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December 5 - December 19, 2016
Amplify Your Strengths Rather Than Fix Your Weaknesses
“Success” need not be complicated. Just start with making 1,000 people extremely, extremely happy.
If you spend your time focusing on the things that are
wrong, and that’s what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction for people.
Book your A list for after your first 10 pitches.
What are the things that, if defunct or slow, render your to-do list useless?
Don’t Try and Find Time. Schedule Time.
It’s not about kissing ass. It’s not about making someone look good. It’s about providing the support so that others can be good.
When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) you have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.
Imagine if for every person
you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you? The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable. You’d have countless new relationships. You’d have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road.
Don’t Accept the Norms of Your Time
Edit for You, Your Fans, Then Your Haters
The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.
we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.”
Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts—so that your travels are not an escape from your real life, but a discovery of your real life.
If I asked you to spend $1 billion improving the world, solving a problem, what would you pursue?
Money can always be regenerated. Time and reputation cannot.
When possible, always give the money to charity, as it allows you to interact with people well above your pay grade.
Are You Doing What You’re Uniquely Capable of, What You Feel Placed Here on Earth to Do? Can You Be Replaced?
One of my favorite time-management essays is “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” by Paul Graham of Y Combinator fame. Give it a read.
Some words are so overused as to have become meaningless. If you find yourself using nebulous terms like “success,” “happiness,” or “investing,” it pays to explicitly define them or stop using them.
Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.
Where in your life are you good at moderation? Where are you an all-or-nothing type? Where do you lack a shut-off switch? It pays to know thyself.
To “fix” someone’s problem, you very often just need to empathically listen to them.
Discipline Equals Freedom
you want to be tougher, be
tougher.
“Take Extreme Ownership of ...
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push yourself harder than you believe you’re capable of.
What advice are you ignoring because you think it’s trite or clichéd? Can you mine it for any testable action?
‘Work will work when nothing else will work.’”
“Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Advice
Perhaps it’s time for you to take a temporary break from pursuing goals to find the knots in the garden hose that, once removed, will make everything else better and easier?
It’s not giving up to put your current path on indefinite pause.
Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
I was risking an unlikely and temporary 3 or 4 for a probable and permanent 9 or 10,
In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.
“People-Pleasing Is a Form of Assholery”
it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the ICU, taking care of their senescent parents, or holding down three minimum-wage jobs they have to commute to by bus who need to tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s most often said by people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in.
Yes, I know we’re all very busy, but what, exactly, is getting done?
On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and see friends, read, or watch a movie in the evening.
Time and quiet should not be luxury items.
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some
bong-smoking anarchist, but it was in fact Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write Childhood’s End and think up communications satellites.
was the Puritans who perverted work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
Life is too short to be busy.
“What are some of the choices you’ve made that made you who you are?”
The best art divides the audience.
It pays to write what you know.
