This post is by Karol K of newInternetOrder.com.

“The who?!” says you.

The Achuar. Image by Enrique Amigo, used under Creative Commons license

The Achuar are small community or tribe of South American Indians living in the Amazon.

When I say tribe, I really mean it. The Achuar live in small villages. A typical household is shaped as a large oval, without outer walls and with a high roof made out of palm tree fronds. Their way of living is somewhat typical to other South American tribes. Women gather and take care of the household while men hunt and work in the forest.

There’s no Internet, no iPods, no electricity, and no medicines—the nearest doctor is thousands of miles away. Basically, there’s nothing we take for granted in our everyday lives.

How can a community survive with no doctors and no medicines? (Even without witch-doctors.) The community members have to figure something out on their own, and create substitutes out of what’s available around them. That means that an average man has to know which herbs and plants can be turned into medicines.

Over the generations the Achuar have gathered rather extensive knowledge about all of this. So whenever someone feels a little under the weather they just toss some herbs into a pot, mix it with other herbs, and voila—the medicine is ready. Of course, strict proportions need to be maintained, so it’s a bit more complicated than this. But what’s interesting is that they can create a medicine for many common ailments: headache, fever, food poisoning, diarrhea, and so on.

That’s not all…

As if that wasn’t unusual, the Achuar have decided to publish a book. Yes, a book. A book containing their knowledge of herbal treatment. I don’t mean just some words jotted down on a palm frond. I mean a normal book, printed on white paper, and written in Spanish (not perfect Spanish, though).

I don’t even know how they managed to do it, or where they started. I have literally no idea where I would start if I were to publish a book while living in the middle of the rainforest, and knowing almost next to nothing about how the modern world functions. Yet they did it.

So I have just one question for you…

What the heck have you done lately?!

If a small tribe living in the Amazon can publish a book, what can you accomplish? I doubt that you have bigger obstacles standing in your way. Here are a few lessons you and I can learn from the Achuars.

1. “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.”

This quote’s actually from Henry Ford, not the Achuar. But fortunately it ties rather well into this post!

2. Don’t worry about what other people think about your project

Whenever somebody says something is impossible, what they really mean is: “I don’t know how to do it.” So if they don’t know, they can’t help you. Fine. Ignore them, and get an opinion from someone who can be of help. Simply become a leader yourself—stop searching for one.

3. Obstacles are not something that should keep you from trying to achieve your goals

An obstacle in business (or in life for that matter) is nothing more than just that—an obstacle. Just like an obstacle on a treadmill. You need to find a way around it and keep running forward.

4. Focus only on one nearest possible task that can be executed right now, and take action

The steps will reveal themselves once you’re on your way. When you think about it, the nearest possible task is all you need to know in order to achieve anything. After this first task is done, come up with another one, and then the next one, and so on, until you achieve your final goal. Besides, it’s rarely effective to be doing more than one thing at a time.

And now for the ultimate take-away from this post, something you might actually want to write down and keep in sight, as it’s highly motivating by itself:

The Achuars have published a book. What the heck have you done lately?!

Are you still in the mood to complain over how tough life is, and how hard it is to go out there and create something of your own? Don’t be. It could be worse—keep that in mind. Besides, transforming your life takes only five steps.

Karol K. (@carlosinho) is a 20-something year old web 2.0 entrepreneur from Poland who shares his thoughts at newInternetOrder.com. Tune in to get his Getting Things Done (GTD) tips and other personal productivity advice.

This post is by Marly McMillen of NamelyMarly.

I have a few theories in life and one of them is this, “If you want to be good at something, be prepared to fail.” Kind of a negative life mantra, eh? To be good at something, you have to be prepared to do it badly.

Image is author's own

Sure, there are exceptions to every rule, and the virtuosos in this world may not seem to fit my little theory. That’s because they can play Mozart concertos on the piano at age five. But then again, their savant-like talent is usually concentrated on one thing, like that piano. They may not have any idea at all about how to paint or play tennis.

And that’s where my theory comes into play again. If you’re a virtuoso at the piano, the only way to get good at photography is to be a failure at it … sometimes quite miserably.

Of course, there’s also the other end of the spectrum with those who adopt failure as a way of life. They’re like the proverbial fly against the window, doing a miserable job trying to get through the same dead-end corner. But both ends of the spectrum aside, if you want to get better at guitar, or painting, or public speaking, all of these skills require that you do them badly … at least to begin with.

And that’s the thing that holds a lot of us back. Fear of failure, or a desire to do things perfectly, can make you and the people around you miserable.

Like best next time

Like Best Next Time is a phrase a colleague and I used when working on a recent project together. As is typical for a lot of us, we were working for a boss with unrealistic expectations; he wanted a project rolled out on an impossible timeline. And he wanted it to come in far below what we had projected in terms of costs.

We wallowed in misery by sharing our favorite boss-bashing Dilbert cartoons, which surprisingly helped a lot. But time was ticking and we knew we had to get busy and produce real results.

I’m sure you know the saying about project expectations: You can have only two of these three—fast, cheap or perfect. We decided to give the boss the two he asked for, fast and cheap, but perfect would be a work in progress.

And that’s what we did. And you know what? It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and productive projects any of us had ever worked on. Without the harness of perfectionism tethering us to a defined stake in the ground, we were all able to relax, throw out creative (if not sometimes zany) ideas, and work together with ease. We eventually turned out a product that was beyond all our expectations. It still didn’t meet our self-defined expectations of perfection, but it was definitely a high-quality project with potential to become even better.

How can you know if perfectionism is holding you back?

Perfectionism can take a miserable and sometimes tragic toll on individuals and the people around them. Consider French Chef Bernard Loiseau who committed suicide after his restaurant received a slightly lower rating than it had in the past. In their book, When Perfect Isn’t Good Enough Martin Anthony and Richard Swinson describe a perfectionist as someone who has, “strict standards or expectations for oneself or others that either cannot be met or can only be met at a great cost.”

On one hand, having a drive to constantly improve can actually be a good thing. Problems arise, however, when you raise the bar to impossible levels and place your entire self worth on the outcomes of reaching those impossible goals.

That’s why perfectionism frequently results in depression, anger problems, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

How do you know if you suffer from perfectionism? There are some tale-tell traits. Do you recognize any of the following in yourself?

• You’re not satisfied with anything less than complete perfection (which usually means you prefer to do things yourself rather than entrusting it to others).
• You feel constantly worried about details.
• You think of mistakes as evidence of your unworthiness.
• You’re overly defensive when criticized.
• You have standards that are impossible or nearly impossible to reach.
• You have an all or nothing attitude—things are either good or bad, which can lead to procrastinating. Why start something if it can’t be perfect?

How can you learn to release the notion of perfectionism?

Perfectionism is not only self-detrimental, it also impacts those around you. Acknowledging perfectionistic traits is a great first step and even better when followed by creating a list of how these traits are holding you back. You can also find ways to embrace your complete self, flaws and all. That means learning to love a little bit of failure here and there…as part of a process toward improvement. Don’t avoid practicing guitar because you don’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan. He probably didn’t start out sounding so great either.

Lots of books provide steps on how you can be happier, but I’ve found none to be as effective as this one. Learn to live with a “like best next time” mentality. Do your best and learn how to do it better next time.

Are you a perfectionist? Does that hold you back? Share your experiences in the comments.

Marly McMillen has a passion for life, family, vegan food, and names. She writes about all of these and more on her site at NamelyMarly. Marly’s podcast, NamelyMarly, can be found on iTunes, where she interviews people about their names. The people she interviews include famous authors, models, and even the people she meets at the park. Marly is also passionate about healthy food and shares vegan recipes as well.

This post is by Michelle of Take Back Your Creativity.

Here’s the thing about creativity: it’s all in your head. Even if you say there’s something outside of you that gives you ideas, they still end up in your head. And the thing about something in your head is this: your worldview, thoughts, and opinions will greatly affect it, and how it’s brought into the world.

Nowhere does this show as clearly as in the way we treat our ideas. People apply the scarcity mindset to their ideas and end up hoarding them. “No!,” they cry. “That’s my idea, you can’t have it.” Or, often heard from bloggers: “I think I should use my best ideas for my site instead of guest posts.”

Ideas are intangible things, completely without form and thus without limit. And, of course, they are abundant. They’re everywhere—how many ideas do you have in a random week? Okay, they’re not necessarily good ideas, but they’re ideas nonetheless.

Now think about how you treat your ideas when you’re influenced by the scarcity mindset. You hoard them or save an idea for later, when you can do justice to it. You don’t tell anyone about your latest idea, whether for fear of them ridiculing you, or fear of them stealing it. You wind up believing, consciously or not, that there exists only a finite number of ideas—more importantly, there’s only a finite number of good ideas—and so you treat them as if there will never be enough to go around. Big mistake.

When you treat your ideas this way, you set up creative blocks. Instead of treasuring the ideas you do have, you’re worrying about where the next one will come from. Instead of using them (and of course, ideas love to be put into action), you’re letting them get dusty on a shelf somewhere. Eventually, the part of you that creates ideas, that pulls them out of the ether—whether you believe that’s your subconscious, a higher self, or a daemon—will start to think you obviously don’t value them if you treat them so, and then the ideas dry up. They cease to come to you, and when they do come, it’s only with much effort.

Here’s a novel idea: instead of hoarding your ideas, use them relentlessly. They don’t have to be used in public, if you’re shy about them or not sure they’re that good—but use them somehow. Test them out, play with them, put them into action.

This sends a message to yourself that yes, these ideas will get used, yes, you do value them, yes, send more, please and thank you! Even if you’re only writing the ideas down and keeping track of them in a swipe file—and that’s all you do with that idea for now—that sends a little signal that you’re willing to act on the idea.

The less ideas you work on, the less ideas you have. So get crackin’!

Michelle is a writer and creative strategist living in Austin. She just launched Take Back Your Creativity, an ebook, workbook, and audio kit intended to help you integrate your creative life & your daily life, increase your creative output, and navigate around creative blocks and burnout. Check it out here, or you can read her writings at Wicked Whimsy.