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makes your physical environment a sort of user
interface for your brain, and it becomes a way to manipulate your energy levels and
concentration. To change how you feel, and how you think, you can simply chang...
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Tidiness is a personal preference, but it also has an impact on your energy. Every second you look at a messy room and think about fixing it is a distraction from your more important thoughts.
My experience is that after straightening up my office and working through the piles of miscellaneous tasks, I feel more clearheaded and energetic.
One of the biggest obstacles to success—and a real energy killer—is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.
so it has been with about 90 percent of the topics that have intimidated me throughout my career.
Keep in mind that every time you wonder how to do something, a few hundred million people have probably wondered the same thing.
Most of my problems were caused by my own bad decisions, lack of skill, and bad luck.
economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house.
The next rings are your local community, your country, and the world, in that order. Don’t bother trying to fix the world until you get the inner circles of your priorities under control.
Right choices can be challenging, but they usually charge you up. When you’re on the right path, it feels right, literally.
Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.
Your brain is wired to continuously analyze your environment, your thoughts, and your health and to use that information to generate a sensation you call your attitude.
It turns out you have that superpower. You can control your attitude by manipulating your thoughts, your body, and your environment.
Tired people are grumpy, rested people are less so. Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.
Imagination is the interface to your attitude. You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy.
This is the same reasoning for why you should avoid exposure to too much news of the depressing type and why it’s a good idea to avoid music, books, and movies that are downers. Show me someone who you think is always in a good mood and I’ll show you a person who (probably) avoids overexposure to sad forms of entertainment. The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can. Realistically,
A powerful variation on the daydreaming method involves working on projects that have a real chance of changing the world, helping humanity, and/or making a billion dollars. I try to have one or more change-the-world projects going at all times.
Ideas change the world routinely, and most of those ideas originate from ordinary people. You might have a patent idea, a product idea, or a process idea that could change the world. Before my cartoon career, I had plenty of big ideas that didn’t work out. When one idea failed, I usually had two more to take its place. And every one of my ideas had real-world potential, even if the odds were
Let your ideas for the future fuel your energy today. No matter what you want to do in life, higher
energy will help you get there.
And fail you will, most of the time, so long as you are dreaming big.
anyway. It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills. From that viewpoint, if you have a big, interesting project in the works, you’re a winner every time you wake up.
you learn a few things in the process of doing your research, and you meet some new people along the way. If you accomplish that and nothing more, you’re succeeding, no matter what happens with your project.
The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it.
Feeling hungry can make you want to eat simple carbs, but eating simple carbs can make you feel hungry.
The next time you’re in a gloomy mood, try smiling at a stranger you pass on the street. You’ll be surprised how many people reflexively return the smile, and if you smile often enough, eventually that cue will boot up the happiness subroutine in your brain and release the feel-good chemicals you desire.
When you’ve tasted success, you want more. And the wanting gives you the sort of energy that is critical to success.
I’m better than 99 percent of the world* in each of those games because I put in more practice time than 99 percent of the world. There’s no magic to it.
Importance of competition- but winning more so than losing?
A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.
the fascinating thing about Snickers’s flawed view of the world is that it works perfectly.
She has a system for getting what she wants, and it seems to work, albeit for different reasons than she imagines. The deeper reality
Are humans so different from dogs in terms of having totally flawed assumptions about reality, and do our flawed assumptions work for reasons we don’t understand?
The socks can still improve an athlete’s performance, even if the wearer has a flawed idea of why.
Our brains have a limited capacity to know the true nature of reality. Most times our misconceptions about reality
are benign and sometimes, even helpful. Other tim...
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movement only makes sense in relation to other objects.
external reality doesn’t change, but your point of view does. In many cases, it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe. And you can control your point of view even when you can’t change the underlying reality.
Huge
you shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway.
This is another case where humility is your friend. When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.
Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.
The way I motivate myself to take on a task this large is by imagining that I have fascinating and useful things to say that will help people.
I can’t see the future, so I have the option of imagining it in whatever way gives me the greatest utility. I choose to imagine that the book will do well because that illusion is highly motivating. It increases my energy.
The worst-case scenario is that I will spend a lot of time writing a book that no one will find useful or entertaining. It wouldn’t be the first time. But because of my imaginary future in which the book is enjoyed by millions, I’m able to find great satisfaction in writing it. No matter what reality delivers in the...
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What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your ill...
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of any group, you start to automatically identify with the other members and take on some of the characteristics of the group.
The group of people who read books on how to succeed is an excellent group to be in. You’re the people most likely to succeed because you’re putting real thought and research into the mechanics of success.
simple knowledge that I had become an official professional cartoonist had a profound effect on unlocking whatever talent I had. In my corporate career I often marveled
