We come into this world not knowing nor understanding what life has installed for us. We are beginners learning to live in a world that other people have created over the course of human history. Within this world, people live life on their terms. Well, okay… maybe partly on their terms and partly following the terms set by other people and society. Either way, they make a life following a certain set or conscious and often unconscious directives that shape their choices, decisions, and actions each and every day.

All these people, just like you and me, live according to a set of rules. These rules govern how they live their life day-to-day. But I’m of course not talking about laws created by governments and institutions. I’m specifically referring to the set of rules that go deep into the unconscious. These rules are reflected in our values, beliefs, convictions, and in our personal standards. Every day of our lives we live in accordance with these rules without ever questioning them.

These rules have been conditioned into our psyche over the course of a lifetime by others and by society in general. However, we have also played our part in this conditioning process. We have been willing participants and have accepted things to be one way over another way. At one point or another, we made that conscious (or maybe unconscious) choice and have consequently accepted to live and perceive life a very specific way. And now this conditioned way of looking and responding to life events and circumstances is shaping our future, whether we like it or not.

The honest truth is that many of us are living on autopilot. We are living our lives in accordance with a very specific set of habitual rules that might not be serving our greater good. Yes, we all have good intentions and honorable hopes, dreams, and goals for the future, however, the rules by which we live our lives, unfortunately, won’t allow us to realize our desired destination. Instead, another destination awaits. One that is missing the things we want most out of life.

The reason why so many of us go wrong and don’t end up attaining our desired goals and objectives is that our rules are too constrictive. They just don’t allow us the freedom to experiment, to fail, to make mistakes and to wholeheartedly enjoy this process. Or to put it another way, these rules we live by don’t allow us to live life the way it was meant to be lived: AS A GAME!

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

It is never too late to learn. Learning new things challenges the brain, revitalizes us and keeps us sharp.

Our brains are lazy by default. They will constantly attempt to automate as many processes as possible, so that it has to work as little as possible. In order to stay mentally fit, we have to challenge the brain and keep it active. Learning is one of the very best ways to do this.

However, we all know that learning can be very difficult at times and that it is easy to forget what we have just been told or read. Therefore, in this blog post, we will summarize the best ways to study based on concrete scientific evidence so you can train yourself to learn better. These tips can improve learning across all ages, whether you are a student at a school or university or simply interested in learning more about a subject on your own.

The process of learning can be divided into two crucial stages. Firstly, you have to actually take in the information – we will call this initial learning. Secondly, you have to review and refresh the information, hard-wiring it in your brain so you can recall it at a later point in time – we will call this long-term learning. You can actively train both stages of learning, thereby training yourself to learn better.