I've been trying talk to many of you personally about the tragedy but somehow nobody truly understood what I was going to say (still, thank you so much for being there for me in these hard times, it means a lot). After doing this for several days I felt the need to think about why this relationship was so important to me and why I feel that this was the best friendship I could possibly imagine in my life.

I suspect all of us know what it means to "just don't fit in". Imagine you're doing a couple of things that nobody understands in your environment. Then one day somebody walks into your life with sincere interest in you and starts doing some of the things you do and introduces you to some new that you've never considered before. You are doing this for many years and then notice that you both have the same dreams, goals and passion. You realize how wonderful it is that you've born to the same place so you can meet frequently and work on your life together.

For many years, we've been setting and achieving goals all the time.

We have set the goal to reach complete financial freedom within less than 10 years. I have retired from many of my projects while he has left school to work on this. We've been very much into entrepreneurship and business. Planned to rent an office in 2 months. We loved elegant clothing even on average days and already bought some new clothes to wear all the time.

We've been very much into djing so we started a group for the purpose. We learnt together the basics of music production. We have decided to open our sound studio this Spring (Resonant Sound). The studio offers radio jingles, web music (flash intros, ads, rich content) and audiobook production in the beginning. Besides that we are producing music mainly in the trance, r&b and hip-hop genres.

As most of you know, I am partially working in the PHP world. He has joined my experiment this month to make it a success together.

We were both interested in personal development and have learned a lot together from authors and speakers like Harv Eker, Robert Kiyosaki, Steve Pavlina, Eckhart Tolle, David R Hawkins and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We used to discuss and put into practice immediately what we've learned.

We used to spend most of our free time together eating out, enjoying coffees, traveling, watching movies. It was as natural for us to talk in English as in our primary language.

For a long time, we've been planning to do some sports together and we constantly motivated each other to eat healthy foods. It was so much fun.

We had the same values. We liked and cared about and always looked up to each other very much. We had the willingness to accept each other unconditionally.

Isn't it obvious why we kept telling that "you're the one who understands me the most on this planet?". Imagine you don't fit in in as many areas as I just mentioned and found somebody who feels the very same. Now, imagine such a friend living within 15kms (not to mention our decision to move next door in some years).

I feel so extremely lucky and grateful to have had this relationship in my life. I believe I'm never going to have such a friend again who is my mate whether it's about work, music, fun or free time.

His death has changed me in many ways. Most importantly, I have accepted death as a natural part of human life. I'm not afraid of it anymore. I'm ready to die at any time. I'm not going to end my life by myself but whenever the time comes, I welcome it. Until then, I am here to experience what life is like. I feel stillness and experience no fear now. Things that were so scary two weeks ago just don't matter now at all.

Thank you so much for being part of my life, Arctis. I wish you peace wherever you are now. I'm sure it's impossible to experience such a friendship again and most of the people don't understand that but you do and that's all that matters.

My very best friend passed away on Saturday in a tragical car accident. He was my family in the sense that he cared the most about me in the world. I always thought about him like my brother. Now he suddenly left and everything's empty. He was 20 years old and healthier than most of us. He wasn't even driving the car and whenever he did he was very careful.

If I have to sum up my past 7-8 years, I'd say it was all about him. All. My work, my free time, my thoughts, everything, all my life. I am very unsure about how to go on now. We always respected and were looking up to each other. We knew each other better than anybody else on this planet. He probably didn't know but I learned more from our relationship than from anything else. Although there are lots of friends supporting me now, I still feel like I'm very alone here. Especially because we both have had this feeling so we promised several months ago that we'll stay together until the end of our lives. It seemed like natural because we were totally the same and had very similar dreams, goals, and more importantly, values.

I'll live the very best life I can in the hope that I'll see him again when I die and he can be proud of me as he always was.



One of his voice messages clearly reflect how much we liked each other (and the English language): arctis02.mp3

I am so proud of you and always were Arctis, you are the best person I have ever met in my life and you'll always be. I make sure your dreams come true on this world. I'll finish the projects we've started, release your music and open the cafe for you that you were dreaming about all the time. It'll wear your name.

You had the greatest impact on my life, ever.

You are awesome. I miss you a lot and I always will.

I am asking for patience and understanding from everybody because even though I thought I lost my family several years ago, this is the point in time when I really did.

I feel like operating very close to the consciousness level called "Love". I am awakening to my true purpose. I'm not identifying with my mind-created self (ego) anymore. I am focusing on service.

Don't beileve your own mind--it's primary purpose is to protect you (survival). That's why you experience fear that blocks most people. Say No to "What If".

Scott has just posted a fabulous article on Daily To-Do Lists.

I have also started using such lists a while back and it's boosting my performance as well. Although, using GTD for 2 years now (David states it takes 2 years only to get it), I don't feel like these lists could substitute the system. Most people have 50-150 open loops in their lives and GTD manages them properly. Additionally, the 6-level model of reviewing your work helps you align your projects and actions with your purpose, not to mention the other parts of the system.

What I do now is I use GTD in a hardcore way (I believe I'm a Black Belt) and make daily to-do lists each morning with the key things that I'd love to accomplish during the day. Still, I have many other actions defined in my trusted system that I can constructively use for procrastination purposes.

I don't believe a simple daily list is enough for most of us these days but it can definitely help focusing on the important tasks. The problem with these lists is that they don't help defining your work nor do they free you of stress, which in my eyes are much larger issues.

Currently I am considering integrating the daily list with my GTD calendar or the virtual tickler file.

Whenever I hear people complain talk about "getting rid of procrastination", it drives me as crazy as getting out of debt does Mr. Kiyosaki.

If you feel like procrastination is killing you just like many others in Steve's forums, here is my take: Accept it. Seriously. Don't expect any quick fixes. Stop looking for the single right answer.

The key is to never force yourself to give up on everything else because thing X needs to be done first. You won't accomplish the task and you won't accomplish anything else either.

The most successful people in the world are the biggest procrastinators, yet, they are the best in their field because they just keep doing things. They are not necessarily doing what seems to be needed at the moment but they are definitely progressing.

So here's what to do if you still "suffer" from procrastination:

First, accept that you won't be able to get rid of procrastination ever and move on.

Second, when you get that s#cky feeling (called resistance) again, ask yourself the question: what would I enjoy doing now? and start doing it. Usually the resistance will soon fade away (even if it doesn't, you've just accomplished something that's also important!)

Third, now that you know procrastination doesn't need to be "solved", start learning about it (and other related personal development topics such as the levels of consciousness) if you really want to get more productive. Covey's principle of separating the urgent from the important comes to mind (search the web for Covey quadrant) and David Allen's GTD system that helps you defining your work better. One of the key reasons to implement the GTD system is to always have a whole bunch of constructive tasks to procrastinate on. Not many people get that but David said it himself (see the podcast below).

Remember: It's a process, not a single event.

Have a productive (to)day using constructive procrastination!

Related articles on the web:
2 Rules to Stop Procrastinating by Trizoko
Overcoming Procrastination by Steve Pavlina
David Allen on Procrastination (Merlin Mann's 43Folders podcast)

Less-related articles:
Why Great Business Leaders Embrace Failures
Is Perfectionism Good for Your Business?
How to Work Smarter

"Life really began flowing for me when I finally let go of that ego junk, pride, and feelings of doubt and said to myself, "I'm just going to focus on making the best contribution I can. If I go broke doing that, I go broke. My fears and worries are just not that important compared to the difference I could make if I really gave this life my very best. If I'm here to make a contribution, then the universe had better back me up."
Steve Pavlina

"..getting the focus off the centeredness of your life on the business of serving. The irony of it is that when you get to the point where you're able to do it and let go of that outcome, all of the stuff that you chased after and worked so hard for and figured you had to have, begins to chase after you and show up in your life. You're no longer on the treadmill. It's like a surrendering."
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

"Financial scarcity is what you attract when you focus on me, me, me — my needs, my problems, my wants. Financial abundance is what you attract when you focus on we, we, we — our needs, our challenges, our potential. The ego is too small a container for wealth."
Steve Pavlina

Covey's interdependence principle comes to mind too.

After having to eat in restaurants for 34324324 times in a row I just realized: we used to get into the trap of taking everything for granted instead of appreciating what we have. We can't enjoy all the little things, we even hate them. I can relate this to so many parts of my life. Keep telling to yourself: I choose to instead of I have to. It makes such a big difference in POV and you do it in every second anyways.

We have some capacity for the following months over at phpXpress thus we are looking for more business partners with PHP development needs. If you happen to be one of them or know somebody who might be interested in our services, please drop us a line.

"Start cramming as many decisions as you can within a day." (trizle.)

WACT 0.2a users, you might need this form postback fix.

My promo mix for July is available to download. It starts with great trance tunes from the past 4 years and goes on with more from the past 4 months.

Be sure to check out my old project trance-e-motion if you haven't do so yet--there are some more sets for download.

Tracklist:

You need to reach a certain level of consciousness to realize that living proactively is essential ("life is either an adventure or nothing"). In other words, there are levels on which you first need to find your "why". Not as in "why to reach a goal" but "what's the point in doing anything else than necessary?". Despite being only 23, I have many hard years behind me and if I haven't lived them, I think wouldn't believe how different one's mindset can be. The typical example is that of the homeless: unless you have the food and the shelter, you won't think about caring, love, relationships, not to mention goal setting, financial independence and so on. I've been in a loop for many years which simply didn't allow me to build those bridges.

Recently I finished reading David R. Hawkins' book titled Power vs Force about the Levels of Human Consciousness. In the "dreaming" state (not to be confused with conscious visioning) one usually operates at the levels of fear (100), desire (125), anger (150), pride (175), maybe even at courage (200) and neutrality (250). Willingness (310), acceptance (350) and reason (400) are the levels which actually make you start building the bridges. ("Courage is the Gateway" anyways).

Personal development hit me a year ago when I operated at the levels of Apathy, Greaf, Fear and Desire and sometimes Courage also which provided the energy to stick to it. Looks like it took around 10 months to reach these higher levels. That's not too bad in a reasonably negative environment. Similarly to others in this field, I've given up TV and use my mind instead of letting it use me (Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer). I am living most of the Napoleon Hill principles and experimenting with the Law of Attraction. Constantly operating in the upper levels has been with me only in the past 2 months. It takes hard work but I enjoy this journey a lot. I love this kind of topics and those "a-ha" moments.

Scott points out the importance of enjoying the action. One of my goals is to make music that a specific audience enjoys. However, I can't always focus on joy while doing the small steps. Learning all the little tricks of music production is not always that much fun. Choosing the best of 400+ samples (finding them in the first place!), then mixing many together to produce a single kickdrum doesn't sound like 3 great days, does it?In reality it's not like "Let's play the piano and the song is done". [update: That's bullshit, but] The illustration is perfect.

I agree with the three steps (1. Enjoy the Action, 2. There Is Only Now, 3. Build Momentum). I'd add what needs to precede them is finding your why, getting to the level neccessary to live proactively. Unless you see the why behind proactivity, why would you want to persistently take action?

No matter if it's positive or negative, wanted or unwanted, it all adds up in the long run. Live your life proactively to attract what you want into your life. Take the baby steps; they will add up. The whole is almost always greater than the sum of the parts.

Recently I have reached one of the biggest goals I've ever set in my life. It took many years to accomplish and now it's finally done. So I'm going on with my journey. I have set new goals because they give a certain quality to my present moments.

Using GTD and many other organizational techniques for more than a year, I feel like my life is on track now. There are still some things needed to be cleaned up and that's what I'll be doing in the following days. If you were expecting something from me and didn't get it yet, be sure you will, probably in a week or less (let me know if not but I shouldn't forget anything because it's all outside my head--in a trusted system).

To bring one’s self to a frame of mind and to the proper energy to accomplish things that require plain hard work continuously is the one big battle that everyone has. When this battle is won for all time, then everything is easy.
- Thomas A. Buckner

This is an interesting concept that I am experimenting with at the moment but have never put a name on it. Following a combination of many time management and productivity methods, I believe Scott's article on Energy vs Time makes a whole lot of sense. You are planning your days inside out, still, you usually can't finish what you've planned for the day and you blame your self-discipline for it. Or even worse, you think that you don't have enough time even though time is the only constant resource available to us (past and future doesn't exist anyways).

In the last months I had all four kinds of energy-recovering activities scheduled for each day: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual (I consider personal development to cover mainly the last two). I've been constantly reminding myself of the importance of "sharpening the saw", a Covey-principle, the 7th habit. However, I needed Scott's article to notice that Covey doesn't only mean spiritual but all four actually.

Suppose you came upon someone in the woods working to saw down a tree. They are exhausted from working for hours. You suggest they take a break to sharpen the saw. They might reply, " I didn't have time to sharpen the saw, I'm busy sawing!"

I simply used to say "take time off" but this doesn't cover the deeper meaning behind it: you need to consciously balance the four levels to get the most out of your life (and be the most productive also).

I met Scott through the blogospehere several months ago. He has a great blog with many topics in my interests, if you're somewhat like me, be sure to give it a try!