A Guru is a Sanskrit term which is derived from two words: Gu (“ignorance”) and ru “dispeller.” The guru is a dispeller of ignorance, all kinds of ignorance; thus, there are gurus not only for spiritual development but also for dancing, music, wrestling, and other skills. 1 A guru is synonymous with being a guide, mentor, expert, or master in a particular area of specialization. As author and educator James Thom once said, “Probably the most honest self-made man ever was the one we heard say: ‘I got to the top the hard way—fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way.’” One of life’s great truisms is that “Everyone is trying to figure it.” No one has every area of their life figured out; the motivational speaker does not have their relationship intact, the fitness expert is struggling with their finances, and the celebrated movie star is battling with drug addiction.
“Probably the most honest self-made man ever was the one we heard say: ‘I got to the top the hard way—fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way.’” – James Thom
A buffer time is the extra time reserved between tasks, appointments, meetings or schedules to help manage unexpected interruptions, distractions, delays, transitions or disruptions. Your buffer time can help you complete more things, reduce stress/burnout, and improve productivity and focus. We all have buffer time we can deliberately use effectively during the day. I am often asked, “How can you read 100+ books yearly?”. One of the productivity hacks that has helped me become more productive is how I try to use the buffer time that presents itself daily. Here are some of the ways that I use buffer time to enhance my productivity daily:
I read from my Kindle while in traffic transition or waiting in line.
Listen to an audiobook while waiting in a queue or exercising in the gym.
Practice French flashcards while waiting to play in a volleyball or pickleball game.
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” – Carl Jung
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung once said, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” We live in a world where looking inside is becoming increasingly harder to do because of the various distractions at our beck and call. We tune down our inner voice and allow all other external stimuli and social validations to distract us from finding the essence of our purpose in life. We numb our pain, trauma, and boredom with the constant dopamine rush from our social media vanity metrics such as likes, retweets, shares and status updates. American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once quipped, “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” We look at the window, focusing on things we can’t control instead of focusing on the mirror and the things we can control.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The last five years have been very traumatic for me as I had to go through back to back to back grief. I went through the following: Mum’s cancer diagnosis (2018), Losing mum at 55 (2019), getting laid off from a gig (2020), marital separation (2021/2022) and getting divorced (2022/2023). It’s been highly traumatic navigating the emotional rollercoaster of this series of grief. Two of the coping mechanisms that have helped me not lose my head and self in the process are my meditation and writing process. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I started meditating daily, and I also started educating myself on how to write by reading writing books and immersing myself in the writing process.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Wellness involves engaging in daily healthy habits to attain better physical and mental health outcomes. Wellness activities include exercise, nutrition, sleep, mindfulness, taking breaks, social connectedness, and reducing unhealthy activities such as smoking, excessive stress, and unnecessary drama. Having a wellness plan is critical in living a life of purpose and meaning. There has to be a deliberate attempt to prioritize your health and well-being. Most of us spend the majority of our youth striving for wealth while we spend our old age taking care of our bodies with the money we earned in our youth.
Stoic philosopher Seneca once said, “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.” Doing hard things can be draining and uncomfortable, but it is where the most growth takes place. Most of us easily give up when this gets hard but it is when the going gets tough that we need to keep pushing. I constantly try to attempt relatively hard things periodically, and in the past three years, I have attempted the following:
New sports: Volleyball, Badminton, Pickleball, Swimming and Basketball
Learn a Foreign Language: Consistently perfected my spoken and written French by listening to a French podcast 1hr daily and moving to a French-speaking city.
Programming Languages: Python and Java
Run 15 Full Marathon 2022-2023: I ran six full marathons in 2022 and nine in 2023.
Average 100+ Books per year across eBooks, audiobooks and physical books.
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” – Bill Gates
Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates once quipped, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” When we succeed, we often think our result is as a result of our actions, but when failure comes around, most of us don’t attribute it to our actions. As motivational speaker Jim Rohn often said, “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure. Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices.” Success and failure are very similar, it is the result of good or bad decisions repeated over a long period of time.
Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. – Jim Rohn
We all aim for greatness in life, but most of us are willing to pay the price required to attain the excellence that we ultimately desire. The significant difference between highly successful and low achievers is their commitment and persistence to achieving their goals despite their challenges. There are no shortcuts to succeeding in life; you have to go the extra mile, most times take the stairs instead of the escalator, create a door for yourself when others see a wall and keep pushing until you achieve your goals. Success is never an accident and failure is usually not a coincidence. As author and motivational speaker Jim Rohn often said,
“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure. Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. We do not fail overnight. Failure is the inevitable result of an accumulation of poor thinking and poor choices.”
Aristotle once quipped, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” We get rewarded in public for what we repeatedly do in the dark. One of the hallmarks of high-achieving people is that they are usually the hardest workers in the room; they go the extra mile, sweat the small stuff and stay consistently self-disciplined on the path to achieving their goals. As the saying goes, How you do one thing is how you do almost everything. The self-discipline required to repeat reps, laps, drills and sessions in the gym is required to study for an exam, build a business, or follow through on a commitment. Overnight success usually takes 10 years of consistently working on your craft, becoming a better version of yourself, making daily progress and trusting the process.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle
The Power of Reps
I can attest to the power of repetition in the daily improvement that I am experiencing in my wellness plan. I spend an average of 2-3 hours daily exercising. I start my exercise regimen daily with swimming laps, then go for basketball shooting drills and running for 30 minutes on the treadmill during cold months or 1 hour during the summer months. I repeat almost the same drills and laps every session, becoming muscle memory activities as the day passes. I am not where I want to be in most of these activities, but I am not where I used to be. The daily consistent practice and repetition are adding up, and I notice the improvement with time. It can be frustrating shooting the basketball during drills, and they are not entering the net, but with patience, perseverance and commitment, it is going to get smoother. As the saying goes, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast”. We play the way we train; if you can’t do it in training, it is going to be hard to execute when it is showtime.
The above image shows my exercise training regimen for the month of July. I was in the gym for 108 hours, and I exercised for 31 days straight, covering 809 KM in the process. It takes a lot of dedication, self-discipline and commitment to pull this through. Have the end in mind, start with why, trust the process and be patient with yourself.
Cross-training is defined as an exercise protocol that utilizes several modes of training that are outside the athlete’s main sport to develop a specific component of fitness. 1 Cross-training is a way to vary your fitness program by combining different types of exercise activities. An ideal cross-training routine incorporates cardiovascular exercise, strength training, and flexibility exercises like yoga or Pilates. Benefits of cross-training include full body conditioning; improving skill, agility, and balance; flexibility in training plans; and the opportunity to continue training while injured. 2 The goal is to improve overall performance. It takes advantage of the particular effectiveness of one training method to negate the shortcomings of another. 3
My Cross-training Journey
In 2021, I decided to start training for my first Triathlon, an athletic contest consisting of three different events, typically swimming, cycling, and long-distance running. Prior to 2021, I had participated in and finished 11+ marathons across five different cities: Lagos, Accra, Cotonou, Nairobi, Toronto, and Ottawa. In 2022, I started incorporating swimming, cycling, and pickleball into my training regimen. Cross-training really helped me to get more focused and deliberate with my training regimen. There were days I did not feel like running, but because I had other sports to fall back on, I did go to the gym almost every day.
In 2022 4, I ran six full marathons and three 10 KM marathons and I also reduced my personal best for a 42.2KM marathon from 3:59 to 3:44. My cross-training habit helped me build my stamina, and endurance while staying consistent throughout the year. In 2023, I ran nine full marathons, two half marathons, and one 10 KM race, taking the total amount of marathon run between 2022-2023 to 15 Full Marathons, two half-marathons and four 10KM marathons. At the 2023 GMS Queen City Marathon in Regina, Saskatchewan 5, I ran a personal best of 3 hours 20 minutes for a full marathon, which is 24 minutes reduction from the 3 hours 44 minutes that I previously ran at the Beneva Montreal Marathon in 2022.
I attribute my being able to reduce my marathon finish time by 24 minutes mostly to my cross-training regimen. The various sports that I participate in help me work on different muscle groups and also help me stay active during the winter months. I have since included other sports such as Volleyball, Badminton, and Soccer in my training regimen in 2023. Cross-training has been life-transformative for me and it is also in alignment with my goal-stacking regimen6. Whenever I am training across these various sports, I also use it as an opportunity to either listen to an audiobook, listen to a podcast, listen to a French audio program/podcast, or read from Amazon Kindle Gadget. As a result of my cross-training regimen, I have been able to stay consistent with my fitness goals, run 15 full marathons in 2 years in the process reducing my personal best to 3:20, improve my French listening skills, and ultimately build my endurance and stamina.
As a result of my cross-training regimen, I have become more confident in my abilities to achieve anything that I set my mind to do. I strongly believe that how you do one thing is how you do everything. In 2024, I intend to participate in my first triathlon, ultramarathon, qualify for the Boston Marathon, and run a sub-3 hours time for a full marathon. To achieve these new goals, I would have to train consistently over a long period of time across multiple sports and keep showing up daily. As the saying goes, “We play the way we train”, if you cannot do it in training, it is going to be hard to do it on race day.
In his memoir, Invention: A Life, British inventor, industrial designer, and entrepreneur James Dyson describes the impact of cross-training in his life and how engaging in different activities helped him build his character, his business and ultimately navigate the vicissitudes of life. He writes:
It was playing games, however, that taught me the need to train hard and to understand teamwork and tactics. The planning of surprise tactics, and the ability to adapt to circumstance, are vital life lessons. These virtues are unlikely to be learned from academic life and certainly not from learning by rote Acting in plays, which I very much enjoyed, taught me about character, learning to express thoughts and to emphasize dramatically in speech. Long-distance running allowed me the freedom to roam the wilds of Norfolk while depending on no one but myself. Running also taught me to overcome the pain barrier: when everyone else feels exhausted, that is the opportunity to accelerate, whatever the pain, and win the race. Stamina and determination along with creativity are needed in overcoming seemingly impossible difficulties in research and other challenges in life.
Running also taught me to overcome the pain barrier: when everyone else feels exhausted, that is the opportunity to accelerate, whatever the pain, and win the race.
In Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, Journalist and Runner Alex Hutchinson describes the cross-training regimen of Stéphane Mifsud, the current record holder in static apnea, The Frenchman on a Monday afternoon in 2009 managed to stay submerged in his local pool for a hard-to-fathom 11 minutes and 35 seconds. Hutchinson writes:
Mifsud trains like an endurance athlete, putting in months of running, cycling, and swimming, including grueling Ironman triathlons. Only after his aerobic fitness is sharpened does he move to what he calls the “apprentice fish” stage, adding 30-second breath-holds to his cycling, repeated 20 times with a 15-second break between each one. Eventually, he moves into the water, spending as much as two hours, out of a six-hour training day, without breathing. His lung capacity is a remarkable 11 liters.
“Cross-training workouts at prescribed intensities increase blood flow around muscles, which in turn increases the muscle’s ability to utilize oxygen and fat as energy sources for exercise.” – Bill Pierce, Runner’s World Run Less Run Faster
Meditation
Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Pausing
During times when we are really busy, tired, or stressed, we react to triggers more swiftly. When we are stressed we are more susceptible to reacting without thinking. Stopping to pause allows for a brief space between a trigger and our response. Purposeful breathing acts as a break to the sympathetic nervous system and helps our emotional mind calm down and think clearly,
“I need to take a sacred pause, as if I were a sun warmed rock in the center of a rushing river.” — Dawna Markova
Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Spread the Light
Writer Edith Wharton once said: “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” Most of the time, we try to be the candle, we do whatever we can to spread our own light but we can also be the mirror, Mirroring magnifies because it encourages people to lean into the good they are doing and amplify their positive traits.
We often underestimate the impact that we have on other people but your appreciative words and actions have the power to make someone’s day, even to change their life.
Podcast
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE Entrepreneur Tells ALL Her Secrets! “Trusting My GUT Made Me $255 Million” – Alli Web on Jay Shetty Podcast.
All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
“One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.” – Earl Natingale, Lead the Field
“One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.” Those were the words that changed my outlook and perspective on personal development. I was listening to Lead the Field by Earl Natingale in 2004 and the above words really resonated with me. Since I heard those golden words, I have been on a journey of personal growth, self-improvement, and life-long learning. I am naturally curious and it is the curiosity that has led me to read as much as I can. Since 2016, I have been experimenting with reading/listening to 100 books every year. I have lots of weaknesses I want to work on and strengths I want to solidify.
‘There will be haters, there will be doubters, there will be non-believers, and then there will be you proving them wrong.’
Naysayers are part of life; they say nay to whatever you are trying to do. Don’t get too bothered about naysayers because that is their nature; there is nothing you can do about them, doubters doubt. How you respond is the one thing you can control about people doubting your dreams and aspirations. Success is the best revenge; shock them with your success and never stay satisfied; stay hungry, and you will be fine. Ignore the naysayers, focus on your goals, find your yaysayers, and become a better version of yourself. When you realize that people doubt you not because of you but it is more about them. Naysayers project their fear and insecurities to feel better about themself and their low-level thinking.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said, “We often underestimate what we can achieve in a year and overestimate what we can achieve in five years.” To run a marathon successfully, you need to increase your run mileage by running consistently. To finish a 700+ page book, you can read 20 pages per day, and you would be done in 30 days. Most of our biggest goals seem overwhelming and out of reach, but if you take one step towards achieving your goals daily, the incremental progress will increase your confidence, and ultimately, you will achieve your goal. As author and motivational speaker Les Brown often said “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.
The Scandinavians have a saying “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing”. There is nothing we can do about the weather, but we can surely control what we wear in the weather. Complaining about the weather or the challenges that we deal with in life would not change the situation, the only way to change anything is to take action; nothing moves until you move. As author, Jim Rohn often said “Don’t wish it was easier wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom”. Life is going to happen to us all at some point, whatever will go wrong will eventually go wrong. In the words, of the British writer Vivien Greene “Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass.It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.”
Solomon’s Paradox is named after the ancient Israelite king, Solomon’s paradox describes our inability to reason wisely about our own lives, even if we demonstrate good judgement when faced with other people’s problems. 1 Most of us have the tendency to easily activate advice-giving mode instead of genuinely listening, staying curious and asking questions to understand the real issues.
In his book, The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes 1, author David Robson describes why intelligent people act stupidly – and why in some cases they are even more prone to error than the average person. One of the examples that Robson cites to explain the intelligence trap is Solomon’s paradox, which is our tendency to demonstrate good judgment with other people’s problems but find it hard to reason wisely on our problems.
