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that helps me find out what’s true and what to do about it.
If instead we classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result.
Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 . . .
People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t will suffer through constant misunderstandings and conflicts.
The principles you choose can be anything you want them to be as long as they are authentic—i.e., as long as they reflect your true character and values.
My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I’m right” to having one of “How do I know I’m right?”
talk. Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision,
Because the power of a group is so much greater than the power of an individual, I believe these work principles are even more important than the life principles on which they’re based.
Over the course of our lives, we make millions and millions of decisions that are essentially bets, some large and some small. It pays to think about how we make them because they are what ultimately determine the quality of our lives.
Living through that taught me that while almost everyone expects the future to be a slightly modified version of the present, it is usually very different.
Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively.
Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning.
people’s greatest weaknesses are the flip sides of their greatest strengths.
There are two parts of each person’s brain: the upper-level logical part and the lower-level emotional part. I call these the “two yous.” They fight for control of each person. How that conflict is managed is the most important driver of our behaviors.
difference. I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future.
Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making,
Over time I learned that getting more out of life wasn’t just a matter of working harder at it. It was much more a matter of working effectively, because working effectively could increase my capacity by hundreds of times.
It can also be difficult because being radically transparent rather than more guarded exposes one to criticism. It’s natural to fear that. Yet if you don’t put yourself out there with your radical transparency, you won’t learn.
I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I’ve since come to understand that it produces less rapid progress than experimentation and adaptation.
Once we get the things we are striving for, we rarely remain satisfied with them. The things are just the bait. Chasing after them forces us to evolve, and it is the evolution and not the rewards themselves that matters to us and to those around us. This means that for most people success is struggling and evolving as effectively as possible, i.e., learning rapidly about oneself and one’s environment, and then changing to improve.
If you can recognize the differences between those roles and that it is much more important that you are a good designer/manager of your life than a good worker in it,
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To be successful, the “designer/manager you” has to be objective about what the “worker you” is really like, not believing in him more than he deserves, or putting him in jobs he shouldn’t be in.
The biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively, which leads them to bump into their own and others’ weaknesses again and again.
You need to get over all that and stop seeing struggling as something negative.
When encountering your weaknesses you have four choices: 1. You can deny them (which is what most people do). 2. You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change).
You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them. 4. Or, you can change what you are going after.
The second—accepting your weaknesses while trying to turn them into strengths—is probably the best path if it works. But some things you will never be good at and it takes a lot of time and effort to change. The best single clue as to whether you should go down this path is whether the thing you are trying to do is consistent with your nature (i.e., your natural abilities).
The third path—accepting your weaknesses while trying to find ways around them—is the easiest and typically the most viable path, yet it is the one least followed.
I know that my own life has been full of mistakes and lots of great feedback. It was only by looking down on this body of evidence from a higher level that I was able to get around my mistakes and go after what I wanted. For as long as I have been practicing this, I still know I can’t see myself objectively, which is why I continue to rely so much on the input of others.
Make your decisions on the basis of first-, second-, and third-order consequences.
What will ultimately fulfill you are things that feel right at both levels, as both desires and goals.
Almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have a) flexibility and b) self-accountability. Flexibility is what allows you to accept what reality (or knowledgeable people) teaches you; self-accountability is essential because if you really believe that failing to achieve a goal is your personal failure, you will see your failing to achieve it as indicative that you haven’t been creative or flexible or determined enough to do what it takes.
every problem you encounter is an opportunity;
for that reason, it is essential that you bring them to the surface. Most people don’t like to do this, especially if it exposes their own weaknesses or the weaknesses of someone they care about,
Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem. “I can’t get enough sleep” is not a problem; it is a potential cause (or perhaps the result) of a problem. To clarify your thinking, try to identify the bad outcome first; e.g., “I am performing poorly in my job.” Not sleeping enough may be the cause of that problem, or the cause may be something else—but in order to determine that, you need to know exactly what the problem is.
I don't have time - cause of a problem
Being little flexible, procrastinating - problem
Ask yourself: Am I seeing this just through my own eyes? If so, then you should know that you’re terribly handicapped.
find that most people don’t do that—they prefer to make their own decisions, even when they’re not qualified to make the kinds of judgments required. In doing so, they’re giving in to their lower-level selves.
