Effectiveness is the true measure of authority. Sound decisions must be backed by intelligent action to generate real results. In order to increase your authority, you must consider two questions: Am I making the correct decisions? Am I taking the correct actions?
Notice how elegantly the principles of truth and power work together to improve your personal effectiveness over time. First, you identify one of your desires and make a decision to move toward it. Then you use your predictive abilities to select a reasonable course of action. As you progress toward your goal, you need only identify the next action you predict will move you in the correct direction. You use your power to move yourself forward, one step at a time. Even as you take these microsteps, your predictive mind is always looking ahead, continually refining its selections and evaluating the results of the decisions you’ve already implemented. Maybe you reach your goal; maybe you don’t. Either way, you experience a powerful gain. When you succeed, your successful predictions, decisions, and behaviors are reinforced. When you fail, your mind learns that its predictions were inaccurate, and it updates your model of reality to help prevent you from repeating the same mistakes. When you suffer from blocks to truth and power, this process won’t work perfectly, but you’ll still gain something from it. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth Whenever you get really stressed out, grab a pen and a few pieces of paper. Write down every single thing you’re currently worrying about. Don’t filter your words or resist your feelings. Be brutally honest about what you are going through. Expose your fears and insecurities so you can see them outside of yourself.
Once you’re finished, go back and read through everything you just wrote. Then take out another few sheets of paper, and write down one reason why you’re grateful for every single thing you’re worried about. It doesn’t matter how awful or irredeemable that source of stress has been; come up with one reason why you’re thankful to have experienced it. This is the best method for transforming mental poison into spiritual nourishment. Writing unlocks the gates of your mental prison, which allows your brain to decompress and breathe. And practicing gratitude for each of your stressors helps you see your life in a more positive light. I can’t overstate how critical writing was for retaining my sanity. It was one of the few activities that calmed me down and made me feel better. Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety Amazingly, it worked. Meditating became so much easier when I observed my thoughts like a detached outsider. Each morning, I would sit cross-legged with my back against the wall and close my eyes for 10 minutes. Then I’d just observe myself. Every thought that my mind produced – no matter how nerve-wracking or obnoxious – was allowed to make as much noise as it wanted. Instead of trying to control and change these thoughts into peaceful silence, I just watched them do their thing, like they were clouds passing by.
My thoughts weren’t good or bad; they were just thoughts. I didn’t need to make them perfect, or assign them any value. They all received the exact same treatment: detached indifference. When I got bored with them, I’d shift my focus back to the rhythm of my breathing. It was like a relaxing mental workout where there could be no failure. After two weeks of observing my thoughts for 10 minutes each morning, my mind wasn’t able to scare me. My thoughts only had power when I granted them that authority. The incessant chirping in my brain that freaked me out for months was now background noise. Sit cross-legged with your back against a wall, or lay down on your back. Set a timer on your phone for 2 minutes. Close your eyes. Practice watching your thoughts as though you’re a detached observer. Alternative: Go on a 10-minute solo run and only pay attention to the rhythm of your breathing (no music allowed!) Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety There’s only one true authority in your life, and it’s you. You make the decisions. You take the actions. If you’re looking to some external authority figure, leader, or guru to tell you how to live your life, you’re looking in the wrong place. That leader is you. Whether you feel ready or not, you’re in command.
Despite what you may have been conditioned to believe, there’s no higher authority in this life than you—not your parents, your boss, or your favorite supreme being. If you think anyone else has authority over you, it’s only because you yield your authority by choice. Sometimes the consequences of not doing so are so severe that you may feel as if you have no choice, but in truth you always do. Even when threatened with suffering or death, you remain the commander of your own life. Some of your choices may be extremely limited, but they’re always yours to make. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth During the month I cured my anxiety, I made consistent sleep one of my highest priorities.2/18/2014
During the month I cured my anxiety, I made consistent sleep one of my highest priorities. The first thing I did was optimize my bedroom for ideal sleeping conditions. Here are the steps I took: Plugged my iPhone charger in an outlet far away from my bed so I couldn’t grab my phone while I was laying down. This little obstacle prevented me from checking email or Facebook before trying to fall asleep. Cranked up the air conditioning so the temperature in my bedroom was around 68 degrees Fahrenheit.23 Kept the curtains drawn and wore a sleep mask so that my room was as dark as I could possibly make it. Downloaded the Relax Melodies app, which played a continuous loop of ocean waves throughout the night.
Once my room was optimized, I committed to a consistent bedtime. I set a daily reminder on my iPhone called Get Ready for Bed, which went off at 10:00PM every night (i.e. nine hours before I wanted to wake up). As soon as it went off, I’d stop whatever I was doing, hit the bathroom, brush my teeth, and change out of my day clothes. I was dead serious about obeying my phone’s command. Even if I was in the middle of a conversation, I’d abruptly end it so I could get ready for bed. After I finished getting ready, I would switch my phone to Flight mode, open the Relax Melodies app, and climb in bed to read fiction for 15 minutes.24 When I was done reading, I’d turn off the lights and focus on the rhythm of my breath until I fell asleep. It took several nights to adjust to this change, but within a week, I was sleeping like a champion. I wasn’t eating anything after 8:00PM, and I stopped drinking caffeine after 5:00PM. Those habits helped my body wind down earlier, but the critical part was getting ready at the same time every night. There was another aspect of my sleep routine that was critical for healing my anxiety: I took a 20-minute nap every afternoon. Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety The Comfort Zone is supposed to keep your life safe, but what it really does is keep your life small.
A few rare individuals refuse to live limited lives. They drive through tremendous amounts of pain—from rejections and failures to shorter moments of embarrassment and anxiety. They also handle the small, tedious pain required for personal discipline, forcing themselves to do things we all know we should do but don’t—like exercising, eating right, and staying organized. Because they avoid nothing, they can pursue their highest aspirations. They seem more alive than the rest of us. They have something that gives them the strength to endure pain—a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose doesn’t come from thinking about it. It comes from taking action that moves you toward the future. The moment you do this, you activate a force more powerful than the desire to avoid pain. We call this the “Force of Forward Motion. To tap into this force, you need to move relentlessly forward in your own life—only then have you taken on its form. He talked about the subject closest to his heart—football. He was first team All-City, considered the best running back in the area. For whatever reason, he was eager to explain to me how he’d achieved this distinction. What he said shocked me—I can still remember it forty years later. He explained that he wasn’t the fastest back in the city, nor was he the most elusive. There were stronger players, too. But he was still the best in the city, with big-time scholarship offers to prove it. The reason he was the best, he explained, had nothing to do with his physical abilities—it was his attitude about getting hit. He’d demand the ball on the first play from scrimmage and would run at the nearest tackler. He wouldn’t try to fake him out or run out of bounds. He’d run right at him and get hit on purpose, no matter how much it hurt. “When I get up, I feel great, alive. That’s why I’m the best. The other runners are afraid, you can see it in their eyes.” He was right; none of them shared his desire to get crushed by a defender. My first reaction was that he was mad. He lived in a world of constant pain and danger—and he liked it. It was exactly the world I’d spent my young life avoiding. But I couldn’t get his crazy idea out of my mind; if you go right for the pain, you develop superpowers. The more the years went by, the more I found this to be true—and not just in sports. The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion The Mirror Exercise
Select a random person, such as a friend, co-worker, or celebrity. How would you describe this person? Make a short list of this individual’s key character qualities. Then put a plus (+) next to the qualities you like and a minus (-) next to the ones you dislike. Now look at the list you’ve created, and read it back to yourself. But this time consider it from the perspective that you’re looking at a list someone else wrote to describe you. You’ll likely gain some new insights about yourself as you recognize that this is a fair representation of what you like and dislike most about yourself. I’ve offered this mirror exercise to many people around the world, and those who apply it are often stunned by what it reveals. I encour -age you to try it for yourself. It only takes a few minutes, and it will help you realize that other people are not so different from you after all. We commonly praise in others what we like most about ourselves, while condemning those qualities we resist facing in ourselves. Inci -dentally, did I mention what a beautiful, brilliant, and loving person you are? Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth Every day I write down ideas. I write down so many ideas that it hurts my head to come up with one more. Then I try to write down five more. The other day I tried to write 100 alternatives kids can do other than go to college. I wrote down eight, which I wrote about here. I couldn’t come up with anymore. Then the next day I came up with another 40. It definitely stretched my head. No ideas today? Memorize all the legal 2 letter words for Scrabble. Translate the Tao Te Ching into Spanish. Need ideas for lists of ideas? Come up with 30 separate chapters for an “autobiography.” Try to think of 10 businesses you can start from home (and be realistic how you can execute them)? Give me 10 ideas of directions this blog can go in. Think of 20 ways Obama can improve the country. List every productive thing you did yesterday (this improves memory also and gives you ideas for today)
I Was Blind But Now I See: Time to Be Happy Here’s the truth: You will work harder at something you love than at something you like. You will work harder than you have ever worked when you start chasing a dream. You will hustle and grind and sweat and push and pull. You will get up earlier and go to bed later. But that’s okay. Know why? Joy is an incredible alarm clock. It will wake you up and keep you up and pick you up and gently pull you through a thousand rejections along the way. If your goal is to work less, stay on the road to average. Do something you just kind of like. Settle into life like a long winter’s nap and coast on through to your 80s. But if you want to dream—if you want to live out some unique talent you’ve been given to steward during your time on this planet—get used to 4 a.m. alarms. Get going. Get up.
You have to love the act of being awesome. Writing, selling, singing, running a business—whatever the act is, that’s what has to fuel you through the land of Harvesting. Even if you harvest a thousand accomplishments during your time in this land, treat them as rewards for what you do, not the reasons for what you do. Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters The only way to stay young is to keep learning. That’s not last-chapter hyperbole—that’s science. In the book Ten Steps Ahead, Erik Calonius wrote, “Even though the number of neurons in the human brain decreases as we age (as has been said time and again), the number of synaptic connections can grow as long as we live. If we keep using our noodle, in other words, we can make our brain better every day.” Neuroscientists Steven Quartz and Terrance Sejnowski report, “Being born some way doesn’t amount to forever remaining that way. . . . Your experiences with the world alter your brain’s structure, chemistry, and genetic expression, often profoundly throughout your life.” And most encouraging—given that the first land on the road to awesome is Learning—is what New York University neurologist Joseph LeDoux has to say on the matter: “Learning allows us to transcend our genes.”
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