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you: you act, and then the whole machine starts to turn. If you don’t act, or you don’t act very effectively, then all the rest of us suffer. It is in the world’s interest that you are working at top capacity, all the time. We need you.
THE SEVEN-POINT PROGRAM 1. Do yoga.
Yoga exercises were designed over thousands of years to have a maximum effect on subtle pathways where your thoughts travel, inside your body.
This means that if you do yoga right, you will actually begin to think more clearly.
Ashtanga:
Iyengar
Hatha:
Sivananda:
Bikram:
Anusara
2. Start meditating.
You’re more calm, you think more sharply, you see opportunities, you crack problems.
3. Follow a personal ethical code.
Protect life.
Respect others’ things.
Respect others’ relationships.
Be truthful.
4. Keep learning.
Never stop learning—learn whatever you can,
5. Serve.
A human life is not complete without purposely doing at least one good thing for someone else every day.
6. Eat skillfully.
How do you eat skillfully?
It takes a lot of wisdom and intelligence to go against the flow and retrain ourselves how to eat.
7. Rest and relax.
If eating is a skill, then resting is an art.
Get enough sleep
Not this. Not that either.
DECISIONS JUST BREED MORE
Decisions are born from the uncertainty about the odds. You’re used to having to make decisions because all this time you’ve been playing the odds.
And that decision will be: Do we stick with the old direct paper mailer, or do we try some new Web ads?
A decision must be made simply because it’s not certain that either approach will work at all.
The problem is that decisions breed more decisions, because uncertainty itself tends to multiply uncertainty and stress on the head of the poor
little Project Manager (us).
On top of this messy little picture now we need to add a pros-and-cons list, because every time you need to make a major decision it spawns a long list of pros and cons.
The problem is that this pros-and-cons list is immediately going to spawn another list in your head, which is the “pros-gone-con” list.
So it’s time to stop making decisions. Let’s see how you’re going to get away with it.
In that moment—in that one moment—it dawns on me that it doesn’t really matter whether you take risks or stay conservative. It doesn’t really seem to matter which decision you make: either one might work out, or it might not work out, and the reason the Wall Street Journal has so many pages is just to report on how true that is, all over the world.
Look around and find that list of five things you were supposed to get done this week. Next to each there should be some odds of success written down. Now for each of these write a pros-and-cons list, just three pros and three cons each.
Stare at all this for 5 minutes and try to feel like there must be a better way.
We’re going to start changing the...
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Now every time you have a meal or a snack during the day, stop afterwards and pull out the notebook and note down anything you ate that had a lot of sugar or fat in it, or any kind of stimulant like caffeine
We’re just observing, not changing. And then you’ll find that the observing becomes the changing. Try it. It works.
Quiet Sitting to write down a personal ethical code that will make you a better person.
No more than five items total.
Once a day, just before you go to bed, pull out your notebook; think of which of the five items you were most successful with today; ...
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This creates all kinds of background echoes that contribute to the success of your projects, including the 100,000.
No action is ever lost.
FLIPPING OVER TO INSTINCT
Ask them why they always make the right moves at the
