More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 17 - July 14, 2021
People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rear-view mirror—because data is only available about the past.
But this doesn’t solve the fundamental challenge of what information and what advice you should accept, and which you should ignore as you embark into the future.
The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
Vinita Punjabi liked this
We begin to accept that it’s not realistic to do something we truly love for a living.
Ya bro
Too many of us who start down the path of compromise will never make it back. Considering the fact that you’ll likely spend more of your waking hours at your job than in any other part of your life, it’s a compromise that will always eat away at you.
The problem is that what we think matters most in our jobs often does not align with what will really make us happy. Even worse, we don’t notice that gap until it’s too late.
Good intentions are not enough—
All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy. The process is continuous: even as your strategy begins to take shape, you’ll learn new things, and new problems and opportunities will always emerge. They’ll feed back in; the cycle is continuous.
She wasn’t just a scientist. She was a mother and a wife, whose mood, whose happiness, and whose sense of self-worth had a huge impact on her family.
Vinita Punjabi liked this
But incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.
Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.
Interesting!
Vinita Punjabi liked this
Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.
The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money.
the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful.
In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
it is frightfully easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness.
We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it.
The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.
As you learn from each experience, adjust. Then iterate quickly. Keep going through this process until your strategy begins to click.
Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.
Instead, find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions.
Instead, this approach of “What assumptions must prove true?” offers a simple way to keep strategy from going far off-course.
Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?” List them. Are they within your control?
what makes us tick.
The Paradox of Resource Allocation
we have resources—which include personal time, energy, talent, and wealth—
unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments.
build a satisfying personal life alongside their professional life,
In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it’s effectively implemented.
Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.
high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home.
Even when you know what your true priorities are, you’ll have to fight to uphold them in your own mind every day.
keep myself true to what I most value.
Work can bring you a sense of fulfillment—but it pales in comparison to the enduring happiness you can find in the intimate relationships that you cultivate with your family and close friends.
Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives. They are worth fighting for.
“What assumptions need to prove true?”
Great concept.
93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.
Deal with tomorrow tomorrow.
planting saplings when you decide you need more shade.
having shallow friendships with many but deep friendships with none;
we can’t turn the clock back.
though he is poor, his life is rich in friendships.
I genuinely believe that relationships with family and close friends are one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.
The two fundamental jobs that children need to do are to feel successful and to have friends—every day.
It’s so easy to mean well but get it wrong.
Even with good intentions and deep love, we can fundamentally misunderstand each other.
Our communication ends up focusing only on who is doing what. We assume things.
the path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.
sacrifice deepens our commitment—
