In order to learn and grow, you must have the freedom to connect with what you want and to disconnect from what you don’t want. No one can give you that freedom. It’s your birthright as a human being. You don’t need anyone’s permission to decide which connections are best for you. It’s up to you to take the initiative to connect with what you want and to disconnect from what you don’t want. By consciously making connections that feel intuitively correct to you, you bring yourself into alignment with the principle of love.
When you understand that there’s no such thing as an external relationship and that all such connections exist solely in your mind, you’ll become aware that the true purpose of relationships is self- exploration. Whenever you communicate in any fashion, you are in truth exploring different aspects of yourself. When you feel a deep sense of communion with another person, you’re actually connecting deeply with an important part of yourself. By communing with others, you learn to love yourself more fully. The irony is that when you’re feeling disconnected, connecting with people is the cure. If you spend more time with positive, upbeat, interesting people, it’s unlikely you’ll be feeling down in the first place. In truth, your disconnection from other people is a sign that you’ve disconnected from the best parts of yourself. You’re a worthy human being. When you hold back from connecting due to fear of rejection, you rob other people of the chance to get to know you. Many people would love the chance to connect with you. They want someone to understand them, someone who can remind them that they aren’t alone. When you connect with people, you’re giving them exactly what they want. Reaching out socially does entail some minor risk, but the long-term benefits are so enormous that the only way to fail is to refuse to try. In Chapters 3 and 6, you’ll learn to build your power and courage in order to overcome this common block. When you want to enrich your life with new connections, it’s wise to seek out people with whom you’re compatible, notably in terms of character qualities, values, and attitude. As you continue to grow, your compatibility preferences will surely shift. This is no one’s fault. Allow yourself to let go of any group, person, career, or activity that no longer resonates with you, and you’ll soon attract more compatible opportunities into your life. The process of letting go can be very difficult, but it’s an essential part of personal growth. When you fail to release incompatibilities from your life, you settle for mere tolerance and prevent compatible new connections from forming. Moreover, you create an even bigger disconnect within yourself. Tolerance is not an act of love—it is resistance to love. Something very powerful occurs when you fill your life with compatible connections. First, you’ll feel lovingly supported and encouraged to express yourself authentically. Second, you’ll find it easier to connect with people who’d otherwise be totally incompatible with you, since you know you have that stable base to return to. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth by Steve Pavlina Experiment. That’s it. That’s the action you have to embrace in the land of Learning. Because scientists don’t fail; they experiment. They blow things up. They burn things down. They tinker. They smash. They mix. And when an experiment doesn’t go the right way, they don’t call it a failure. They say, “Look what we learned. We thought it would go one way and it went the opposite! What can we take away from this that will help us with our next experiment?” That’s why James Dyson had 5,126 prototypes before completing his industry-changing vacuum cleaner. It’s why Angry Birds, the wildly popular app, was Rovio’s fifty-second attempt at a game. It’s why WD-40 had thirty-nine other formulas that came before it. Everyone who succeeds learns through experimentation.4
Start today, regardless of your age. Turn off the fog machine. Acting on the dreams you learned about in your previous destination is not complicated. Walking deeper into the land of Editing is not as complex as fear and doubt are trying to tell you it is. In fact, it starts with just one question. examples. Those are real people I know who all dared to ask that question, “What gives me the most joy?” I dare you to ask it too. Be brave enough to have fun with whatever you whittle down in your life. Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters by Jon Acuff You don’t need to go back in time to be awesome; you just have to start right now. Regretting that you didn’t start earlier is a great distraction from moving on your dream today, and the reality is that today is earlier than tomorrow. As far as having a mom or dad who showed you the ropes, or a giant in your life, that’s fixable too. You’d be surprised how easy it is to find a giant, someone who is farther down the path than you. People who are awesome are usually surprisingly willing to share their wisdom if you ask humbly. You may not be able to skip stages, but you’d be amazed what a difference hustle, hard work, and the steps we’ll discuss in this book can make in your ability to shorten them. Just make sure that while you’re hustling you don’t start thinking you deserve more than you really do.
Whatever words you want to use, rescue thirty minutes to walk down your path to awesome. If you can’t—if the idea of setting your alarm thirty minutes earlier sounds horrible to you—then you may not be ready for awesome. If your dream isn’t worth thirty minutes, you’ve either got the wrong dream or you’re just pretending you have one. If the minimum you’re willing to pay in order to be awesome is less than thirty minutes, you’d better go back to average. Nobody gets up early on the road to average. Nobody stays up late on the road to average. You can sleep in to your heart’s content or watch late-night TV until the infomercials begin to make perfect sense. Either way, you’re safe on the average road. Don’t start getting up earlier on your road to awesome just because it worked in my life. Get up earlier because you want the best shot at success. Get up earlier because you want access to your best willpower. Get up earlier because you want the way your brain works and the way your physiology reacts to be your friend, not your foe. I’d received a postcard from awesome, and it had two questions on it: 1. If I died today, what would I regret not being able to do? 2. Are those the things I’m spending time doing right now? Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters by Jon Acuff If you frame ideas as experiments, you can’t technically fail at anything. You're just going to prove or disprove a theory you've arrived at through experimenting. And if it doesn't work the first time, you can iterate and try something different. It doesn't work until it does. There's no formula that will ensure successful work. All you can do is generate ideas and test them. Succeed or fail, at least you’ve done the necessary work. Persistence is the most important trait of successful people. Hardly anyone is successful right from the start. Most try, fail, try again, fail, try again. Their backstories are full of errors, almosts and rejections – until they’re not. They picked up the puzzle box one more time. They kept choosing a new path until it led somewhere good. If the result isn't what you intended or doesn’t make you happy, you're now free. When you're working on an idea, you get caught up in making it work. There's vested interest in thinking, “I've come too far to fail now!” But if it does fail, lay all the puzzle pieces out and start from scratch. Try different pieces in unique ways. Go back to the start of the book and pick a new path. Avoid the dragon this time, since there's a road that bypasses him.
How I experiment I focus on the task at hand, not the end result. Focusing on the process allows serendipity and personal exploration to take over. Otherwise, I might inadvertently apply a subjective idea of how I want something to turn out, rather than what would be best for long-term discovery. I try not to create and judge at the same time. Creation and judgment are very different thought processes and can interfere with each other, so they must be done separately. I experiment and explore every idea first (writing it down, drawing it out, actually trying to do it). Only then do I move into editing, curating, and judging to improve and refine the idea. I break the experiment down into the smallest tasks possible. Then, I work completely on each small task. Only at the end do I tie all those tasks together. This prevents me from feeling overwhelmed or scared about tackling such a big project. I remember that these are experiments. They’re not full-time business ideas. First, I figure out how to run the experiment using the least resources possible. What is the core or essence of my idea that I can quickly prototype? Then I get that prototype in front of as many people as possible before pursuing it further. I fail fast. I don’t repeat myself. The same experiment can’t have a different result unless I change the variables. If I experiment with an idea and it doesn’t work, I either change things up or move onto a new idea. There’s no point doing the same experiment over and over, hoping for something new to happen. If I want a different outcome, I have to change the experiment up a little — refocus for a new audience, try a different medium, or experiment with a completely new idea. Everything I Know by Paul Jarvis We can’t deactivate our biases, but we can counteract them with the right discipline.
1. You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options. So Widen Your Options How can you expand your set of choices? We’ll study the habits of people who are expert at uncovering new options, including a college-selection adviser, some executives whose businesses survived (and even thrived) during global recessions, and a boutique firm that has named some of the world’s top brands, including BlackBerry and Pentium. 2. You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving info. So Reality-Test Your Assumptions. How can you get outside your head and collect information that you can trust? We’ll learn how to ask craftier questions, how to turn a contentious meeting into a productive one in 30 seconds, and what kind of expert advice should make you suspicious. 3. You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. So Attain Distance Before Deciding. How can you overcome short-term emotion and conflicted feelings to make the best choice? We’ll discover how to triumph over manipulative car salesmen, why losing $50 is more painful than gaining $50 is pleasurable, and what simple question often makes agonizing decisions perfectly easy. 4. Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold. So Prepare to Be Wrong. How can we plan for an uncertain future so that we give our decisions the best chance to succeed? We’ll show you how one woman scored a raise by mentally simulating the negotiation in advance, how you can rein in your spouse’s crazy business idea, and why it can be smart to warn new employees about how lousy their jobs will be. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath The first step on your path of personal growth must be to recognize that your life as it stands right now isn’t how you want it to be. It’s perfectly okay to be in this position. It’s okay to want something and have no idea how to get it, but it’s not okay to lie to yourself and pretend everything is perfect when you know it isn’t. The closest you’ll get to perfection will be to enjoy the experience of lifelong growth, including all its temporary flaws.
It’s easy for me to say that you should face the truth about your life, but in practice this can be very difficult to do. It’s hard to admit that you’ve become dissatisfied with your relationship. It’s hard to accept that you made the wrong career choice. It’s hard to look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you don’t like the person you’ve become. But despite how difficult this is, it’s still necessary. You can’t get from point A to point B if you stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that you’re at point A. Denying A, fighting A, or otherwise resisting A only keeps you stuck at A. What do you perceive about your life that you’d like to change? Are there any addictions or destructive habits you’d like to break? Would you find more fulfillment in a new career? Would you rather be living somewhere else? Open your eyes. Look around you and notice what you like and dislike about your life. Don’t worry about setting specific goals just yet; just become aware of what you perceive and how you react to those perceptions Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” William Blake
I’m often struck by the way people will toss off the advice to just be yourself without acknowledging that this is a slippery and complicated mission. It requires a vulnerability that our culture has trained us to avoid, so much so that we construct an entire ‘false self’ to protect our tender souls. In order to just be yourself, you have to crack apart that persona and expose the meat of who you are. You need the skills, and enough mastery of your craft, to project that truth of self in your work. When the gap between who you are and the projection of who you are (your ‘personal brand’) is as narrow as possible, you ring true. We call you authentic, and are that much more likely to engage with you or do business with you. That said, I spend a lot of time writing, which is a form of promotion. I do this not to advertise my books or web services, but because I want to help others, and writing is the best way I know how to do it en masse. So my writing is definitely promotion, but that’s a side effect, not a reason I do it. I don’t think I could write good sales copy to save my life. But, I do want to share what I know, and writing information- and opinion-type articles and books is the best way for me to accomplish that goal. Writing also allows me to explore my ideas in public. I don’t usually know if an idea is sound until I write about it. When I share it with someone else, they either agree or look at me sideways. If it’s the latter, I re-evaluate the idea, re-evaluate whether that person is my intended audience, and sometimes I just move on. Everything I Know by Paul Jarvis Listening to one of Michael Covel's podcasts the other day, I was fascinated to learn that Picasso had created between 50,000 and 100,000 pieces of art. That is a staggering number, but it shows clearly an example showing that the more time you spend at something, the better the odds of it being great.
Picasso did not create 100,000 great pieces of art, I have seen several that were not that great in my opinion, the pieces I saw were rough, mean spirited. We all know that some experiments that don't work, and so did Picasso, but he knew that the more times he created, the better the odds that he would create something interesting, and that because it was interesting, it might last. The man was a machine, and worked hard at his art constantly. It wasn't a job, it was his life. How does it apply to you? The more actions you do, the more times you create, that you get up and try, the better the odds of success and greatness. If you think one idea is all you need, you are wrong. You need hundreds of ideas, and then you try them out with small bets or experiments, and then push hard on the concepts that work. The real key is to have hundreds of ideas, and then actually execute part of it in a small way to see if it works. Over and over. An idea withoout an action is worth nothing. Picasso didn't know which pieces would be lasting pieces of art, he just knew what interested him, and he tried what he thought about, learned from those around him, and then pushed hard on those ideas that worked the best. D We often unconsciously limit our possible outcomes by how we phrase a question at the beginning12/11/2013
You shouldn't limit your options out of the gate.
We often unconsciously limit our possible outcomes by how we phrase a question at the beginning of a project, or in believing unproven assumptions, and doing something as obvious as not leaving all options on the table until we have looked at all the facts, and examined all the possible details. Think on this phrase; I can do this job, or I can do that job. It automatically eliminates one of the options, doesn't it? You are assuming you can only do one. How often have you assumed that you couldn't do more, that there were assumed limits? Why is that true? Is it? Now let's try something else, and say, I can do this job, and I can do that job, I know I can do both, and I just need to see how I can do it. That changes the entire dynamic, and now many more things are possible, as you have widened your focus. . Instead of saying either or, we are saying both, and that means that we then start thinking on how can we do both, and we begin get creative, and we start finding ways to make what we want to actually happen. we look for more options. Instead of not really thinking and just mechanically picking and choosing between two choices, you now get creative trying to find the different ways to make possibly it all work. Changing your outlook so that you consider doing multiple items instead of fixating on one makes you see the world differently. What you find is that often, you can do it all, or at least some variation of what you wanted to go do . The world will be full of ways to make things difficult for you. It is full of people who will tell you what they believe cannot be done, and maybe sometimes it cannot be done, but make them prove it, don't do the work for them. You can do it, you just have to decide how. D It was only after I began studying the science of high performance that I started building a new sort of practice ritual. I still sit down at my desk first thing in the morning when I’m working on books, but now I write for exactly ninety minutes at a time—not eighty-five and not ninety-five. Then I take a break. I may get something to eat, close my eyes and spend ten minutes breathing deeply, or take a run, each activity in order to refuel and recover.
I then come back and work the same way for another ninety minutes, before taking a second renewal break. After that, I return to my desk for one final ninety-minute session, and then I have lunch—another form of energy renewal. If it’s been a particularly demanding day, I take a short nap. During the afternoon, I work on much less demanding tasks. The deliberate practice I’ve ritualized is intrinsically rewarding. I feel accomplished—and restored—even when the work doesn’t translate immediately into external benefits. What’s the skill that you wish to develop the most? Keep in mind that you’ll be immeasurably more motivated if it’s something to which you’re drawn deeply. Next, set aside one uninterrupted period of, say, sixty minutes each working day to build the skill you’ve chosen, preferably first thing in the morning. As your capacity for focus grows stronger over time, add fifteen minutes, and then another fifteen minutes, until you reach ninety. Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (The 99U Book Series) by Jocelyn K. Glei, 99U |
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