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December 25, 2023 - January 2, 2024
If you need people to know about whatever your thing is, you’ve got to tell them. And if you really want to supercharge your dream’s exposure to the world, don’t just tell them about it, act like it’s already come true. You do that by talking openly about what you’re working toward but removing the phrase “will be’’ from your vocabulary.
“See it. Believe it. Achieve it.” But I think it’s missing a step in between: Explain it.
Bridging is a communication technique that anyone can use to take control of a hostile discussion or to avoid a question you don’t want to answer by shifting it toward a topic that better serves your agenda instead of the agenda of the person on the other side of the microphone or the negotiating table.
What is the value of trying to be someone you’re not? Of hiding from your true story and letting someone else tell it? Where do you think that gets you in the end? I promise you, it’s nowhere good. Embrace who you are! Own your story! Even if you don’t like it. Even if it’s bad, and you’re ashamed. If you run away and hide from your past, if you deny your story and try to sell a different one, even if you mean well, it just makes you seem like a con artist. Or worse, a politician.
no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better.
You have to learn how to manage those moments. You have to get good at shifting gears and finding the positive in things. You have to know how to reframe the failure you experience and understand the risks you’re undertaking. Confronting problems instead of complaining about them gives you the chance to practice all these skills.
The Stoics have a term for this: amor fati. Love of fate. “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to,” the great Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus said. “Rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens. Then you will be happy.”
Anytime I find myself in a shitty situation and I feel that urge to bitch and moan rising up within me, I stop, take a breath, and tell myself that it’s time to switch gears. I will actually talk to myself out loud and remind myself to look for the positive in my situation.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed that, while we can’t control many things that happen in our lives, we always have the power to control how we feel and what we do about them.
By giving into negativity, you’re allowing these things to steal time from you, from your dream, and from the people closest to you whom it’s your job to lead—whether
You can turn a negative situation into a positive experience. It all starts by catching yourself any time you start to complain, then talking yourself into switching gears and looking for the good in things. If you can choose joy over jealousy, happiness over hate, love over resentment, positivity over negativity, then you have the tools to make the best of any situation, even one that feels like failure.
failure isn’t the end.
If anything, when you look at it with the right perspective, failure is actually the beginning of measurable success, because failure is only possible in situations where you’ve tried to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. You can’t fail when you don’t try. In that sense, failure is kind of like a progress report on your path to purpose.
Failure has never killed a dream; quitting kills every dream it touches.
This is why failure is worth the risk and important to embrace: it teaches you what doesn’t work and points you toward the things that do.
When you’re chasing a big vision, you have to expect that you’ll face resistance. People who lack vision are threatened by those who have it.
Risk is just the name we give to the conclusion that each one of us comes to independently when we evaluate a choice for its chances of success compared to the consequences of its failure.
The worst thing that can happen when you do the work to overcome adversity instead of quit in the face of it is that you fail again and learn one more way that doesn’t work. Then that just forces you to switch gears, which gets you one step closer to your goal, because now you’re more likely to be heading in the right direction.
asking good “how” and “why” questions about something you’re interested in increases the chances of that information sticking in your brain and connecting with other related bits of information—making all of it more useful to you when it’s time for you to put it all to work in service of others.
Use it or lose it.
listen and learn and approach a problem with genuine concern. When you hold nothing back and give everything you have to make your corner of the world a better place. Curiosity. Hunger for information. Being open-minded. Putting your knowledge to good use.
is a formula for anyone to create real, meaningful change in the world, whether it’s personal, professional, or political. It’s also how you create change in your circumstances and make space for a vision to grow and evolve,
None of us has ever done anything on our own when you really think about it. We have always had help or guidance. Others have paved or pointed the way for us in some form or another, whether we were aware of it beforehand or not. And now that you know this, it’s important for you to recognize that you have a responsibility to give back. To help others. To send the ladder back down and lift the next group up. To pay it forward. To be useful.
Life isn’t zero-sum. We can all grow together, get richer together, get stronger together. Everyone can win, in their own time, in their own way.
How that happens is by focusing on all the ways we can give back to the people in our lives,
By being selfless, by helping your costar or your competitor or your colleague, you have the ability to make everybody’s life better and to create a positive environment where you can thrive and find happiness as well.
You can make someone’s day better and your own day better with the same act of kindness and generosity. And you don’t need to be rich or flush with cash to do it.
The first thing to realize is that at the simplest, most basic level, you don’t have to rearrange your life to help other people. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open and be engaged with the world around you.
The second thing to realize is that you have more to offer than you know.
If you’re still struggling to think up ways you can give back, don’t focus on what you have or what you know, take a personal inventory of what others have done for you in your life and try to pay it forward by doing those same things for others who might be in a similar situation.
Last chapter we talked a lot about how being curious, being a sponge, and asking good questions are tools for opening your mind to the possibilities of the world. Well, they are also tools for opening your heart to its problems, and to the ways you might be a part of their solution.
“Break your mirrors!” he said. “Yes indeed—shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor and less about your own. When you get to be thirty, forty, fifty, or even seventy years old, you’ll get more happiness and contentment out of counting your friends than counting your dollars. You’ll get more satisfaction from having improved your neighborhood, your town, your state, your country, and your fellow human beings than you’ll ever get from your muscles, your figure, your automobile,
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Sargent’s point was that giving back is a source of greater contentment, in part because it puts personal ambition in proper perspective.
I am only asking you to break your mirrors and do for others what you are able to do. I am asking you to give back. To pay it forward. To be useful as often as you can. And I am asking you to do that for the same reason that any of us have chosen to give back. Because we owe a debt of gratitude to the people who got us where we are today. Because we can do for the next generation exactly what the previous generation did for us. Because it will make the world a better place. Because it will make you happier in ways you could never have anticipated.
