Here is a sneak preview of full automation.
I woke up this morning, and given that it’s Monday, I checked my e-mail for one hour after an exquisite Buenos Aires breakfast. Sowmya from India had found a long-lost high school classmate of mine, and Anakool from YMII had put together Excel research reports for retiree happiness and the average annual hours worked in different fields. Interviews for this week had been set by a third Indian virtual assistant, who had also found contact information for the best Kendo schools in Japan and the top salsa teachers in Cuba. In the next e-mail folder, I was pleased to see that my fulfillment account manager in Tennessee, Beth, had resolved nearly two dozen problems in the last week—keeping our largest clients in China and South Africa smiling—and had also coordinated California sales tax filing with my accountants in Michigan. The taxes had been paid via my credit card on file, and a quick glance at my bank accounts confirmed that Shane and the rest of the team at my credit card processor were depositing more cash than last month. All was right in the world of automation. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I closed my laptop with a smile. For an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast with coffee and orange juice, I paid $4 U.S. The Indian outsourcers cost between $4–10 U.S. per hour. My domestic outsourcers are paid on performance or when product ships. This creates a curious business phenomenon: Negative cash flow is impossible. Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Expanded and Updated). by Timothy Ferriss Often the greatest obstacle to our pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain we experience in dealing with the resistance and manipulations of the people around us. If we are not careful, our minds become absorbed in endless political intrigues and battles. The principal problem we face in the social arena is our naïve tendency to project onto people our emotional needs and desires of the moment. We misread their intentions and react in ways that cause confusion or conflict. Social intelligence is the ability to see people in the most realistic light possible. By moving past our usual self-absorption, we can learn to focus deeply on others, reading their behavior in the moment, seeing what motivates them, and discerning any possible manipulative tendencies. Navigating smoothly the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills. Success attained without this intelligence is not true mastery, and will not last.
Mastery by Robert Greene You must allow everyone the right to exist in accordance with the character he has, whatever it turns out to be: and all you should strive to do is to make use of this character in such a way as its kind of nature permits, rather than to hope for any alteration in it, or to condemn it offhand for what it is. This is the true sense of the maxim—Live and let live…. To become indignant at [people’s] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER Often the greatest obstacle to our pursuit of mastery comes from the emotional drain we experience in dealing with the resistance and manipulations of the people around us. If we are not careful, our minds become absorbed in endless political intrigues and battles.
The principal problem we face in the social arena is our naïve tendency to project onto people our emotional needs and desires of the moment. We misread their intentions and react in ways that cause confusion or conflict. Social intelligence is the ability to see people in the most realistic light possible. By moving past our usual self-absorption, we can learn to focus deeply on others, reading their behavior in the moment, seeing what motivates them, and discerning any possible manipulative tendencies. Navigating smoothly the social environment, we have more time and energy to focus on learning and acquiring skills. Success attained without this intelligence is not true mastery, and will not last. Mastery by Robert Greene The model goes like this:
You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you to, but only if they are related to your deepest interests. Like a hacker, you value the process of self-discovery and making things that are of the highest quality. You avoid the trap of following one set career path. You are not sure where this will all lead, but you are taking full advantage of the openness of information, all of the knowledge about skills now at our disposal. You see what kind of work suits you and what you want to avoid at all cost. You move by trial and error. This is how you pass your twenties. You are the programmer of this wide-ranging apprenticeship, within the loose constraints of your personal interests. You are not wandering about because you are afraid of commitment, but because you are expanding your skill base and your possibilities. At a certain point, when you are ready to settle on something, ideas and opportunities will inevitably present themselves to you. When that happens, all of the skills you have accumulated will prove invaluable. You will be the Master at combining them in ways that are unique and suited to your individuality. You may settle on this one place or idea for several years, accumulating in the process even more skills, then move in a slightly different direction when the time is appropriate. In this new age, those who follow a rigid, singular path in their youth often find themselves in a career dead end in their forties, or overwhelmed with boredom. The wide-ranging apprenticeship of your twenties will yield the opposite—expanding possibilities as you get older. Mastery by Robert Greene No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.”
Or, as Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” You have to find a way to survive that adjustment period of shock and help others get through it. You have to find a way to limit denial. The place to start is with the opposite of denial: acceptance. If you have the imagination to accept that aliens are invading or that the dead are walking, then you’ll have the imagination to accept that this earthquake is indeed the Big One. The more you can accept that things have changed, the less time you’ll waste on denial and “milling” (disaster-speak for checking in with other people and doing nothing) and the sooner you will take action. If the shit really hits the fan, I’ll take a semi-decent plan right now over a good plan in ten minutes or a perfect plan later. The faster you can accept that everything has changed, that everything you’ve worked for all your life is now gone, the better off you’ll be during the apocalypse. I’m not talking about actually redefining reality; I’m talking about adopting an attitude—“What’s right in front of me?” It’s about looking at what you see without preconceptions. If you start limiting your emergency plans to only what you think is likely, then you’re screwed. The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse by Sam Sheridan Although you must submit to the authority of mentors in order to learn from and absorb their power to the highest degree, this does not mean you remain passive in the process. At certain critical points, you can set and determine the dynamic, personalize it to suit your purposes. The following four strategies are designed to help you exploit the relationship to the fullest and transform the knowledge you gain into creative energy.
Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations. The choice of the right mentor is more important than you might imagine. Because so much of her future influence upon you can be deeper than you are consciously aware of, the wrong choice can have a net negative effect upon your journey to mastery. In selecting a mentor, you will want to keep in mind your inclinations and Life’s Task, the future position you envision for yourself. The mentor you choose should be strategically aligned with this. If your path is in a more revolutionary direction, you will want a mentor who is open, progressive, and not domineering. If your ideal aligns more with a style that is somewhat idiosyncratic, you will want a mentor who will make you feel comfortable with this and help you transform your peculiarities into mastery, instead of trying to squelch them. Mastery by Robert Greene Some time ago, an American reporter traveled to Tibet to interview a wise old Zen master. When the two sat down for tea, instead of letting the Zen master do the talking, the reporter began to brag about all the things he knew about life! The guy ranted on and on while the master poured the reporter’s tea. As he endlessly babbled, the tea quickly rose to the rim of his cup and began spilling all over the floor. The reporter finally stopped yakking and said with surprise, “What are you doing? You can’t pour in any more! The cup is overflowing!” “Yes,” responded the wise master. “This teacup, like your mind, is so full of ideas that there is no room for new information. You must first empty your head before any new knowledge can enter.” Be open to new ideas, but do not believe what I tell you.
CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone by Drew Eric Whitman Like Michael Ondaatje writes, “All I ever wanted was a world without maps.”
The English Patient is full of knowledge: We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir by Eddie Huang 6 Rules of Thumb for Doing Great Business
Nothing's Changed But My Change Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. What’s the lesson in all this? You must constantly be on the lookout for new and better ways to dramatically improve your overall business performance by capitalizing on what everyone else sees as a limitation.
Whatever you’re doing, however you’re doing it, and wherever you’re doing it, you can and must find continually better ways to maximize your results. But maximizing and creating breakthroughs means more than simply getting the most profit, highest performance, and greatest productivity and effectiveness out of an action, opportunity, or investment. It also means achieving maximum results with a minimum of time, effort, expense, and risk—something few people practice or even think about. Think: highest and best use of your time, money, and effort. Highest and best. Always highest and best! In order to produce the maximum number of breakthroughs possible, you should focus your thinking on these fundamental objectives that your breakthrough ideas should be designed to achieve. It’s a success template that keeps your mind’s eye on the breakthrough ball at all times. • Always discover what the hidden opportunity is in every situation. • Try to uncover at least one cash windfall for your business or employer every three months. • Engineer maximum success into every action you take or decision you make. • Build a business breakthrough foundation based upon multiple streams of idea generation instead of a single idea source. • One of your breakthrough goals is to always make you, your business, or your product special, unique, and more advantageous in your client’s eyes. • The more value or wealth you can create for your client, the greater the power of that breakthrough. • A breakthrough’s purpose is to help you or your business maximize personal or organizational leverage in every commitment of action, investment, time, effort, opportunity, or energy you make. • Breakthroughs increase in direct proportion to the amount of networking, brainstorming, and masterminding you do with like-minded, success-driven people outside your industry. • Your goal in creating breakthroughs is to use ideas to create more value for others. • Breakthroughs fuel growth thinking. • Growth thinking seeds/breakthroughs . . . the two go hand in hand. • The best breakthroughs take away risk or resistance from the other side. So it’s easier to say yes than no. • Employ as many success practices of others outside your field or industry by adopting or adapting their philosophies and methods to your business situation. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham |
Click to set custom HTML
Categories
All
Disclosure of Material Connection:
Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |