The Revolution Method: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Weight Loss, Speaking Spanish, and Behavioral Change

By Luis N Alvarado

Table of Contents

The Revolution Method

In life, there are times when everything works. I mean everything. The birds sing, the heavens open up, and everything in your life trickles down to utter beauty. This beauty then resonates in every part of your being, reminding you of the magnificence of your existence and how fantastic life really is. This phenomenon is called flow. Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Now how do we get to this stage? It starts with identifying what state of mind youre in. Flow has a basic equation: Happiness in the now + Vision for the Future = Flow In life, we must have tremendous vision, it is this vision that gives vigor to our lives and pep to our step. However, our current happiness can not be tied these goals. We must have joy in our lives now.

However, happiness can be a very nebulous term.

So in our case we will define happiness, as the exciting things that are happening in our life.

Since depression can be a result of boredom, our major goal should be to make life as exciting as possible.

Make Life Exciting: 1. Make room. First of all, how can you start a revolution if you don't have time for one? You must eliminate the non-essential in the form of reactive habits. Habits such as unneccesary email or facebook surfing could lead to hours of lost time, and inactiveness. This can be detrimental to your attention, and cause you to go through life on Autopilot 2. Prioritize your life: The most important step you must take is prioritize. The core four technique works gang busters here because it allows you to identify the most important things in your life, allowing you to focus intently on them. Heres an example: God Family Education/Career Baseball/Hobbies Now this is just one example, however this allows you to delegate your all important energy to these important tasks allowing you to create that revolution in your life. 1. Create Your Perfect Day: This all important important personal development activity has been around for years, and is a great momentum builder for your vision. Simply from waking up to sleeping plan your perfect day in excruciating detail. Now to make this even more effective incorporate the core four into your day, whether in this case it's a morning

prayer, calling my grandmother, reading the Iliad, or playing a baseball game, the possibilities are endless, just sprinkle them throughout the day. # Warning: Do not try to follow your perfect day, simply use it as a template and view it as a simple exercise. 4. Radically Set Goals For Each Priority: Here would be an example of goals I've set for myself in each category. God: Working on my site, and writing about matters of Faith Family: Learning to Read, Write, and Speak in Spanish Education: Reading My School Novel Catch-22 Baseball: Gaining 28 pounds in 28 days and building arm strength. That's it, it sounds simple and very little, but it is extremely effective because it addresses the main areas in your life and resolves conflict. Using this outline you should create only 1 list. Each goal you should be set at a 28 Day period. Why? Because a revolution calls for a large change in a small amount of time, and the only way this is possible is starting small and temporary. Once you see relative progress, then your goals will expand into to larger time frames. I do believe planning goals longer than this 28 day cycle is unnecessary for revolution, because in order To control your cow, give it a bigger pasture. --Suzuki Roshi. 5. Getting Things Done Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. The Daily Checklist: By far the easiest way to start working on these things is to implement the daily

checklist. Rule 1: No to-do lists: First of all to-do lists are terrible, all they do is pile up and cause clutter, the best option is to block out time periods during the day or week using a 50 minute focus finder discussed further on the site. Rule 2: Never write your checklist in the morning. Always do your checklist the night before, after your daily review that way you can view tomorrow with perspective using the lessons you learned today. Rule 3: Never plan 50 minute focus finders. I know, I'm contradicting myself, but here's why: Plans are rigid, tactics are flexible . Plans fail, however we must use tactics that are flexible with the surprises that arise every day. For this case, our tactic will be the law of Underscheduling. Introduced by Cal Newton, the goal of this principle leaves room in our lives for relaxation and participation in activities that generate happiness. It rejects the degenerate belief that if youre not working every free minute than youre somehow failing as a human being. It also provides the flexibility needed to pursue the random interesting opportunities that often lead to big positive results. It also allows the flexibility to have these focus sessions and achieve the goals that will lead to excitement in your life. How to Start Your Revolution: For starting I recommend Tim Ferris' D.E.A.L method from the Four Hour Workweek instead applying this to starting a revolution in our lives. D is for Definition To define, you must simply define the core four priorities in your life. Here is where you would define your perfect day, define your radical goals, and define your checklists that look similar to this.

8/2/12: Checklist God: Writing Manifesto and writing the day's post Family: Practice speaking with Spanish tutor, and work on Auxiliary verbs. Education: Read Chapters 6-10 in Catch-22 Baseball: Eat 175 Grams of Protein, and throw long toss. Misc: 30 grams of protein upon waking Vitamin D 4000 IU 20 minute Prayer Nightly Review That's it, once this is properly defined, now we must create time to work on these things. E is for Elimination It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials. Bruce Lee In order to achieve these things we must create space. A garden does not look beautiful when its four main plants are surrounded by weeds, only when there is significant space between each one. THE Concept of Wu Wei;

Practice non-action to be great at action. The other day I quoted the Tao Te Ching: By practicing doing nothing/Everything

is in harmony. This refers to the concept of wu-weior non-action. Now in our western society it is difficult to just be, we must constantly do. However, in order to create revolution, we must be with ourselves and observe ourselves in relation to others. By cultivating nothingness, it allows action in our lives to arise spontaneously. Law of Underscheduling: Therefore to eliminate, in every aspect of your life attempt to underschedule. Use your core four priorities as a guide. If the task is not pertinent to your work or any of your priorities reject it. Reactive Habits: These habits are habits that cause chain reaction of events that lead to multitude of reactive activities. Eliminate these as much as possible or delegate them into proactive habits. Low- Information Fast: Getting back to zero base The Low Information Diet should be familiar to anyone whos read The 4-Hour Workweek. It consists of: No web surfing No excessive email checking No RSS No news (really, the world will still turn) No non-entertainment television (ideally no television) No nonfiction books What is allowed: a one-hour indulgence each day of any of the above. Music and fiction are also fair game. If you easily relapse I recommend not doing the one-hour indulgence since it can stunt progress. You can always go back to devouring information for informations sake, but if you stick to a full week, youll almost certainly drop some information sources from your permanent diet.

Finally Eliminate Boredom: Albeit you will eliminate 80% of Boredom from your low- information fast, you must create value in your free time, and this can be achieved with a Sunday Ritual( discussed here) a weekly Barnes and Noble Heist (read here) or Learning cool skills

in a short amount of time (read here)

A is for Automation:

Automation in a revolutionary sense is simply defined as making your goals failureproof and this is achieved through the following methods: 1. Become Conscious 2. Become a Gamer 3. Become a Competitor 4. Make it Small and Temporary Become Conscious: The fastest and most effective way to create change is to be aware of it in real time, not after wards. This has been implemented in the famous flash diet, where unlike food diaries which take time- consuming entries, participants take photos of what they're eating to allow instantaneous feedback. In the words of one of these participants: I was less likely to have a jumbo bag of M&Ms? Researchers have now come to the conclusion that taking snapshots of your food are three times more effective than food diaries. Implementation: To use this to your advantage, get an accurate snapshot of your baseline. It will look a lot worse than you think. However, don't be alarmed, instead use it to your advantage and fix it. Become a Gamer: The Rule of Five Sessions Games. Frequent Games In 1995 the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company decided to increase lighting, what they discovered was that worker productivity increased with this change. They then decided to dim the lighting. Again, more productivity. In fact, with any change they made they saw increased productivity. Why?

The Hawthorne Effect is to blame, also known as the observer effect. Reinforced further by research in game design, with each change, the workers suspected they were being observed and therefore worked harder. In short this can be deduced to a simple equation: measurement=motivation. Seeing your progress in quantifiable data creates a positive feedback loop. The act of measuring can sometimes be more important than what you measure. How often do you need to record? Or how much do you have to log to get hooked. Just five sessions. According to Nike this is the reason, If someone uploads only a couple of runs to the site, they might just be trying it out. But once they hit five runs, they're massively more likely to keep running and uploading data. At five runs, they've gotten hooked on what their data tells them about themselves. When in doubt, take five. 1. Make it competitive: Loss Aversion and the Benefits of Comparison Economists typically attribute excessive bidding to risk aversion, or the joy of winning. What we found is that the actual cause of overbidding is a fear of losing, a completely new theory from past investigations.~Eric Schotter As depressing as it sounds, this can be extremely useful. Knowing this we can set ourselves up for success by including a risk of public failure. The law is this: Potential loss is a greater motivator than potential reward. Through research, those who compete in challenges against their peers lose 5.9 more pounds than those who don't. Another thing that makes groups an optimal environment for revolution: social comparison theory. Ever heard the old adage, Don't compare yourself to others. In the case of having peace with yourself this is great to live by, but for behavioral change it works. Basically, in a group some will do better than you, ( If Tom can do it, I can do it.) or worse than you ( Sheila lost only one pound ----good for me! Seeing inferior performers makes you proud of minor success,and superior performers makes the greater results seem doable. Embrace peer pressure. It's not just for us teens. 1. Make it Small: This is what ties everything together. By keeping our revolutions in 28 day cycles, it allows to make rapid change quickly and using the principles of Automation it allows us to stick to whatever changes we do make.

Actions: 1. Do I really look like that in briefs? Take your before pictures in the most unappealing way, then post it somewhere you will see often. 2. Do I really eat that crap? As mentioned before, snapshot your food and become conscious of what you're eating. For maximum effect, put these online where everyone can see. 3. Who can I get to do this with me? Find at least one person for a friendly competition. Get them in on the revolution as well. Use guilt, fear, loss aversion and everything else we talked about. In the words of Tim Ferris, Embrace the stick, the carrot is overrated. 4. What is smallest important change I can make today? Make it as small as possible. Small is manageable and achievable. L is for Liberation An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. -martin luther king, jr. The ultimate goal of this website is to liberate you from the confines of society, to lift you from its grips, and ultimately cultivate love and freedom into your life. Simply put, to give you the momentum to create revolutions in your life, from losing fat by binging, speaking three languages in two years, or allowing you to sleep two hours per day and perform better. The results are limitless, however we must liberate ourselves from our dogmas and give ourselves a new view of how we see the world. How To Be Unremarkably Average Accept what people tell you just because they say so Surround yourself with people who think like you. Never stand out Always stay close to home. Get a 9-5 job Do things the way everyone else does, because there has to be a method to the madness. Go to College because you're supposed to, not because you want to learn. Use your credit card as your primary means of spending.

Get the largest mortgage you can qualify for. Fill it with plasma TVs and expensive furniture. Buy a big, new car and complain about the cost of gas. Spend all you earn, or maybe even more than you earn. The government will help you if theres a recession. Spend money on things you dont want but will help you impress others. Give token amounts of money to charity. Change the channel when a charity appeal comes on. Believe the 3,000 marketing messages that the average person in the U.S. and Canada receives every day. Need things youve never heard of before because they will help you feel better about yourself. Buy luxury products because youve earned the right through your hard work.

Congratulations if you follow these things you're on your way to becoming successfully average. Even better, no one can challenge you. Being average is the status quo. Now, that I have you're attention we can now move on to the final step and show you the three guiding principles of this blog, and its ultimate goal. If you ever find yourself on the side of majority, pause and reflect. ~Mark Twain Everything popular is wrong. ~Oscar Wilde Know thyself. ~Inscription at Temple of Apollo at Adelphi In closing, to be a revolutionary, you must go against the tide, you must obliterate your underlying assumptions, and meet the world with a clear mind and clear heart. On this site you will find many sources, guides, and articles on how to be remarkable. Whether you wish to be a Zen Valedictorian, a World Champion Power Lifter, Polyglot, Writer, Traveler, or are simply looking for a clear and spiritual guide to being remarkable it's all here on therevolutionary.com Things to look for in this site: The Productivity System to Change Your Life Hacking Spirituality?

Learn a Language in 90 Days? Gain 28 Pounds of Muscle in 28 Days? The Secret to Exceptional Persuasive Writing Deconstruction Techniques to Accelerated Learning Discussion on methods of Revolution in your life and the lives of others through Faith. To sum it all up here is your revolution check list: 1. Make room. 2. Prioritize your life 3. Create your ideal day 4. Set Radical Goals for Each Priority 5. Get Things Done 6. Fail Proof Your Goals 7. D.E.A.L This my friends is only the tip of the iceberg, and only a glimpse of what is to come. See you soon. May the Revolution begin.

Sincerely, The Revolutionary Luis Alvarado