As a practitioner of Stoicism, I fully embrace the idea of using a death timer as a tool for self-reflection and personal growth. The reminder of our own mortality is a powerful motivator for living in the present moment and making the most of our time on earth.

In my own life, I use a death timer as a reminder to stay focused on what’s important and to avoid getting caught up in the distractions of daily life. It helps me to maintain a sense of perspective and to stay grounded in my values and priorities.

I also believe that the death timer can be a valuable tool for developing the Stoic virtues of courage, wisdom, and justice. By accepting the reality of our own mortality, we can build a greater sense of inner strength and resilience, and be better equipped to handle life’s challenges with grace and fortitude.

Overall, I believe that the death timer is a simple but powerful tool for living a Stoic life and for making the most of our time on this earth. So if you’re looking for a way to stay focused, cultivate inner peace, and live a more meaningful life, I highly recommend giving this practice a try.

“We don’t beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well.”

I downloaded an app called time until, it counts down important dates, but I count my potential death, ticking at 15053 Days, ending August 2061.

This reminds me:

Fate is not bias, oppourtunities will come, if they don’t, I’ll be as content, as I am doing this myself and my spiritual growth.

 I might die tomorrow,the Clock is inaccurate. Life is unexpected, there is no security we will live till 50, 60, or 70, dont plan like we do.

as If there is no legacy I can leave behind, how can life be meaningfull, I am but a small part of the vast history of human kind, and after a large enough span, I wouldn’t make a difference if I have lived or not, if I don’t contribute anything significant. History only remembers the Einsteins and aureliuses of their era.

I was desperate to please society, like an unloved child his strict father, and this made me easily waver by society, life is, once again, out of my control.

I should care about my life, like you should yours, and the people and society I with to help, theirs.

So after 8760 days of life, I can finally say, today I lived.

Hopes this helps, I was stuck until recently, when I started my journey on self actualization, I found so many new things I should be doing, got hooked on the idea that being a human positive.

Naturally with great ambition, I wanted to be like vision and Tim ferris or Elon musk, people who have a significant impact in the world

That is when I got lost, as the pressure of succeeding in this journey paralyses me. (long story short) I realise that some things are out of my control and the only way I can truly live life is to accept that:

To be a human positive, it is ta way of life and I should be just as content to serve neighbours as the community.

Fate is not bias and there are times when the oppourtunities will come, but if they don’t, I will be just as content, as i am doing this for non other than myself and my spiritual growth.

This clock will not be accurate, I might die tomorrow, a powerful fact i want to remind myself. Life is unexpected, there is no security we will live till 50, 60, or 70, but why save up so that we can retire at an age we are not sure we will reach.

That is when is started my asking quest,

Out of the 24 years of my life, that is 8760 days, how much is something I call my own?

I survived for 9 thousand days but only a fraction is my own. All the days spent gaming, caring for people’s feelings, getting drunk, cut them out, what is left?

What if, I invested all those time to growing myself, I might be sombody already.

If I were to die tomorrow, and my life flashes by me, what would be highlighted?

This became my north star, thou my life direction change, the end goal is the same, to be a human positive in the world.

Fate might give me the chance to lead a cause, like vision or tim or seth godin, but if fate left me with 5 of my closest friends and family, equally content, as this is not about the stage, it is about to live. the things out of my control should be just that, out of my control.

That way, I would be like how I just started, eager to please and easily wavered by society, as in truth, you should care about living your life and me mine, that is already a lifetime challenge.

the service of a good citizen is never useless: being heard and seen, he helps by his expression, a nod of his head, a stubborn silence, even his gait.

if he is not, so be it, as the reason is to satisfy the soul

So that I be who I inspire to be, and have no regrets as I have lived life to the fullest, even if I die.

I used to be so afriad of starting the wrong thing.

At the age of 22 YO, the taught of spending potentially 10% (2 to 5 years) of my life on a business is to me at the time, a big decision.

Everything needs to be right, it must be the ONE. 

That is what led to alot of procrastination and hesitation. 

If there is one thing i could change looking back, life would movce so much better if i treat things like a series of adventure/projects i am embarking on.

The personal affliation mindset ” I want to be a marketer” I want to be Y, sets us in our little box to begin with. ]

Whats the alternative to ask?
Well, what do i fell Strongly that i wouldnt mind giving it a go?

It’s very tempting to do it only when you need it to either fire or get opinions of the team, but this not work for very long.

If you want to build a talent centric company, you need to show them that you actually care fortheir well being, not just a method to get excuses to fire someone.

Because after a few times, your employees will realise after every review their friends got into trouble.

How would that effect the answers they give you?

360Evaluation Template: Peer Evaluation

This is what we use for our company at Horizn, Page and other companies to evaluate the team.

1) Does this person exhibits leadership qualities in his role in the Company? Why?

2) Rate the leadership Qualities 1 to 10 (no 7).
* 7 is a very safe number, because its nottoo low or too high, its best to get them to choose between 6 or 8, which is, an A or a C

3) When this person works with coworkers, what interpersonal skills does he demonstrates?

4) Rate the interpersonal performance from 1 to 10.

5) Does this Employee Effectively solves problems? Give a case scenario for your answer.

6) How good is his problem solving skills from 1 to 10

7) Does this person seem to be motivated in doing his work related task, job, and relationship?

8) Rate Their Motivation Score from 1 to 10.

9) Are the persons work method and approach to accomplishing his effective, efficient and continuously improving? justify

10) Rate his Growth Rate

11) Give him an overall score of performance from 1 to 10.

12) What do you think he should improve on?

 360Evaluation Template: Self Assestment

This is what we use for our company at Horizn, Page and other companies to evaluate themselves.

1) Name three things you have done really well in the last 3 months? Why do you think those were successful?

2) Are you exhibiting leadership qualities in the Company? Why?

3)  Rate your leadership Qualities 1 to 10 (no 7).

4) What do you think about your interpersonal skills within the company?

5) Rate Your interpersonal performance from 1 to 10.

6) Do you solve problems effectively? Give a scenario of your answer

7) How good is your problem solving skills from 1 to 10

8) Are you Motivated in your work related task, job and relationship?

9) Rate your motivation score from 1 to 10.

10) Is your work method effective, efficient and continuously improving? justify

11) Rate your Growth Rate from 1 to 10.

12) Give yourself an overall score 1 to 10.

13) What do you think you should improve on next?

Why is the 260 evaluation form structured like that :

when we design, we are looking for ways to improve the happyness and productivity of them inthe company, again, this is just an outline and the best way to use this is to understand the reason why you need the evaluation form and recreate with refrence

These just so happen is the things that our company is interested in, namely growth of our team members.

A website is only a tool for you to use in your strategy to get more sales to come in, if your strategy doies not require  you to get a website, then dont get one.

What can a good website do?

A good website is like a trained sales person online. you can be at places where people (might) search for you, and lead them to a page that is only talking about your service, and that might be powerful to you.

A good website is also a great consultant, when you answer questions that people have, you gain their trust, as they remembered that you are the one who helped them to solve a specific type of problem.

HOW?

 1) The Gut check.

Imagine your website as your online store, the first thing you need to ask is, If you come to your store, will they buy anything? if yes, then great, if no, whats wrong?

What are the information that is missing from the website that is blocking people from buying?

This step requires your to emphatize with your audience, are you generally going to solve their problem when they come? or are you wasting their time?

To test this, you will need to understand your customer avatar that i have covered a few chapters ago.

2) The type of channels you can use.

Once you think your website can get you visits, now its time to put it to the test, this is where you need to be creative, think about how to get people to see you at the right time, which is when they are looking for you or the solution you provide.

Here you need to understand their digital footprint. if your customer generally look for your product on facebook, and a facebook page is enough to get sales, you might not need a website.

A website is generally useful when they try to search for you on google, or when facebook just doesnt work because tehy are too much noise in facebook.

how marketers usually does it is they send traffic from different channels to their website.

eg. in founders, i post my stuff on facebook, but the content is written in my website so google will index it also.

for page productions, since they are a service based company, people generally will search for them on google, thats why my new campaign is to help them use google ads to get customers, which you cant do with a facebook page.

Now, think about how your customers will look for you? and understand their online behaviour before you move forward.

3) How to track?

How do you know if you are performing or not? there are a few tools for us to see how many people go to where i want them to go to.

It depends on what you are aiming to see and track actually.

For example, when we are running neon rush miri, we use clickfunnels to track the signups

for founders club, i am using google analytics to check if we are increasing our readership or not.

for buzzytime, we use mostly facebook to track our results because they provide the metric we want to see.

for page productions right now, i am creating an google ad campaign for them so the tracking is at google ads.

now here is the main thing you need to know, you must have a way to measure the success of what you are doing, because you cannot improve upon things that you cannot track.

4) A few Case Studies

Stone Amperor , one of my pass client now have around 10k visits per month to their content and this have benefitted them greatly

a friend of mine is running a buzz site, and he have around 1 mil trafifc to website, the total amount of money he generated from banner and facebook creator studio is easily around 10k – 20k

which is what buzzytime is also trying to do.

Designing Thinking is one of the most influencial part of my carrier, so many things that i have learnt and do revolves around design thnking. 

and issentially, what design thinking is to me is a model to solve new and unsolved problem in life. things that you cant google your way out of. 

Design thinking have 5 steps 

1) Emphatize, this step is about understanding, relating and seeing things from other perspective, what is the problem and what causes it to be a problem, who does it affect, what is causing this to happen and really dive into the problem itself. 

2) Define. next you define, alright, what are the list of problems that i have selected, which are problems cause because of other problems, and is there a 20% problem i can solve that will solve 80% of the problems.

3) Ideate. the next step is to come up with potential solutions, to a single or more problems, the key here is not the best answers, but a list of potential answers that might be able to solve the problem, that you will realise other alternatives besides what you have originally taught of.

4) Prototype. make a sample model of your solution, make somehting that achieve the result of the problem that is not perfect, but to understand if your hypothesis of your solution is correct or not. 

5) Test, this is the easiest part, test if your problem is really a problem, does it solve the solutions/purpose it is supposed to? 

Once in a while, you will meetsomeone who stands out from the crowd, they do things out of the ordinary, they talk more infront of the team, they care more about others than themselves

And once you find them, you better keep them because if you look at the company 5 years ahead, if they are still here in the company, what would they become?

The ones that is Remarkable.

The next wave of revolution, like the industral revolution will change everything.

Here’s what you need to know, we humans have 2 types of ability that we can leverage on, physical and cognitive. 

The last industrial revolution, alot of physical abilities become obselete, but it creates demand for cognitive jobs because robots cannot analyse, communicate, and understand human emotions.

now this coming revolution, with machine learning, bio- tech and AI, rising to compete with us on a cognitive level, where does that leave us? 

The fear i have now is not being control by a handful of people dominating these new industry, but being irrelevant.

There might be a point in time where there is nothing else to fight for, and we just live life that we have optimize the human race to live.

If I am missing, If I stop doing what i am doing on all the channels that i was on, would anyone miss me? would people ask why you weren’t there when you should? 

Asking this question forces your mind to focus on what really matters, 

they wont miss me, why?

yes they will, which part?

Then you start filtering out all the noise from what is the core value that your brand is delivering on these platforms. 

Start by scratching your own itch

Reason:

You know yourself most, so often times your market research will be to ask, how much will I be willing to pay to get the product or services? am i willing to pay 2x the price I are selling? am I willing to go more if I add in so and so? or less but i remove this and this?

it is often easier to sell to people like you, as you can convey a lot of personal experience that will resonate with the customer.

And, worst case scenario, even if you didn’t manage to sell or for some reason you need to close down your startup, at least you will need to use it.

Useful Questions to ask yourself:

1) what would I be willing to pay an extraordinary amount of money to fix in my life?

2) if money was not a concern, what is the top 10 things you will fix first?

3) If you have no money at all, and have to live off minimum wage, what would you still consider spending money on?

4) in the last 6 months, maybe more, what are the things you faced that you wish you can solve with money?

5) after all the questions you answered above, ask why behind you answer and answer all of them.

6) look through your list, examine what are the actionable steps I can take to see if there is a market?

The best products usually comes from scratching your own niche.

I find it very useful to do this simple exercise to disect yourself.

First, what is your monthly income?

____(2600)_____

In tht income, if you were to categorize into chunks, what would it be?

(500)   investing (inner & outer)

(1100)   Eating Out 

(150)   Gasoline

(200)   Learning

(50)     Telephone

(500)   Travel

(100)   Extra

Now, what subsultures am i involved in?

1) Productivity

2) Startups

3)  Marketing

4) Stoicism

5 Sites i go regularly to get contents

1) Seth.blog

2) digitalmarketer.com

3) tim.blog

4) entreprenuer.com

5) techinasia.com

3 to 5 facebook sites/groups i hang out the most

1)  Digital Marketer Engage

2) Beam

3) The Founders Club

4) e27

3 to 5 instagram pages

1) #seth godin

2) #personalgrowth

3) #motivationalquotes

4) 6amsuccess

5) peng joon

What you are doing is defining yourself, seeing where is my digital footprint and the direction i would likely go. 

3 to 5 podcast 

1) The tim ferris show

2) Mindvalley

3) MFCEO

4) Akimbo

5) The Digital Marketer Podcast

So now if you want to target me, you can make me feel like you spend alot of money advertising by just specifically targeting where i get authority contents from. 

Now, look back at your price category, It is important to Look at where is price sensitive , and price insensitive

And how much you can charge maximum, for example, i know that i only save 200 for learning new stuff, if someone charge me 250 for a monthly marketing subscription lessons, i would be less inclined to join because of the trouble it takes me to move things around. 

 If you dont have a product yet, it is best to go after market that you belong to, so that you dont have to bother trying to figure out somone elses demographics

I know that if i get into speaking in techstars event covered by entrepreneur, then i could appear as an authority for a very cheap price. 

All in all, Your trying to find your 1000 true fans who belong to tribes you belong to, so you can cost effectively appear. 

When i go find my latest camera lens on amazon, i sort things by price. 

And the world now is so transparent, that with a little effort, you can find any product for less cost,

This means the market is not able to sustain the product game, because if you are not the cheapest,

Then what are you? 

Offers, on the other hand, is different. 

i was offered a set of camera lens, with tutorials on how to use them to master them in 3 days, now it shifts from price based, to value based. 

Next time when you are selling somehting, ask yourself, 

is this an offer or a product?

Offers are judged by value, the more value the higher you can charge.

So how do we measure value?

The answer is you can’t 

There is no set guideline on how much you can charge, it depends on how much it is worth to the custyomer buying he product.

So maybe the better question is to ask

 How to make it more valuable?

There are 3 types of products you can include into your offer:

1) DIY – Do it yourself type can give 

2) DWY

3) DFY

If there is one thing I need to give credit to my sanity in recent years, it would be my girlfriend, but the second thing is Meditation.

Meditation is hard because it is increasingly hard to clear my mind in recent years as there is just so many work left undone for me to think about nothing.

That is until I learnt about the 6 phase meditation by Vishen Lakhiani, a 6 step frame of mind that detoxify my body and focuses me on what is truely 20%

This has made my meditation time to also be the time that I set up todo lists for the day.

Watch the video here

here’s why.

Factual:

Most startups fail due to the lack of market demand.

Story:

I created 5 startups before this, and they all failed because there is no market need.

When we talk in facts, especially in a larger setting, most probably half of the crowd will go against you and say, nono, i think its because of lack of money, marketing, proper accounting… etc

so if you notice, doing a factual claim is rarely in high level presentations.

Stories on the other hand, there is no agreeing or disagreeing, because you can’t disagree with a story, you can only choose to believe whether the story is true or not.

So this shift lets the presentor cheat, they can impose their ideas to the audience without much resistence.

Branding is when you are not there, your tribe will miss you

They will ask their friends why are you not showing up, did something happen to you?

You are, in their world, indespenceable, thats why you leave a mark, an impression in their heads.

How do you start?

By being there for the people and being there consistently.

if you are good enough, and if they find value in things you provide, just maybe, you will leave a mark.

Meetings is formed when there is a common goal important enough to meet about

Some meetings drag on and on while some stress too much about ending in time that no progress is discussed

So how to make meetings more effective?

The answer is to always have the end goal in mind and be strategic about every step

The framework I follow which I find super effective is the 3 Os

Do whenever a meeting is about to start, answer these 3 questions

1) What is the objective of the meeting?
2) what are the output(s) required to meet the objective?
3) what is the expected outcome in terms of action plan that we expect to have?

We have so many things to do, that it feels like a whirlwind. you have no control.

Thats why I find it really useful to anchor yourselves before the day starts to have 3 major things done then have the rest of the day handling the whirlwind.

Questions to consider:
1) Which of these if done, will make the rest unnecessary / easier?
2) If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do?
3) What if I could only subtract to solve problems?

The essence of doing business is to supply something that is demanded and in exchange, you get a cut.

So the more your solution or product is demanded by the customer, the more you are going to get in exchange.

so who gets to decide how much you for your product?

its the customer you serve,

More customers = More money

More value = more money

so it make sense to create a product that matters to the customer/ the tribe you are trying to serve.