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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Sullivan
Read between
October 31 - November 6, 2021
“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been.” —Dr. Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist
“We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present. . . . Our memories are not stored and objective entities but living parts of ourselves in the present. This is the reason our present moods and future goals so affect our memories.”
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
You can be reminded that the “normal life” you’re now living may be the dreams—or even beyond the dreams—of your former self.
MOVE TOWARD WHAT’S GROWING “Your increasing sense of individual uniqueness makes you aware of everything and everyone that’s rigidly opposed to any kind of growth. This enables you to identify and move toward everything that’s growing.”
Here are the five questions: Where am I right now? What are my wins from the past 90 days? What are my desired wins for the next 90 days? Where will I be in 12 months? Where will I be in 3 years?
Comparing snapshots of your former self with your current self quickly gets you into the GAIN.
A.M.B. ALWAYS. MEASURE. BACKWARD.
THE PROBLEM IS HOW YOU MEASURE “Do you find that no matter how much success you have, you’re perpetually dissatisfied with your progress? Does it feel like you’re still far from achieving your biggest goals? The problem is not in the quantity or quality of your success and achievements. The problem is how you measure.”
“The only way to measure the distance you’ve traveled is by measuring from where you are back to the point where you started.” —Dan Sullivan
For now, let’s start by going back roughly 10 years. Where were you 10 years ago? What were you focused on? How did you measure success back then? How has your situation changed? What do you now know that you didn’t know back then? What have been some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned over the past 10 years? What have been some of your biggest accomplishments and achievements since then?
“I’ve noticed that people who measure their accomplishments in terms of specifics tend to be happier and a lot more energized than people who speak and think in generalities. Someone who responds to a question like ‘How are things going?’ with an answer like ‘Things are pretty good’ isn’t actually connecting with their real experience. “But if you think about specific facts when you assess your situation, this grounds your feeling in reality. “For example, saying, ‘This recently completed project earned ten times as much money as it did last year’ is very different from saying, ‘This project
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THE ONLY WAY TO MEASURE “The only way to measure the distance you’ve traveled is by measuring from where you are back to the point where you started.”
Alain de Botton said, “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.”
“What did I believe 3 months ago that I no longer believe today?”
HOW TO MOVE FORWARD “Your level of capability in the future depends upon your measurement of achievements in the past. You can’t move forward and grow until you’ve acknowledged how far you’ve come and have properly measured your GAINS.”
“Our eyes only see and our ears only hear what our brain is looking for.” —Dan Sullivan
THERE’S NO BLAME “There’s no blame to be had for your being in the GAP up to this point. Even if you were raised in a GAIN-minded household, you could easily have picked up GAP-like thinking from the culture that was otherwise around you. After all, measuring backward is counterintuitive to most people.”
What you do during the hour before bed sets the tone for the rest of your life. This is where your deepest habits are formed. How you end your day doesn’t only determine how well you sleep. It dictates when you’ll wake up. It orders how clear and directed you are when you awake. It decides how committed and sold you are on what you’ll do and who you’ll be the next day. It defines how effective and alert you’ll be the next day.
HOW TO MAKE JUMPS “As you move forward, new goals will require you to jump to higher levels of confidence and capability, but you’ve done that before, time and time again. To remind yourself of this, all you have to do is look back to your various starting points and then to your corresponding achievements.”
As Thomas Edison said, “Never go to bed without a request to your subconscious.
DON’T COMPARE TODAY “Don’t compare today’s value to that of any other day.”
“Never begin the day until it is finished on paper.” —Jim Rohn
Research shows that writing down three things you’re grateful for each day increases your happiness.17 Other research shows that gratitude before bed not only makes you feel better but literally makes you sleep better.18,19 Writing what you’re grateful for is very powerful. But perhaps even more powerful is writing down specific “wins” you had that day. Writing three wins from the day not only boosts your gratitude but simultaneously boosts your confidence.
EACH WIN IS IMPORTANT “Each win, big or small, is important, and the more you do the activity of identifying your daily wins, the more you’ll see greater and greater opportunity for wins.”
WINNING EVERY DAY “You’ll notice with each winning day—which is every day—that your sense of pride, confidence, and excitement expands and accelerates.”
Michael Jordan summed it up well: “Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again.”
William James, the Harvard psychologist and father of American psychology, explained selective attention this way: “Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
WINNING EXPANDS WINNING “Once you get in the habit of looking for wins, you expand your understanding of what can be a win.”
Naval Ravikant: “I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second.”
“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.” —Pearson’s Law
After writing down your three wins each night, an effective way to tap into Pearson’s Law—where you measure and report your progress—is sharing your three wins with an accountability or “success” partner. It doesn’t need to take more than 2 minutes per day. After your journal session where you’ve written down your three wins for the day, as well as your three wins for the next day, all you have to do is text what you wrote down to your success partner. By sharing your wins, you’re not actually “reporting” to someone. Rather, you’re sharing your success. There are several benefits to sharing
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THE WINNING MUSCLE “When you take the time daily to recognize your achievements, you’re building a muscle.”
Take Ownership of Your Past “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” —attributed to Stephen Hawking
WE CREATE MEANING AND VALUE “Meaning and value aren’t given to us. We create our own meaning and value for every experience.”
Taking Ownership of Your Experiences “Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it. . . . It’s just easier if you do.” —Byron Katie
When you’re in the GAIN, you’re proactive about your experiences—you look at your experiences and utilize them to become more adaptive and successful in your future.
FREE YOURSELF FROM JUSTIFICATION “When people stop spending their energies on justifying what they want, they free themselves up to focus on creativity and innovation.”
Conversely, when you’re in the GAP, you’re reactive to your experiences—looking at them and being frustrated over what happened. Rather than utilizing your experiences for learning and improvement, you frame them as “a negative.”
“Everyone who grows achieves their progress and improvement by transforming frustrating and painful failures into rules and measurements for satisfying success.”
The GAP takes away your agency as a person and makes you psychologically rigid. The GAIN increases your agency and makes you increasingly psychologically flexible.
EXPAND OWNERSHIP OVER LIFE “You use your winning brain to identify, achieve, and measure daily progress, which continually expands your ownership over every area of your life.”
The more flexible you are as a person, the more willing you’ll be to try multiple approaches to getting where you want to go. The more rigid you are, the more dogmatically you’ll try forcing the same approach even when it proves unsuccessful.
CONTROL YOUR RESPONSE “Successful people don’t control events; they control their response to events.”
“We will be better because of this, not bitter because of this.”
VALUE CREATES MEANING “With increased value comes greater meaning. The things that we value or appreciate the most also have the greatest meaning. Value and meaning in the world, then, are totally created by appreciation.”
They’ve taken ownership of the meaning and framing they give their stories. They aren’t reactive about their past, but proactive. They decide what their past means. They decide what they’ll do as a result. They’re better because of their challenges, not worse.
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” —George Orwell,
“Your past is just a story. And once you realize this, it has no power over you.” —Chuck Palahniuk
To apply The Experience Transformer, pull out your journal and follow these instructions: Think about any specific experience—positive or negative. Ask yourself: What about this experience worked? What “usefulness” can you get from this experience to improve your future? What can you learn from this experience about what you don’t want? Knowing what you know now, because you’ve had this experience, how will you approach your future differently? What about this experience are you grateful for?
