More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
true with what is really true. 2. Don’t worry about looking good—worry instead about achieving your goals. 3. Don’t overweight first-order consequences relative to second- and third-order ones. 4. Don’t let pain stand in the way of progress. 5. Don’t blame bad outcomes on anyone but yourself.
15 You shouldn’t assume that you are always the best person to make decisions for yourself because often you aren’t.
others may know how to get it better than we do because they have strengths where we have weaknesses, or more relevant knowledge and experience.
Believable parties are those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished something—and have great
19 I recommend Richard Dawkins’s and E. O. Wilson’s books on evolution. If I had to pick just one, it would be Dawkins’s River Out of Eden.
21 The marginal benefits of moving from a shortage to an abundance of anything decline.
24 Your ability to see the changing landscape and adapt is more a function of your perception and reasoning than your ability to learn and process quickly.
BAD Avoid facing “harsh realities.” GOOD Face “harsh realities.”
BAD
Worry about appearing good. GOOD Worry about achieving the goal.
Make your decisions on the basis of first-order consequences. GOOD Make your decisions on the basis of first-, second-, and third-order consequences.
BAD Allow pain to stand in the way of progress. GOOD Understand how to manage pain to produce progress.
BAD Don’t hold yourself and others accountable. GOOD Hold yourself and others accountable.
2 Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life
1. Have clear goals. 2. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals. 3. Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes. 4. Design plans that will get you around them. 5. Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results.
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. Then you will look at the new results you achieve and go through the process again.
To evolve quickly, you will have to do this fast and continuously, setting your goals successively higher.
For example, when setting goals, just set goals. Don’t think about how you will achieve them or what you will do if something goes wrong. When you are diagnosing problems, don’t think about how you will solve them—
effective, pretend that your life is a martial art or a game, the object of which is to get around a challenge and reach a goal.
Once you accept its rules, you’ll get used to the discomfort that comes with the constant frustration. You will never handle everything perfectly: Mistakes are inevitable and it’s impor-tant to recognize and accept this fact of life. The good news is that every mistake you make can teach you something, so there’s no end to learning. You’ll soon realize that excuses like “that’s not easy” or “it doesn’t seem fair” or even “I can’t do that” are of no value and that it pays to push through.
2.1 Have clear goals.
a. Prioritize: While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want.
Choosing a goal often means rejecting some things you want in order to get other things that you want or need even more.
good alternative for a better one, they try to pursue too many goals at once, achieving few or none of them.
b. Don’t confuse goals with desires. A proper goal is something that you really need to achieve.
c. 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.
e. Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable.
Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.
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. And you will be that much more motivated to find the way. h. 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. 2.2 Identify and don’t tolerate problems. a. 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. Thinking about problems that
Be specific in identifying your problems.
Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem.
e. Distinguish big problems from small ones.
You only have so much time and energy; make sure you are investing them in exploring the problems that, if fixed, will yield you the biggest returns.
But at the same time, make sure you spend enough time with the small problems to make sure they’re not symptoms of larger ones. f. Once you identify...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
2.3 Diagnose problems to get at their root causes. a. Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.”
A good diagnosis typically takes between fifteen minutes and an hour, depending on how well it’s done and how complex the issue is.
b. Distinguish proximate causes from root causes. Proximate causes are typically the actions (or lack of actions) that lead to problems,
(I missed the train because I didn’t check the train schedule). Root causes run much deeper and they are typically described with adjectives (I didn’t check the train schedule because I am forgetful).
c. Recognize that knowing what someone (including you) is like will tell you
what you can expect from them.
2.4 Design a plan.
a. Go back before you go forward. Replay the story of where you have been (or what you have done) that led up to where you are now, and then visualize what you and others must do in the future so you will reach your goals.
Think about your problem as a set of outcomes produced by a machine.
Practice higher-level thinking by looking down on your machine and thinking about how it can be changed to produce better outcomes.
c. Remember that there are typically many paths to ach...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
