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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Your choice of goals will determine your direction.
How you react to the pain that causes is up to you. If you want to reach your goals, you must be calm and analytical so that you can accurately diagnose your problems, design a plan that will get you around them, and do what’s necessary to push through to results.
The good news is that every mistake you make can teach you something, so there’s no end to learning.
Have clear goals.
Prioritize: While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want.
Don’t confuse goals with desires.
Decide what you really want in life by reconciling your goals and your desires.
d. Don’t mistake the trappings of success for success itself.
Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable.
Remember that great expectations create great capabilities.
Almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have a) flexibility and b) self-accountability.
Knowing how to deal well with your setbacks is as important as knowing how to move forward.
Your mission is to always make the best possible choices, knowing that you will be rewarded if you do.
Identify and don’t tolerate problems.
View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you.
b. Don’t avoid confronting problems because they are rooted in harsh realities that are unpleasant to look at.
Be specific in identifying your problems.
Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem.
To clarify your thinking, try to identify the bad outcome first;
Distinguish big problems from small ones.
Diagnose problems to get at their root causes.
Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.”
Distinguish proximate causes from root causes.
schedule). Root causes run much deeper and they are typically described with adjectives (I didn’t check the train schedule because I am forgetful).
2.4 Design a plan.
Go back before you go forward.
Think about your problem as a set of outcomes produced by a machine.
Remember that there are typically many paths to achieving your goals.
Think of your plan as being like a movie script in that you visualize who will do what through time.
Write down your plan for everyone to see and to measure your progress against.
Recognize that it doesn’t take a lot of time to design a good plan.
Push through to completion.
Great planners who don’t execute their plans go nowhere.
Good work habits are vastly underrated.
c. Establish clear metrics to make certain that you are following your plan.
Your values determine what you want, i.e., your goals.
have humility so you can get what you need from others!
Ask others for their input too,
There are two paths to success: 1) to have what you need yourself or 2) to get it from others.
Be Radically Open-Minded
The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.
a. Understand your ego barrier.
Your two “yous” fight to control you.
When you try to explain your behavior, your explanations don’t make any sense.
Understand your blind spot barrier.
thoughtful disagreement, your goal is not to convince the other party that you are right—it is to find out which view is true and decide what to do about it.
we all experience reality in different ways and any single way is essentially distorted.
Leonard Mlodinow, in his excellent book Subliminal, writes,
that man is perpetually suspended between the two extreme forces that created us: “Individual selection [which] prompted sin and group selection [which] promoted virtue.”
The Spiritual Brain (which I also recommend to you).
