unpleasant associations. Let’s replace it with ‘merit’, that’s a pleasant and positive word.

So along those lines, we will replace ‘responsible‘ with ‘meritable‘.

Now change your vocabulary!

Feels like playing with words? True, but we’re really going to replace it in our language. Whenever you hear responsible, replace it with meritable when you listen. Whenever you want to say responsibility, say meritability instead. It will feel awkward at first, but you’ll notice the impact instantly.

Suddenly things that you associated with pain, become areas where you can deserve praise for. It’s an opportunity to create, to do something good, to score. It’s fun again! And if you keep it up long enough, you will end up reinforcing positive associations that will even replace the negative associations of ‘responsible’. In time even that word will be safe to use again.

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

Blog performance

I hope you enjoyed the post about passwords. I had that post in draft for a while before I decided to finally finish it and publish it. I have more posts like that…draft status, needing more time to really finish them. This week I probably won’t be publishing a lot too, because the renovation project (see next section) needs a lot of attention this week also.

Here are the stats: subscribers up, the rest stable.

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Passwords! My God, don’t you need a frigging shitload of them these days? I have a love/hate relationship with Digg, I keep forgetting the password I have there (it’s because they don’t allow special characters like ? @ ! &), forcing me to go through the annoying process of resetting it, confirming that via email, rethinking a new password, working my way through all the errors caused by special characters, compromising me in a password that I’m bound to forget again.

I was listing the passwords I use online, and it was plain scary. The list is enormous, and I haven’t even finished it yet (scroll down for the list). Argh!

A lot of them share passwords, because my brain capacity is limited (or I’m just too lazy to have different ones for each site). Most of them I use only once in a while, but some of them I use daily. And these are where you can put your passwords to work for you. You can turn them into a fun and productive event, rather than an annoying but necessary event.

Passwords you use frequently, should change frequently as well (how annoying is that!?). And they should be strong passwords too, if you care about the content they are protecting (or to satisfy the IT guidelines). This can sometimes be a real challenge, but with these simple tips you can turn them into assets, instead of a nuisance.

List your goals

This is something I’ve used a lot. Whatever goals you have, use them for your passwords. I’ve used passwords like:

• Finish2ndFloor!
• GrowBlogNow
• Get2500RSS

They’re pretty strong passwords, and when you’re typing them you get reminded instantly of what you want to achieve.

Prevent pitfalls of bad habits

When you log into one of your biggest time wasters for instance (IM, gaming, Twitter, Facebook, whatever), remind yourself that it’s a time waster. Use a passwords like:

• OneHourIsEnough (upper and lower case, not too bad)
• RUsure? (special character added, pretty strong)
• 1h=Q2>1h=Q4 (yay, Covey in action with a very strong password)

Learn spelling

Pick a word you have trouble spelling word and use that as a password. The sheer repetition will make sure you’ll never spell it wrong again.
Examples: Definitely - Opthalmology - Massachusetts - Prolificacy

Learn (a couple of words in) a foreign language

It can be fun to add some foreign words to your vocabulary. Want to know how to say beer in 20 langauges? Just look them up and use them as passwords:

• Spanish:Cerveza
• French:Biere (okay, accents are a problem)
• Italian:Birra

Or use the real translation:

• Merde=Damn
• Giornale=Newspaper
• Freizeit=LeisureTime

Extend your vocabulary

Use a new word and it’s meaning as the password. The trick is to find synonyms here, because the dictionary meanings tend to be long.

• Prolificacy=Fruitfulness
• Defiance=Resistance
• Superfluous=Redundant

Use affirmations

Affirmations are a popular technique to get you (back) in a productive state, or a harmonious state or whatever state you want to be in. In a lot of self improvement books the use of positive affirmations is advocated, but how often are you going to sit and read them out loud to yourself?

But if you use them as your passwords, you will repeat them often. Some examples:

• I’mFinanciallyFree
• IAm@Peace
• MyBodyVibratesWithEnergy

Have fun!

Admitted, it’s only a microhack. It’s not going to massively change your world, make you more productive, increase your IQ, expand your network or whatever. But it turns passwords into fun, and you might also learn something.

The sites I need passwords for:
So far I have: StumbleUpon, Digg, LinkedIn, Plaxo Pulse, Facebook, Twitter, Twitterfeed (via OpenID), Reddit, Gaia (former Zaadz), MyBlogLog, WordPress.com, How to be an Original (admin interface), WordPress DIY (admin interface), Feedburner, Joe’s Goals, Flickr, iStockPhoto, several bank accounts (4), Paypal, Neteller, Dutch State Lottery, Gmail (google, thanks for sharing passwords across ALL services!!), Lotus Notes at work, Hosting at Argeweb, Hosting at GoDaddy, Cell phone account at Orange (2), Internet Provider, alumni network of former employer, bol.com, Amazon, Text Link Ads, Linkworth, YouTube, Revver, several online poker accounts (pokerstars, partypoker, and the likes) and counting…

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits? 

Blog performance

This week I’ve been writing more than I have in a long time. I did not publish a lot yet, because some posts are not finished yet and others will not appear on this blog. But the creative juices are flowing again, and that’s a great feeling!

The blog statistics are encouraging too. Visitors and subscribers are up, as is the participation level of commenters on the blog. I love that!

Technorati is down again, which means that other bloggers are not posting links on their blogs to How to be an Original. We all like the link love, but it’s not the most important thing out there. Readers come first on my list, so the drop in Technorati Authority doesn’t bother me that much.

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