Monthly Archives: July 2015

What actually happens if you step out of your comfort zone regularly

Life, Self improvement

There has been written many articles about stepping out of your comfort zone. You have probably read about it. If you haven’t, just search for “Step out of your comfort zone” in your search engine and you will find a lot of articles. I will describe what’s the problem of not stepping out of your comfort zone and I will describe my personal experience with this topic.

Are you lazy to read? Listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/elfoslav/step-out-of-your-comfort-zone

Small comfort zone

Many people have very small comfort zone nowadays. They need hot water to wash themselves, they need to eat each 3 hours, they don’t want to get wet if it’s raining, they put themselves in their bubbles which protect them from discomfort zone.

People are afraid to step out of their bubble, to step out of their comfort zone because everyone wants to feel safe and comfortable. It’s natural to want to be in comfort zone. Unless it’s not.

Need to discover

Except natural need to stay in comfort zone, people have natural need to discover new things. We want to discover what’s behind boundaries of our knowledge. If we want to discover new things, we often have to step out of our comfort zone. Stepping out of our comfort zone means facing our fear. We have fear because we don’t know what’s outside of our bubble. We have fear of the unknown. Once we discover there is no reason to fear, we will want to discover more and more.

From comfort zone into discomfort zone

When we get out of our comfort zone, we literally feel uncomfortably. We want to get back into our comfort zone. But if we persist in discomfort zone, we will discover that it becomes our comfort zone.

From discomfort zone into comfort zone

Once we discover the fact that discomfort is not in fact discomfort any more, the discomfort will become our comfort zone.

comfort zone

We will not have fear of the unknown any more and we will enlarge our comfort zone. This will significantly improve our life. Someone calls it magic.

where the magic happens

Stepping out of your comfort zone means pushing your boundaries.

You will basically become a superhero. Your comfort zone will be much bigger than comfort zones of other people’s. You will not have a problem to do things that regular people don’t do. comfort zone of other people

Getting out of my comfort zone

I had known about benefits of getting out of comfort zone for a long time before I tried it. I would probably never try it if the following thing did not happen:

It was 3rd January 2015 when I wanted to take a shower. I found out that hot water did not work. I needed to take a shower so I underwent a cold shower. It was not so bad as I expected. I told myself that I will take a cold shower instead of hot shower since then. It was hard to abide by this resolution. I was tempted to combine hot water with cold water to lessen the discomfort. But I realized that if I resist the temptation, it will improve my willpower and it will have positive impact on other things in my life too. I like to do things that majority of people don’t do. Majority of people don’t take a cold shower (at least in my country). If I tell someone that I take only cold shower, they say: “Really? I don’t believe you”, “Why?”, “You are crazy”,… you will get the same reactions if you do something that other people don’t do. If you will get out of your comfort zone.

Regular visiting of discomfort zone

Regular visiting of discomfort zone is important. If you step out of your comfort zone just once, it will have almost no impact. If you step out of your comfort zone regularly, you will see the result after a few cycles.

When I started taking a cold shower, I was resistant, but I persisted. I noticed that cold shower has really positive impact on my life. My hair started to grow more rapidly. I had no problem to swim in a cold lake whilst my friends had. And I started visiting discomfort zone more often. I tried to walk barefoot in a city, now I walk exclusively barefoot. I talked to homeless people and made friendship with them. I was able to talk in front of people at a conference without stage fright. And I will surely do a lot of uncommon things in the future.

I know how hard is to step out of your comfort zone. But once you start and you will do it regularly, your life will change significantly in a positive way.

The problem of many startups

startup

What is a startup?

First, let’s clarify what a startup is:

“A startup is a company working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and success is not guaranteed,” says Neil Blumenthal, cofounder and co-CEO of Warby Parker.

From this definition we can understand that startup should solve a problem. Do you know what’s the problem of many startups? They do not solve real problems. They make problems. They make problems for their users, customers, partners,… I have worked in a startup that made problems. The startup didn’t solve any real problem. The “startup” was an e-commerce solution for selling discounted goods. It was not just an ordinary e-commerce where a user can choose from many items. There were only 3 items at a given time on the screen. The items contained title, image, description, price and a button for freezing price. The price was falling down continuously and when it felt down to a certain value, the item was replaced by an advert for 6 seconds and then was replaced by another item. It looked really cool and it was cool to build it. We copied the idea from droptilyoushop.com and we run it in Czech republic.

We had been building it for 5 months. We launched it and we failed. The main issue was with acquiring new customers. We were not able to earn enough money after a few months because we didn’t have enough customers. We didn’t have any marketer in our team. That was the main fail. But beside this, I realized that it was not the true startup by definition. It was garbage. We didn’t help anybody in fact. We didn’t solve any problem. I realized that many startups are garbage. They don’t help anybody. I have built a few useless applications that didn’t help anybody.

Startups should help

I have realized that I want to help to make this world to be a better place to live. I want to build something that will help someone. I have decided to teach people to code because there is a shortage of people in IT. I have decided to create a Web development school where I will make web developers from regular people. How will it help to make this world better? That’s a good question. Many people have ideas in their heads but they don’t have skills to bring the idea to life. Once they learn to code, they will be able to build something cool that can help people. They can learn to code by themselves but the Web development school will speed up the process. My web development school also helps companies to find good quality web developers.

Will your project help?

If you have an idea in your head, ask yourself these questions: “Does my idea solve a real problem? Will my project help someone? Will it make this world better?”. If you answered “yes” to all the questions, congratulations. You have an idea that can be labelled as a startup idea. Try to bring this idea to life to make this world better. If you don’t have a team, you can and should try to do it yourself. You will find the right people who will help you with your project later. Trust me. I have started building CoderMania without a team and random people offered me help later when they saw that the project is cool and helpful.

An idea is still just an idea. Execution is the secret ingredient of success. Just start.

I found my life purpose

Life

I recently found my life purpose. It feels good! I wish everyone could find his life purpose and fulfil it. When I read this article: “Life purpose“, I had already knew I found my life purpose.

This perfectly describes me:

Once we get out of the bubble, and see things with a wider view, we can start a journey along a path like this:

  1. We can start to see the needs of others, and feel for their suffering.
  2. We then work to make their lives better, and lessen their suffering.
  3. Even if we aren’t good at that, we can learn skills that help us to be better at it. It’s the intention that matters.
  4. As we go about our daily work, we can tie our actions to this greater purpose. Learning to program or become healthy (for example) isn’t just for our betterment, but for the betterment of others, even in a small way. This gives us motivation on a moment-to-moment basis. When we lose motivation, we need to get back out of our bubble, shed our concern for our discomfort and fears, and tie ourselves to a bigger purpose.

My life purpose

I found my life purpose recently when I started to be interested in spiritual life. I found my life purpose at age 26. My life purpose is to teach people. It does not matter what I teach. I can teach web development, spiritual practices, how to become a better person, inspire others to make the world a better place to live. That’s my mission in this life and I really love it. And people love it too! I enjoy what I do, people enjoy what I do. I enjoy when I can give my knowledge to others and they are grateful for it. I can feel the energy that flows between me and my students. It’s perfect. It’s hard to describe how I feel. It’s like you would win the jackpot in lottery. Really.

Find your life purpose

If you don’t know what your life purpose is, read this article: “How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes” and I hope you will find it.

Revolution in e-learning

Learn to code, programming

You can learn almost anything online nowadays. I will focus on learning to code in this article.

There are many resources for learning to code online. It’s hard to choose the right one. As a beginner you don’t know if the source you are learning from is the better one or the worse one. Most of learning resources don’t provide feedback. Feedback is important factor in the process of learning. Feedback can improve learner’s skills prominently. I learned to code from non-interactive resources like text or video tutorials and tried to build apps myself. These times are at the end.

Learn to code with feedback

Year 2015 is the year of interactive learning. I have built an e-learning platform for learning to code called CoderMania. Students can learn to code thanks to automatically evaluated exercises and they can even ask for help if they get stuck.

Learn to code | CoderMania 2015-01-15 17-59-11-level2

This way of learning is better than reading or watching tutorials. There are also other sites for learning to code interactively. But CoderMania is the best at least for JavaScript IMHO ;-).

Learn to code with instant feedback

It’s great to learn to code interactively with ability to ask for help. But it takes some time while a student gets feedback. What if a student could learn specific topic like HTML, ask for help and get instant feedback? That would be great, right? And that’s where stream platforms like livecoding.tv, coders.tv and watchpeoplecode get on. I have tried all of them and I have chosen livecoding.tv because it has nice profile page for streamers, schedule of streaming events, big community of streamers and viewers, nice user interface and big potential. I will use livecoding.tv for my Web development school. Initially, I wanted to teach people mainly via videos on Youtube but (scheduled) streaming seems to be a much better option. The only disadvantages of livecoding.tv are that they delete videos shorter than 20 minutes after one week and they don’t provide an option to download videos. I don’t know why. But that’s not that big problem for me. I will try to make sessions longer than 20 minutes and it does not matter to me where videos are stored. Livecoding.tv continuously improves their service and that’s the best about it.

Is instant feedback really needed?

I don’t know. Watching videos and reading tutorials is great option for learning but that’s not interactive. Interactivity is the key for attractiveness.

Interactive learning is the future

And the future is now. Interactivity is important part of learning. When students can interact with teacher in real-time, that’s really engaging. As a teacher, I have tried to write tutorials, make videos and even an e-learning platform but none of them are as interactive as streaming. Streaming gives teachers and students the missing part that they would naturally have in real school – real-time interaction. That’s pure awesomeness. When I have tried to stream for the first time and realized that people from around the world can watch me and ask questions, that was a great discovery and feeling!

I will do streams about web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Meteor.js, MongoDB) on a regular basis. You can watch them on https://www.livecoding.tv/elfoslav/. You will be able to learn to code with interaction with teacher as you would sit with him in the room! You can also choose any stream from the schedule. You can even stream while you are learning and you can get feedback from viewers.

I hope you will enjoy live streaming as I do.