- Think deeply. Think often.
- Keep exploring; always be curious.
- Look to the past to build a better tomorrow.
- Use your passion for learning to add value to your own and others’ lives.
- Share your visions of a better future.
- Appreciate and refine your gift for understanding others’ thoughts and feelings.
- Always have at least three options in mind so you can adapt if circumstances change.
- Bring intensity and effort to the most important areas of your life.
- Create fair systems to establish and build trust.
- Stop, listen, and assess before taking action.
Category / effectiveness
It’s not about discipline
Having all the discipline in the world won’t help you eat better if the candy is the first thing you see on the counter.
Being disciplined with your time is useless if your phone is set up to make social media easy to access.
Discipline, like motivation, is fleeting and finite. Better to rely on systems and environments that support you instead.
Take social media off your phone. Make it hard to access on your computer by not saving your password and manually typing it in each time.
Keep candy hidden in the back of the cupboard (or if you’re like me, out of the house completely). And keep fresh fruits and easy protein at the front of the fridge.
It’s much easier to build things that support what you want to do rather than trying to muscle your way through.
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Sometimes you miss a day
Even the best streaks get broken most of the time.
The only good response is to wipe the slate clean and start over.
The wrong, and much more common response, is to quit the whole thing because of one bad day.
Don’t do that.
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The end vs. the beginning
One of the essential habits in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is #2:
“Begin with the end in mind.”
The premise behind this habit is that before starting something—a career, a hobby, a marriage, a life—you should project yourself into the future.
By doing so, whether three years or five (or even all the way to your 80th birthday), you can lay out a map for how you want to live your life or complete a project.
I love this habit, and the idea behind it, but it’s also the only habit out of the seven with which I struggle. Why?
Because it’s overwhelming! Sometimes I don’t even know what I want life to look like tomorrow, let alone in 47 years. (God, is 80 really that close?)
It’s also overwhelming because at times, the daunting idea I have in my head seems so impossible that I become paralyzed, unable to do anything.
I know I’m not the only one.
The negative thoughts creep in with a seeming inability to solve them.
- I can’t uproot my family while I pursue a master’s degree—it’s too many years out of work!
- I can’t possibly go to medical school—it’ll practically leave my wife working as a single mom!
- I can’t throw all my energy into a marketing business—we could be left destitute and homeless!
- I can’t coach people to improve their health—I’m still trying to do that for myself!
The solution?
Start.
Decide on the very next small thing you can actually do.
Julia Cameron calls this “filling the form”—taking the next small step instead of leaping ahead to some giant thing you might not ready for.
Using the examples from above, you can…
- Put in an application to see if you even get accepted to school
- Take a biology course to get your first prerequisite needed to attend medical school
- Call one business in your area to see if they need a freelance marketing expert to help them
- Help one person you know develop one new healthy habit
It’s the oft-cited cliché that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
You have to put a destination into the GPS. But then you must focus on the directions and look for the next turn.
If the end in mind is too big to tackle, focus instead on the tiniest first step.
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If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing slowly
Rapid results rarely last. Everything worthwhile takes time and patience.
- Parenting
- Marriage
- Reading a difficult book
- Getting a degree
- Learning a new skill
- Building a business
Rapid weight loss is dangerous and usually leads to a reversal.
Speed reading might let you get through more books… But more books isn’t the goal.
The goal is mastery, not rapidity. Deep understanding, not casual interest.
In a world obsessed with speed, be a tortoise.
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Choose the harder path
No original thought from me today. Instead, a piece of wisdom I came across from Paul Graham:
“Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
***
If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.”
Choose the harder option and watch your quality of life explode.
The only thing we have in common
There is exactly ONE THING that all human beings have in common with each other:
We are all completely different.
We all see things differently. We’ve all had different experiences, good and bad. We were born physically different. We were raised in different cultures.
And we’d be fools to believe this didn’t affect the decisions we make and the things we want.
Once we understand that, we can begin to work with each other to actually make things better.
Selfishness vs. prioritization
Asking your spouse to watch the kids for 4 hours every Saturday so you can get your research done…
That’s not selfish.
That’s self-prioritization. And it’s the only way to get important things done.
It may feel selfish. Other people might TELL you it’s selfish.
You’re wrong. And so are they.
We have to be willing to ask people to take things off our plates so we can take care of the “Big Rocks” in our lives. And reciprocate in kind when the same is asked of us.
Knowing, and asking for, what you need to be your best self makes things better for everyone you influence.
How is that selfish?
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Your brain only has one core
The term “multi-tasking” didn’t arrive on the scene until the 1960s. But it was used to describe computers, not people.
And if you think about it, even computers don’t do multiple things at once as well as they do one thing at a time.
Imagine your computer running multiple apps, windows, and other software all at the same time. What happens?
The fan kicks on, each app runs slower than it would otherwise. If you’re using a Mac, you’ll probably get that bouncing pinwheel of death…
In simple terms, what’s happening (at least in modern multi-core Macs) is that the different cores of the processors “split apart” to run the different “threads” separately. Each core has to work on its own to do a different task. This is known as multi-threading.
But if you just run one app at a time, the cores can all work together to accomplish that single task faster and more efficiently. This is single-threading.
The human brain works the same way. It does ONE THING very well and multiple things poorly. It’s not designed for “multi-tasking.”
If computers can’t do it well, what chance do you have?
It’s cliché to say it, but do one thing at a time until it’s one for better results.
He called me a “f@#*ing idiot”
I went to get my oil changed the other day at one of those quick-stop places that litter every metropolitan area.
As I pulled up, the gentleman at the computer started talking to me through my window to get my information.
The man below my car (the one who would be doing the oil change), yelled up…
“Tell the idiot turn his car off!”
Okay… So I did.
Then I was asked to pop the hood. I pulled the tab, saw the front of my car move a bit and heard a pop. I assumed that I’d popped the hood, and so did the person who’d just collected my information.
We sat for a few seconds trying to figure out why he couldn’t open it—much too long for the gentleman waiting below.
He stormed up the stairs, cussing at the top of his lungs, and started banging on my hood.
That’s when I realized that I might have popped the trunk instead (all the buttons are right next to each other and my trunk doesn’t move when you pop the lock).
So I hit the correct button. And I was greeted with the longest awkward silence of my life.
The man looked at me, and through gritted teeth snarled, “You pressed the wrong damn button, didn’t you?”
Well, obviously I had. And he wasn’t happy—and things quickly got out of hand.
That man RAGED AND STORMED all over the garage yelling at the top of his lungs for employees and customers alike to hear.
“I’m so tired of dealing with F@#*ING IDIOTS like this!!!”
“I need these F@#*CKING IDIOTS to learn how to use their damn cars!”
“What the hell is the matter with these a@#holes today?”
He screamed, he kicked tools and tires, he sounded on the verge of murder…
After his tantrum, he stormed back down the stairs, cussing up a storm all the way.
Now, I’ll admit—I was both angrier than I’d ever been and mortified beyond belief.
I didn’t tip him (as I always do), but I paid my bill after the service was performed and drove away, fuming and on the verge of starting my own tantrum.
But after I’d been driving for a couple of minutes, a different thought entered my mind:
How bad had his day been to trigger a reaction like that?
What did he have going on in his life that made him HURT like that?
Because I realized (from plenty of past experience) that the only times people act that way are when they’re feeling some unbearable pain inside.
I realized very quickly that it had absolutely NOTHING to do with me (or at least very little).
As Zig Ziglar would say, “Someone had been kicking his cat. All. Day. Long.”
I think that’s the lesson of this story:
It’s not about you.
Something else (possibly lots of things) happened before I ever showed up. There might have been trouble at home. He might have had an angry boss. Or a jerk for a customer that treated him the same way just a few minutes before I got there.
When people act out like that, they’re hurting, insecure, scared… And emotional.
Aren’t we all?
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