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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tommy Baker
Read between
April 23 - April 24, 2018
Our expectations are sky high, and we’re prone to giving up at the first sign of struggle or obstacles.
The first iteration of your goals is never the end result—the magic is in the pivot.
Without starting and jumping into the cold water, you’ll never clearly see the pivot and the opportunity in front of you, no matter what area of life you’re in.
We will experience challenges, adversity, and chaos at least once every single day.
Operating under this ethos allows us to not be surprised, but rather to get excited when it comes. We recognize this, knowing our competition will fold when faced with a similar circumstance, as would have our prior selves.
When we feel we’re moving the needle forward in life, even a seemingly insignificant amount, we stay motivated. Progress keeps us inspired and on track.
Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.
The 1% Rule: 1% progress + daily application (consistency) + persistence (focus) + time (endurance) = success.
When I focused on small daily actions tied to the larger vision, I felt invigorated and inspired, and I moved the needle. When I focused on the end result and the massive vision I’d created, I felt depleted and uninspired, and suffered from paralysis by analysis.
If I moved the needle forward 1% in every area of my life, every single day, what would my life look like in one year? Simple: I’d experience a 365% increase across my life. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty awesome. What would a 365% increase across all areas of your life look like?
“Write a page every day,” he advises at the top of a list of eight writing tips he published in the New York Times recently. “That’s about 200 words, or 1,000 words a week. Do that for two years and you’ll have a novel that’s long enough. Nothing will happen until you are producing at least one page per day.”
John Grisham
We only truly value that which is earned—and specifically, that which we earn through the process of becoming.
We’d much rather stay in what’s known and uncomfortable—even if it’s painful. We’re afraid of the unknown, and we lack the courage to step into it with faith. Our world can be spinning in chaos and mediocrity, but we won’t be compelled to change because it’s familiar. Some would say we can become addicted to the frustrations in our life and are receiving a benefit from them.
Let’s take a vegan at a restaurant. When the menu arrives, they’ve already discounted 80% of the potential options. As they go through the menu, they don’t even consider the plates with meat. It’s as if they don’t exist. They simply zone in on the choices in line with their underlying code. This makes their life easy—no back and forth between dishes. There’s no overanalyzing and spending their precious energy on best- or worst-case scenarios. Vegan eating, then, is simply an example of having a strict code in life to guide us.
Jon Acuff is the New York Times best-selling author of several books, including Start and Finish. A master researcher on goal setting, I asked him what the most difficult day for people who set goals is. Most assume it’s the first day when they get started, or possibly the last few days as they push to finish. When I asked Jon (Acuff 2017), he said: “Simple—Day two is the hardest day and where we see the most drop off.”
Peter Drucker famously said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
Pursuing mastery means you’ll be practicing. Specifically, you’ll embrace deliberate practice. Made famous by Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code (Coyle 2009), this means pushing yourself to the edge of discomfort during practice to the place where you want to give up. It’s easy to practice a skill and do what we’re good at. Can you instead spend the time on what challenges you?
“A warrior is an average man with laser like focus.” - Bruce Lee
It’s not the quality of our skills that stops us. It’s not the quality of the information that stops us. It’s not the know-how or the inspiration that stops us. Without a doubt, the number one obstacle standing between people and their dreams is a lack of focus.
if we were to ask ourselves the following questions, we would quickly realize our busiest days weren’t productive at all: Did I really move the needle forward in my life and business? Which activities truly mattered and which could be deleted? Was I moving myself forward or just other people’s agendas?
in an ever-distracted and changing world, the ability to engage in deep work makes you rare and inherently valuable. Furthermore, the quality of your output increases, as does the level of your feelings of purpose and fulfillment.
Using the concepts and strategies of deep work, I committed to my book and finished the first draft in a matter of months. The more I engaged in these undistracted sessions, the less I felt the need to check the smartphone or e-mail. I created strict rules around both, including no checking of e-mail until 10:00 a.m. and writing a minimum of 1,000 words a day. I’d spend most of my day in airplane mode. I was unavailable for long lunches and random meetings without an agenda.
Stop checking e-mail all day. The days of the inbox being open all day are long gone and the research proves it. Set a strict time to start checking e-mail.
Start your day on “airplane mode.” Cut the crap—you don’t need to check stocks or Twitter to start your day. You’re robbing yourself of key insights and clarity to help your life and business. My smartphone won’t be turned on until seven or eight, and only for meditation and music and to message my soul mate.
You’re going to perform one Pomodoro time block every single day. It doesn’t matter who you work for or what you do. Use it for your current career, for a passion, or to sharpen a skill. Don’t start with six, that’s not realistic. Start with one and watch what happens during the next 30 days.
Do you persist and endure, continuously growing though support and challenge? Or… Do you find the next “new” thing to latch on to so you can feel the initial feelings again?
“Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals. Self-control is the voluntary regulation of behavioral, emotional, and attentional impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions. Grit can be simply defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”
When we truly, deeply, and authentically desire our visions, we will persist in the face of extraordinary challenges. We won’t require external motivation; we’ll be so driven from every cell of our body that we will simply move forward because we don’t know any other way.
Steve Jobs once famously said in a beautiful commencement speech at Stanford: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Without a healthy dose of challenge, we wither away and slowly begin to fade. Our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual capacity is no longer used or tested, and it begins to suck the life force out of us. We don’t have to go through retirement to recognize this. There have certainly been moments in your life where you fell prey to the soul-sucking feeling of complacency.
Enthusiasm is a creative energy unlike any other. Once you start slipping into complacency, you’ll notice your enthusiasm wane. Eventually, it’ll turn into boredom—or worse, apathy. Enthusiasm is cultivated through meaningful work and progress. If you find yourself lacking enthusiasm for anything in life, pay attention. It’s telling you bluntly that something is missing, and you’ve gotten too comfortable with the status quo.
Enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare. Endurance is what separates the master from the masses and the amateur from the professional. It separates those who stay focused and persistent on a long enough timeline to watch all their dreams come true.
Which meant when I was knee-deep in mental and physical pain, I would reframe the pain and see it as a gift. It became the feedback mechanism that showed I was growing. The illusion that your path and your vision won’t have pain is simply that—an illusion. It’s time to drop that once and for all, lean into the moments where you’re at your edge, and choose to step beyond it.
YOUR MOUNTAIN IS YOURS Don’t compare your start or middle to someone else’s ending, or you’ll never endure. In a social-media-fueled, all-access world, it becomes easy to take our evolution and compare it with someone else’s.
One day, you’re going to look back and reflect on this period of your life—and miss it. You’re going to miss the excitement, the doubt, the beautiful mess of ambition and desire, the growth, the studying, the wins, and the losses. Sure, you will love your results and the life you’ve created, but don’t miss out on the moment right now.
Stephen Pressfield, the brilliant author, describes why resistance is a prerequisite, not an obstacle, in his book The War of Art (Pressfield 2012): “Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”
Yahoo Finance (Ryniec 2017) said this about his style: “If Buffett’s ‘formula’ could be described in a word, that word would be ‘boring.’ Wonderfully, profitably, enjoyably boring.”
Seneca the Younger wrote a text, On the Shortness of Life (Corpus Scriptum Latinorum 2017).
“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by, you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”
Accountability is the reason you show up at the gym at 5:00 a.m. when every voice in your mind is telling you to sleep in. Accountability is the reason you finish the last 200 words after an exhausting day, because you committed to finishing your book. Accountability is why you hire the crucial team member in four weeks and not four months, because you’re reporting back to someone daily.
If you want to find a relationship that sets you on fire—put in the work. If you want to create a thriving, profitable business—put in the work. If you want to feel deeply connected—put in the work.
The Pomodoro Technique, Francesco Cirilio. This technique was referenced several times in the text. https://cirillocompany.de/pages/pomodoro-technique Pomodoro Online Timer. Online, free tool to track your Pomodoro’s: http://www.marinaratimer.com/ RescueTime. A great tool to track your time spent online, free version works great. https://www.rescuetime.com/
SEALFIT by Mark Divine. A great platform combining every aspect of life for training. https://sealfit.com/
