Two friends and I are regularly publishing in our native Czech language on the TriStiri portal. Recently, we were thinking about two questions that may be interesting for everyone to contemplate. Let me share my answers here. What are yours? Would be great to hear your thoughts. How do you survive your life?

1. What have I learned last year?

2019 has been a great year for me and I hope for you too. I learned (more exactly started to learn, I will probably never master it at least not in this life…) Muay-Thai kick-box. Such amazing physical preparation, hard to find. Thanks to one of my best friends who convinced me to join him in Phuket. I also tried to learn skateboarding, nevertheless gave up after several fruitless attempts. One should know when to stop!

In terms of effectivity hacks, I learned how to use Trello, a software for project management – try it if you manage any projects (who does not?). Even our 12-years old daughter is on Trello now…my wife blatantly refuses though.

The most important learning of the last year is perhaps an ability to drop everything and leave for motorbike or sailing or whatever trip without any feeling of guilt that this or that item on the list is not finished. I realized that if we wait until everything is finished – we would never go anywhere! That would not be very clever way how to survive your life.

Last but not least, David, ex-CEO of 3M for Czech Republic and I developed a new leadership retreat concept ReCharge Spaces. The Czech edition of Forbes featured ReCharge Spaces in the January issue. Yay!

2. What are my New Year resolutions?

However disappointing, I don’t make any for many years now. What I do instead is look at the answers of several questions from the previous year, the questions that I ask myself every year. Then, I think about the answers to those same questions for the coming year and record them in Evernotes (another effectivity hack that I use regularly).

The questions were inspired by Greg McKeown. He suggests to make this mental exercise together with your partner, answer questions on your own first, then compare with your other half – what are the similarities. what are the differences, what is ‘the common agenda’ for life. I tried with my wife last year, she thinks it’s some kind of ‘coaching stuff’… Never mind, I like it!

Here are the questions, in case you want to give it a go:

1. What’s been going on in my life for the last year or two?
2. What did I like and am grateful for?
3. What did I not like and why?
4. What are the activities, states of mind or whatever that makes me feel fulfilled / happy?
5. What should be happening going forward in my life? What is really important & I am not doing enough? What should I stop doing starting from tomorrow?
6. What are the specific actions to take this year to make it great?

What do you think? Do you have any similar or completely different methodology to ‘design your life’ or using my hashtag to #surviveyourlife?

Discussing this topic – you may also like to have a look at one of my earlier posts Pyramid of Life: what is Learn-Enjoy-Live. OMG, I still had long hair back then…;)

All the best for 2020!

Dan

PS: In order to survive 2020 and beyond…you may find interesting a new series of Longevity articles that starts here.