More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 26 - March 30, 2019
recognizing how little credit you really deserve for your triumphs and achievements.
Aim for predictability in your professional performance. It greatly enhances your value to others.
Predictability is one of your competitive advantages.
One mark of a fine person is demanding far more of yourself than you do of others. Let them be unpredictable. Roll with it, absorb it, and focus on developing your own predictability.
Success in business means getting on with people.
If you really are to succeed in business, it won’t be because people think you are smart; it will be because people like you. There is an old adage, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
your welfare is interlinked with that of everyone else in your extended order of social cooperation.
YOUR PATH TO PROSPERITY
Learn to develop new relationships.
Don’t try to make connections in specific forums, such as job networking meetings.
Learn how to relate to strangers with the sincere warmth and interest that turns them into friends.
build genuine and sincere relationships with as many people as possible with no thought of reward.
Make sure all your friends and contacts know that there are ways you could help them and that you are eager to help them.
Choose carefully those with whom you do business.
Find joy in serving others.
The secret to learning how to love serving others is to develop the character trait of humility.
Be predictable, and you’ll be seen as a professional.
see himself not as a discharged former employee but as a business, Mike Inc., whose chief asset was Mike’s time, experience, and connections. He realized that he was not seeking a job as much as he was seeking new clients or customers. He was no longer a supplicant but a business professional. He then set about finding a new “client” or employer and he did so now with a bounce in his step.
Learning to view yourself as being in business rather than as merely an employee brings enormous benefits in its wake.
Finding a job is just the beginning. Now you must grow in that job, always seeking new areas to expand your responsibilities and continually seeking ways to enhance your usefulness.
no matter what you do, you are really in business to succeed.
the most important questions are: Are you in business, or do you just have a job?
You may not be able to do much about the job you have, but you can change your outlook. You can make this change devastatingly effective, and you can make it permanent. It is all about how you are going to interact with other people from this day forward. Your success depends on them, but most of it is totally within your control.
Modifying the real you for maximum effectiveness is what ancient Jewish wisdom advises its devotees.
Like most people you can think of yourself as having two distinct personalities—call them two distinct impulses—only one of which is dominant at any particular moment. Furthermore, your behavior in any given situation can be pretty much predicted by knowing which of your two impulses is in charge. Furthermore, each of the two individual impulses within you is complex and capable of making complex and persuasive arguments to you.
The technique that Jews would use to teach themselves this indispensable skill of viewing oneself honestly and from above,
Each and every one of us is, at one and the same time, both divine and animal.
This essential ability to constantly teach oneself and improve oneself depends entirely on becoming accustomed to seeing oneself as made up of two separate beings: one tugging toward short-term gratification while the other is heard issuing warnings in the background.
It becomes a little easier to follow your head rather than your heart when you become cognizant of the tug of-war between the two impulses.
Long before you can hope to lead others, you must acquire the strength to lead yourself.
Rule 1: Physical things can be destroyed, whereas spiritual things cannot.
Rule 2: Physical things can tolerate imperfection; spiritual things need to be precise.
Rule 3: The spiritual element of an event must precede its physical actualization
Ben Zomah asking and answering four questions: 1. Who is wise? 2. Who is powerful? 3. Who is wealthy? 4. Who wins esteem?18
most people you have a very real need for a sense of intellectual growth.
The basics of life can be reduced to the incredibly demanding task of extracting an adequate living from an often reluctant earth while expending the least amount of energy. Not everybody understands this, and losing sight of this reality can be a real handicap.
To whatever extent you have the ability to control your environment, that is the extent to which you possess power.
Power, therefore, is a measure of your ability to extend your influence and control into the world around you.
the basics of survival. It includes food, shelter, physical health, and so on. You may call it “wealth”
“wealth” means the ability to survive on this earth.
the person is wealthy who is satisfied with his or her portion.
Without this invisible substance, a person will literally die. What could this be? It is the esteem of other people.
people with high self esteem tend to have low self-control.
Those who want to succeed must concentrate on self respect and the esteem of others rather than on self esteem. Self respect is the consequence of genuine achievement and cannot be conferred by others.
take constant little slices of retirement as it were, each and every day of your life.
shalem, from which is derived the far better known shalom, meaning “peace.” The root meaning of the word is “totality” or “comprehensiveness.”
I may have to specialize in my professional occupation, but I should not do so in the totality of my life.
their first task is to help him or her get rid of some accumulated bad habits. Only after that has been accomplished can the coach begin the task of teaching the right way
Step 1: Admit Your Weaknesses. The first step is to acknowledge that you do dumb things.
A question I force myself to confront regularly is this: Which of the actions I am currently taking or contemplating will, in the future, appear to be fully as stupid as those of last year, last month, and last week?
