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Relate your education to what you actually want to do when you finish. • Don’t use graduate school, or any other course of study, as a form of life avoidance. Pursue the course only if there’s a good reason. • Much of higher education consists of learning to make yourself look good. It’s an essential skill, but you might as well learn something else while you’re there too. • Regardless of how you feel about college or university, consider some form of alternative learning to increase your knowledge.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader. —JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Why will people willingly follow you? Because they’ll believe in your cause, and because your work helps them in some way.
prospects look for the “reason why”—why should they care?
Followers, the largest part of the team, learn of your cause, find it intriguing, and actively seek out more contact from you.
True fans are hyper-responsive followers. They typically represent 2 to 4 percent of your follower base,
Allies are like-minded individuals who are actively waging campaigns of their own in similar fields. They are your peers.
To move prospects from window shoppers to followers, you’ll need to focus on asking and answering the “reason why.”
“Why should I care about this?” or, phrased differently, “What’s in it for me?”
You want people to feel encouraged by participating in something greater than themselves or in something that connects them with others. Your message should be “Come join me. Be a part of something bigger than yourself. There are other people who see the world in a similar way.”
tell prospects who you are looking for, and tell them that you’re not going to be like everyone else out there.
Putting forward controversial opinions from time to time will also help you gain a following and filter out prospects who aren’t a good match.
Motivation comes in three forms: inspiration, education, and entertainment.
This is where you as an individual have an advantage over large companies or other organizations: you can be yourself. You can show the failures and successes on a personal level.
However, followers and true fans still like to be rewarded in other ways—usually through the work you do for them, regular communication, and as much personal recognition as is practical.
personal note, especially one that is unexpected, will almost always create a real impact on the recipient. The key principle is to go beyond the expected.
Similarly, an online reader who writes an offline card brightens my day more than any email could have.
Followers have their own circles of influence, and they can get the message out to the people they know far more effectively than you ever could on your own.
You should connect with potential allies as early as possible. When you launch a new project, actively introduce yourself to everyone who has influenced you and anyone in a similar field. Tell them what you’re doing and how their work has been an inspiration. Help them out wherever you can without keeping score. Don’t try to sell them on anything or ask for something at this point; instead, aim to establish a relationship.
You can build a funnel of entry-level products that lead to higher-level products, enabling you to serve customers who are at different stages in their relationship with you.
taking the emphasis away from selling and toward meeting the needs of people who look to you for help and inspiration. Instead of selling products, you focus on solving problems.
To defeat your own small army, simply don’t do what you say you’re going to do, and don’t apologize when you make a mistake. If you let people down without explanation or apology, good luck rebuilding that trust.
Think carefully about how you can help people get what they want. If your campaign uplifts others or meets an important need, you’re on the right track. • Create at least three ways your followers can connect with you—examples include a blog with RSS feed, a profile on a social networking site, a newsletter, or a live event. • Communicate in at least two mediums. For example, if you are a writer with a blog, supplement the written posts with an occasional podcast or video message. • Directly ask people to join your army, and then ask them for specific help. • Set a target goal: within the next
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Cheshire Cat said in Alice in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
goal is to know where you fall on the money and happiness scale, so you can then plan your life accordingly.
To get serious about saving, focus on increasing income more than cutting expenses. This is because cutting expenses is essentially a scarcity behavior, whereas increasing income is essentially an abundance behavior.
you’re not responsible for what happens after you give.
Once you give, let it go. It’s literally out of your hands at that point, and that’s where it should stay.
One thing’s for certain: when you set out on an unconventional journey, you’ll attract attention and criticism. If you succeed in your quest, you can expect more of both.
It’s good to be aware of the things people say, but that doesn’t mean you have to let them stop you from pursuing your goals. When you start to attract vampires, congratulations: you’re well on your way. Just don’t give in. The rest of us are counting on you to keep going.
These distractions include: • The 3,000 marketing messages that most of us take in every day • Busywork given to you by others or that you create for yourself • Unnecessary obligations or responsibilities • Social norms and widely held beliefs about work and time (the belief that you must work a certain number of hours each day, for example—without considering what actually gets accomplished during that time)
An important principle of life planning is that you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything at the same time. To be able to devote most of your time to projects and activities you enjoy, you’ll need to be forceful about dropping a lot of other activities.
Why not stop making commitments to events, activities, or people who bring you down?
If anything you read, including this book, is not interesting and helpful to you, you should put it down and spend your time in a more meaningful way.
Say yes to legacy work. (We’ll look at this much more in chapter 11.) • Say yes to work that leaves a deliverable. (Define work in output instead of time.) • Say yes to your kind of fun.
You can have almost anything you want, but you can’t have it all at the same time.
One of the things that separates a goal from a dream is a deadline,
you should do what you want instead of what others expect; and the goal is to achieve as much convergence as possible around everything you are passionate about.
Once you earn elite status with one airline, you can request a “status match” from several others to become a high-flyer on every major airline alliance. (Just be careful, because some airlines only allow one status match per lifetime.)
There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.” The need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution. —STEPHEN COVEY
Do something wonderful, people may imitate it. —ALBERT SCHWEITZER
Because he is relentless about spending a majority of his time on legacy work, Jim carries a stopwatch with him throughout the workday. The stopwatch has three separate timers: one for “creating,” one for “teaching,” and one for “other.” The “other” category is a catch-all for everything that doesn’t fit in either the creating or teaching category, and 100 percent of his workday is measured on one of the timers. At the end of the day, the time is logged onto a spreadsheet, with the resulting data posted on a whiteboard.
in addition to the weekly work log, he keeps a sleep log as well. If he falls below the required amount over a period of 7 to 10 days, he says, he can still teach and do tasks that fall into the “other” category, but he can’t easily create—the
Instead of going strictly where the money is, Jim accepts only 18 invitations a year, nearly a third of which he provides for free to non-profit organizations.
GOOD QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN PLANNING FOR LEGACY WORK In the morning: • How am I feeling? • What do I want right now? • What is the single, most important thing I can do today? In the evening: • Who did I help today? • How much time did I spend creating today? • Did I move closer to one of my big goals today? • How much exercise did I do today? • How much sugar, caffeine, or alcohol did I consume today? • What do I want for tomorrow?
I follow a classic rule of writing and editing: when writing, don’t hesitate to include something; when editing, don’t hesitate to throw it out. With the average blog post, for example, I’ll typically write twice as much as I end up using after a rigorous editing process.
Regardless of what you’ve done before or where you are in life now, you can make something beautiful that will outlast you.
Increase the percentage of legacy work as opposed to busywork (or even just “good work”).
Setting a continual metric (like the 1,000-words standard) can help keep you focused on what really matters to you.
Why should charities continue to exist after failing to solve the problems they were founded to address?
