When Julius Cesar was little more than a rebel against the Roman Republic, he faced near certain ruin against Pompey's great international armies.

The night before the final battle, outnumbered more than 2 to 1, Cesar ordered his army: "Pull down your own ramparts and fill in the ditch, so that if we fail to win we shall have nothing. And the enemy shall see that we lack a camp, and that necessity compels us to make our quarters in theirs."

The took the battle with no hope of retreat. The only two options were win or die. 

They won.

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Sebastian has a post today, Nothing Magical: "There's a certain tendency to look for magical solutions...The thing is, the[re] usually isn't a magical thing."

I'll go a bit farther. It has served me well for many to years to state and believe: There are no Solutions. Except in chemistry. There is only continuing struggle, effort, achievement, mistakes. There are no "solutions" for health, time management, willpower, productivity. Every type of action in the world requires some sort of ongoing, time-indefinite application.

The worst misuse of the word is by the political class, who propose "solutions" to poverty, ignorance, laziness and obesity. There are no solutions government can offer, only individuals taking action to improve. Conditions might be improved, but this is not a solution, and never can be.

Just leave it at four simple words. There are no Solutions. Believing it can help to free your mind for more effective actions.

I've been tracking my time daily since October 2011, having seen a few articles that Sebastian had written about the idea. Here is a recent one that Sebastian wrote.

Time tracking has been immensely helpful in general, and like Sebastian's time tracking, mine has gone through many changes since I started while looking for whatever is going to be the most useful stuff to track for my life at that moment. Another nice benefit is that it serves as a memento for nostalgia purposes - I quite like looking back and seeing what I was doing 2 years ago.

You don't need any fancy tools to do this effectively - I've exclusively used a plain text file on my laptop, which I can edit with (for example) Notepad++.

(1) The basic format is always a diary where I list everything important that I did that day, and for my first month that's /all/ I included. Starting off simple is important to ensure that you can get into the habit of actually filling it out. Here is a sample from October 2011:

Mon 17 Oct

http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-million-dollar-question

Voice 1 tells me to go for the stars. Voice 2 tells me I'm not good enough.

Voice 1 speaks of unbreakable self-worth. Voice 2 is a fickle status whore.

The other day I was talking to my boss. I was asking him what parts of my work I should put more focus on – what type of work will generate revenue. He said I needed to help him push out more content. Content marketing seems to be the main focus of most online marketing nowadays. Almost everyone is giving away advice and tips.

So I asked him that, I said “You sure about content marketing? Everyone is doing content marketing these days”.

He replied “That’s why we have to create better content”.

Naturally, I replied to that with “Don’t you think the bar is being raised too high? If everyone is giving way free content, then pretty soon paid content will be free content. Don’t you think that because content marketing is so saturated that one day it will stop working?”

“Yes. One day, content marketing will stop working" He said, "But right now, it works. So we gotta go with what works. When I was young, I was caught up in the future, and I ended up wasting a lot of time chasing things that never happened, and getting nothing done.”

What follows is the one pager 0f the Meta-Learning chapter of Tim Ferriss Four Hour Chef (the first part of CaFE is one-paging whatever you’re learning).

It’s forming the foundation of my Mindset & Skill Acquisition Method, and I’ll be putting it to the test in the next few months with an experiment to learn surfing (which I'll be updating about on eddyazar.com).

You can get the full chapter and method notes here.

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“It is possible to become worldclass in just about anything in six months or less. Armed with the right framework, you can seemingly perform miracles” – Tim Ferriss