I eat like a caveman.

Well, ok, not exactly like a caveman. We don’t know with 100% certainty how pre-agricultural man ate and I admit to enjoying the occasional bottle of wine, bar of chocolate or aged cheese – all of which I can pretty comfortably say wouldn’t have been easily available 20,000 years ago. Let’s not get too bogged down in particulars here though, compared to the vast majority of my modern man compatriots I eat like a caveman.

So why do I eat like a caveman and not the way everyone else eats? Let’s take a look at two average specimens of good ol’ Homo Sapiens and see if we can’t solve this riddle.

I wholeheartedly believe that one of the best things that you can do to improve your quality of life is to learn to be grateful and appreciative.

We’ve talked about ways to improve your quality of life before, and touched on gratefulness there, but it deserves its own article.

Having a strong sense of gratefulness or appreciation is extremely important in developing an overall sense of well-being and happiness in life. All too often people find themselves losing sight of what’s really important, growing unhappy with their situation and becoming upset over everything.

Learning to be grateful helps solve all of these problems. Understanding how lucky you are to have the things that you do have often puts into perspective how inconsequential it is when you don’t get the things you want. Gratefulness lets us look at a bad situation which might otherwise really upset us and say, “You know, I’m gonna let it go. It’s really no big deal.”

Having learned from my Winter Molt Challenge that regular progress updates are not only tedious to produce but, honestly, probably not that interesting to read this is going to be the only check in for this challenge until you get our final result.

We’re now a little past the halfway point and I am extremely pleased with our progress. Our 1,000 words in 30 days mini-challenge worked out really well, though I’ve found it a little difficult to quantify exactly how well we did. I can, however, tell a huge difference in our comprehension as a direct result of the vocabulary boost.

We both now regularly read the news in Korean everyday. We are also working through Korean books. I can’t say we have 100% comprehension at this point, but it’s sufficient to read and then usually be able to relate about 80% to 90% of what happened.

Parkour.

If you’re not practicing it, you should be. If you are, well, then you don’t really need to be reading this do you? Go outside and have some fun.

Anyway, back to the people who are the actual targets of this article – people who don’t practice parkour. You might be wondering, “What in the world is parkour anyway?”. I’m glad you asked.

Parkour, as defined by Mark of American Parkour, is “…the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment.” Now, that’s just speaking strictly of parkour, there’s also freerunning. I’m not really going to touch freerunning for right now, since there’s a lot of debate over what ‘real’ parkour is and I don’t want to get into it here. Suffice it to say that parkour is moving over obstacles in the most fluid and efficient way possible.

Put another way, parkour is the art of making the entire world your playground.

You’re going to hear this from me a lot, so get used to it – before long, you’re going to be dead. I don’t mean that as a threat or anything, I’ll be dead too, it’s just that we really don’t get very long to live. As a male in the U.S., ranked #36 in world life expectancy at the time of writing, I’m told I’ve got about 75 years total. At 23 years old, that means one full third of my projected life is gone already, and most of that time has been spent wasting away in compulsory schooling.

With that in mind, don’t you think it’s a good idea to try out this 5 easy little things that you can do to improve what time you do have here?

Imagine for a moment that there were a way to make yourself a happier, more productive person. Something that could, without any harmful side-effects, literally change your brain chemistry to make you more cheerful. On top of its ability to alter your brain, it would be completely free of charge and extremely contagious – improving not only your life but the lives of everyone around you as well.

Thankfully, and as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, I’m not talking about some magical, imaginary technique. I’m talking about smiling.

That’s right, just smiling. Most people don’t realize how drastic of an effect smiling can have on us. I’m not just talking about seeing other people smile either, just the action of smiling directly affects what chemicals are released in our brains. Let’s take a look at some of the effects.

No, not chrome the metal – Google Chrome. After I talked about using it to automatically translate pages you would normally view in your native language into your target language, several people have been asking how to do it. Enough people have asked that I decided to just make it into a quick how-to.

For those who have been living under rocks for the past year or two, Google Chrome is a web browser developed and released by Google. Personally, I’m fond of it. Not just because it’s fast, but because of all the handy little tricks you can make it do – at this point, I’ve almost completely been converted over from Firefox. You can get Google Chrome from Chrome’s download page.

Contrary to what some people may tell you, you don’t have to move to a country that speaks your target language natively to become fluent.

For some reason a lot of people seem to treat moving to a country that speaks their target language as the ‘magic pill’ of language learning. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard some variation of ‘Well, if I had the money to go live in [country] for a year or two I’d be great at speaking [language]!’

I will admit, I can definitely see why people are fond of repeating it – you have plenty of success stories from people using this method, and since traveling to foreign lands is often seen as an expensive, difficult thing (a lie I’ll address in another article) it makes a perfect cop-out. There are plenty of ‘good excuses’ for why you just can’t travel right now, so no one can fault you for not learning that language you’ve been wanting to speak for years, right?

Being fairly well invested at this point in our challenge to learn to speak Korean in six months, we’ve decided to toss another minor challenge on top of it.

Learning 1,000 new words in Korean in 30 days

The motivation for this is simple, I just don’t feel our vocabulary is progressing quite as quickly as I would like it to for meeting our 6 month challenge. I’m also finding that in many cases our vocabulary is the limiting factor in the speed of progress in other areas of practice. I figure the best way to fix this is by learning the 1,000 most common words in Korean.

Why the 1,000 most common? Well, like I’ve said before, the 80/20 rule applies to language too. By focusing on the most common 1,000 words we’ll be taking the most efficient route and learning the stuff we’re most likely to need to know first.

f you’re familiar with anyone involved in the realm of Lifestyle Design (See our Recommended Reading list), I’m sure you’ve come across the Pareto principle before. For anyone who hasn’t, the Pareto principle (a.k.a. the 80/20 rule) essentially states that in almost every situation 80% of the effects are a result of 20% of the causes.

For example, 80% of profits come from 20% of customers, 80% of problems are caused by 20% of clients, 80% of the weight you lose is a result of 20% of your behavioral changes, etc.

Of course, actual ratios are rarely so consistent. It may be 95/5, 70/30, or whatever. The consistent part, the part that’s important to take away, is that in every case a majority of effects are brought about by a minority of causes.

So, why is this important?

It’s important because it means that, in general, there are two types of actions – those which fall into that 20% that cause 80% of the results, and those that fall into the 80% that are only responsible for that last little 20% of results. I call the first, the 20% with the big effect, High Return Variables and the latter, the majority responsible for that paltry 20%, Low Return Variables.