You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.  – Christopher Gardner

I had the pleasure of rewatching the excellent The Pursuit of Happyness yesterday. If you’ve missed it, I suggest you grab a copy right away and find the time to watch it. Warning: This post contains spoilers.

In short, Will Smith plays the role of Christopher Gardner, a man stuck in his own life and struggling to get by while keeping his wife happy and his son safe and full. The audience watches, some in tears, as Christopher works to keep his family together and provide for them. He faces numerious challenges, and each and every one of them seems to bring him closer to ruin. Meanwhile he applies for an internship at a prestigious broker firm, and despite his lack of education he is determined to make it work.

Every time he seems to be getting a little ahead he hits some kind of wall, either it be parking tickets, jail or tax collectiors taking his meagre savings. He has to sleep in a public restroom with his son, run from a taxi bill, see his wife leave him while trying to sell bad medical equipment just to stay alive. Inbetween all his problems and caring for his small son he works to get that internship.

It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that? – Christopher Gardner

So what can we learn from Christopher Gardner?

1. Never give up. Despite the whole world seeming to work against him, he never gave up. There are times everybody wants to lay down and give up, and how we handle those times are an important part of who we will become.
2. Accept help. Christopher accepted help and support from people he met, and he made that help count. His skills with people helped him enormously.
3. You should aim high. With just a high school diploma, he aimed for a job as a stockbroker in a major firm. Hard work, perseverence and his never-say-die attitude eneabled him to edge out his competition despite their advantage in education and fundings.
4. Focus. His ability to focus on his one goal is an important part of his success. To put it simple: anything not leading us towards our goals are merely distractions. By eliminating as many distractions as possible we see our goal clearly and can spend the most time working towards it.

Christopher Gardner is a real person, and the movie is based on a real story. There is also a popular book available. If you want to learn more about him, visit the wiki. And – watch the movie. It’s great!

The important thing about that freedom train, is it’s got to climb mountains. We ALL have to climb mountains, you know. Mountains that go way up high, and mountains that go deep and low. Yes, we know what those mountains are here at Glide. We sing about them. – Reverend Williams

There is an increasing amouth of pressure on our waking hours. Tv, internet, work, family and friends are just some of the things taking more and more time. We want more waking hours, so we sleep less. This is not good. Sleep is vital, but still many of us are sleep deprived. Some effects of sleep deprivation can be:

- Sickness
- Obesity
- Depression
- Growth reduction
- Type 2 diabetes (!)
More @ wikipedia

Enter biphasic sleep. As the name suggests, it’s simply splitting your sleep into two phases instead of the traditional monophasic sleep most of us use. Usually a biphasic sleeper will have some core sleep at night, 3 or 4.5 hours, and then a 1.5 hour nap after the usual working hours. Notice how my examples use 1.5 as a multiplier? It’s because that is the length of a sleep cycle. A sleep cycle consists of light then REM then heavy sleep. Short version: We want to wake up during the light sleep. We dream during REM.

My biphasic sleep begain by accident. Summer break had me working early every morning and staying up late every night, so I developed the habit of napping when I got home from work. What surprised me was how awake and clear I felt after realatively little sleep. I was aware of the potential benefits of biphasic sleep from my own (failed) polyphasic sleep experiment in january, but somehow the idea of going biphasic escaped me.

The schedule differs from person to person. The most common is a 4.5/1.5h split, and this is what I’m doing. I tried 3/1.5h, but found myself sleepy during certain periods of the day. Now I usually stay up until 01:30 and get up at 6, feeling fresh and clear. I’ve been doing this for about 2 months now, and my experiences are mainly positive. An added bonus for me is my new eating habit. When I get home I eat something light, usually some fruit, because I’m going to bed soon. When I wake up I’m moderately hungry and eat something light again, completely eliminating the heavier food commonly served for dinner.

I see a few practical negatives. If you have a family you will be sleeping for a part of your children’s awake time, something you might value more than the extra waking hours. However if you are comfortable with the children looking after themselves for an hour and a half you and your partner can nap at the same time, squeezing in not only a few extra hours to spend with each other later but also a cozy nap snuggled up together. Any parent can tell you this is very valuable time. By sleeping around 5-6 o’clock you will also miss some of the daylight we all like, especially during the darker parts of the year. I’ve also noticed that if I miss my nap my mind gets tired.

Other than this I’ve experienced no discomforts. My productivity is at an all-time high, I feel awake and quite honestly I don’t see myself ever going back to monophasic sleep. If I were to set a grade I’d give biphasic sleep a 10 out of 10.

My biggest idol is not Steve Tyler, Steve Buchemi or Johnny Depp. No, it’s the slighty eccentric blogger and self-improvement “guru”, Steve Pavlina. Thru him I discovered biphasic sleep, the raw-food diet and so much more. Today I was browsing his forums, and stumpled upon this gem:

“If you were broke, bankrupt, and homeless and couldn’t spend any money, what activities would give you the most joy? Are you centering your life around those activities today? If not, then you must ask yourself, “Why the hell not?” ” – Steve Pavlina

He is so right. If you were in a situation where you had absolutely no extra money to spend and no means of making more, what would you do with your time?

I for one have no answer. I am seriously considering this as a challenge for myself. I belive it will help me realise what I really love to do, and the change in pace would be a good step on my current task of redesigning my life.

After all it turned out easy as pie. I spent the last piece of the 20 today, buying myself a treat. However, I found the whole experience very rewarding. It made me see money in a totally different light. If I can live pretty well off a measily $20 for a week, why am I usually spending $200 a weekend. I didnt have any less fun than usual, in fact I had a great week. I spent time with friends, on the beach, bathing, working on my book, and was all over very social. I call this a success, and it is for now done.

I spent 18 nok yesterday. Today I’ve made 62 from cleaning out my car, returning bottles and gathering the spare change laying everywhere. So I’m actually up 44 NOK, or about $8.

I’m finding this strangely entertaining. Because I’ve limited my available funds to such a small amount, every change is very significant. So I keep looking for ways to make money, and small sums like that makes me as happy as larger sums used to. It also keeps me more on the lookout for opportunities.

I want to keep something like this going, maybe for a month or so. If I can make a habit out of looking at my money this way, I belive it will be a great starting point for a more frugal lifestyle and help me on my way to eliminate my debt. I will draft out a plan for this on sunday, when this challenge is nearing completation and I see how it all went and if it actually is possible to live 5 days on $20.

 

Yesterday I spent the evening and much of the night organizing my personal files, my writings and my resume. I seem to get a lot more done lately, largely because I’ve adopted a biphasic sleep cycle. More on this in another post, probably today. Productivity is rising recently. Today my goals is:

- Send my resume to at least 3 potential employers

- Develop a system for scanning and achiving my papers

- Put the finishing touches on my workspace. I need a additional desk, but this will have to wait.

So, in order to save some money and do an experiment at the same time I want to do an $20 challenge. I want to several, but because it is wedensday I decided that $20 (100 NOK) for the rest of the week would be hard enough. Prices are high here in Norway.

Today I spent:

18 NOK (about $3.50) on a glas of dolmio.

I ate at work, twice, and took two apples with me. I’ve spent a lot of the afternoon organizing my files, working on my resume and looking at jobs. I’ve organized a lot of my things and my thoughts, and now have a very calm place to work. It should help.

I found two great tools today. The first one is Joe’s Goals, a small web-based application that helps you keep your goals. I’ll be using it from now on.

The second one is NowDoThis (www.nowdothis.com), a fabulous web-based to-do list. It’s so simple you can’t tinker with it at all, and it shows one task at a time, leaving you no other options than simply doing it and then click done. When you are done with all your tasks you get a nice “all done” message and can lean back for the rest of the evening. Simple, fun and great!

 

I’ll add something to tools. I’m an open-source enthusiast for several reasons. My main OS is Ubuntu linux, because it is fast, good and better than the expensive alternatives offered from Microsoft. Oh and it’s free. And I get a new one every 6 months. For free. And with a little work it runs lightning fast on my old 1200mhz/512mb laptop, making it a usefull piece of hardware again. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to windows again.