Most people's life quality can be drastically improved by just finding 5-10 of their limiting beliefs and changing them. Each single one of your beliefs has the power to create either depression or joy in your life.

This means that whenever I refer to a belief as negative or positive in this book, I am only talking about whether or not it is improving the quality of your life. Now that you understand that all beliefs are also meta-beliefs, and vice versa, I will just use the word belief from now on, in order to make things as simple as possible.   The Model   I work with a model of behavior that is very simple to understand:   Belief --» Reaction + Justification   This simple model is determining how you are constantly reacting.

The first step towards free will is to understand the underlying principles.   Belief: An understanding about a given area of life or a situation.   Reaction: How you ''choose'' to react in different circumstances and to different experiences in life. Your reactions are completely determined by the kind of beliefs you have running in the background.   Justification: This is the story you build around a given reaction and your justification explains why you did what you did. In 9/10 cases your justifications are NOT the real reason why you reacted as you did, your beliefs are.   Let's look at some practical examples of how this model works in relation to your limiting beliefs, so that we don't get too caught up in the theory.  

You think you are in control, but in reality your beliefs are controlling everything. This isn't problematic in and of itself, because no matter what you do, your beliefs are always going to be in control   If we couldn't rely on our beliefs as a means of operating in daily life, we would never evolve or grow, because we would constantly have to learn the same thing over and over again. But how are we going to become the master of our experience, if our beliefs are always going to be in control? We are going to do so by choosing the beliefs we want to operate with.  

The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai

Things simply aren’t as predictable as they once were.

Our intellectual journey—as teachers, innovators and businesspeople—was to answer the question of how can you achieve success in an uncertain world. To find out, we looked to those who thrive best in uncertain environments: serial entrepreneurs. When we did, we learned they not only think differently, but act differently, too.

It is a pattern of thinking and acting based on the assumption that the future is going to behave in a way similar to the present and the immediate past. Instead of thinking your way into a new way of acting, which is at the heart of using Prediction, you need to act your way into creating the future you want.

If you can’t predict the future—and increasingly you can’t— action trumps everything.

In the face of an unknown future, entrepreneurs act.

More specifically, they:Take a small, smart step (see “What’s a Smart Step?”) forward;Pause to see what they learned by doing so;and Build that learning into what they do next.

It is the action you take based on the resources you have at hand and never involves more than you can afford to lose, that is, your acceptable loss.

It can involve bringing other people along, although initially it does not have to. Having taken the step, you pause to reflect on what you have learned. From there, you take another smart step or quit if your desire has waned (or you have discovered something else that you want more) or if you have exceeded your acceptable loss.

You repeat this process until: You succeed. Or You no longer want to continue. (You changed your mind; something else is more appealing.) Or You exceed your acceptable loss. Or You prove to yourself it can’t be done.

Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future by Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer

Make a list of the real benefits or advantages that you already offer a client or employer. Then list the benefits and advantages your competition offers them that you don’t. Now list the ways you could improve upon your competitors’ unique advantages. List any niche advantages you already possess. For instance, the ease of application of your product or service. Or your location. Now make a list of your most important or favorite suppliers, vendors, retailers, and businesses in your professional life. Focus on the one biggest reason why you like or prefer dealing with each of these entities over their competition. Reduce that main reason or benefit down to one sentence or less. Then see if you can adopt that same benefit or advantage to your business or career.



One of the biggest “competitive-edge” advantages you’ll ever gain is to always make it easier for the client to say yes than it is for them to say no. You do it by taking away the financial, psychological, or emotional risk factors that are always attached (stated or unstated) to virtually any decision-making proposition you ever ask a client to make. When you remove the risk for anyone deciding to do business with you, it results in a powerful advantage in your business and financial success.



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

Acquiring clients at a breakeven or a slight loss and making substantial profits on back-end repurchasing is one of the most overlooked and underutilized methods of client growth and generation available to you. But it can’t work for you until you first recognize a very important fact. If your business or practice is one that has a high probability of clients coming back, again and again, to repurchase from you the same or different products or services, you owe it to that business or practice to do everything within your power to get clients into the buying stream as quickly and easily as you possibly can. 

Many companies increase their clients and profits merely by shifting their focus from trying to make a huge profit on the acquisition of a new client to making their real profit on all the repeat purchases that result from those new clients.

Knowing how much a client will spend with you over a period of years tells you how much you can spend on the process of acquiring a client. The most profitable thing you’ll ever do for your business or career is to understand and ethically exploit the marginal net worth of a client.

What is the current lifetime value of one of your clients? It’s the total profit of an average client over the lifetime of his or her patronage—including all residual sales—less all advertising, marketing, and incremental product or service-fulfillment expenses. 

If you haven’t calculated your clients’ marginal net worth yet, here’s how to do it: 

1. Compute your average sale and your profit per sale. 
2. Compute how much additional profit a client is worth to you by determining how many times he or she comes back. 
3. Compute precisely what a client costs by dividing the marketing budget by the number of clients it produces. 
4. Compute the cost of a prospect the same way. 
5. Compute how many sales you get for so many prospects (the percentage of prospects who become clients). 
6. Compute the marginal net worth of a client by subtracting the cost to produce (or convert) the client from the profit you expect to earn from the client over the lifetime of his or her patronage.

Once you’ve calculated the lifetime value of a client, you have many ways to accomplish your break-even objective. Remember, the goal isn’t just to cut the price of the first purchase. The goal is to make that first purchase so much more appealing that people find it harder to say no than yes . . . please! 

While reducing the price of your product or service is the most common and obvious way to get the first sale, there are other powerful ways to obtain first-time buyers. For example, you can calculate your allowable marketing or selling cost, which is how much money you’re willing to either spend or forgo receiving (by reducing the selling price), in order to make that very first purchase more appealing to a prospective client. 

Let’s say your product or service sells for $200 and your cost is $100. Also assume your average client repurchases several times a year for several years and you will realize a good long-term profit. Obviously you can reduce your price by $100 on the first sale to reach a break-even point and gain a new client. But you could put that $100 to a number of other uses. You could keep the price at $200 and use the $100 as “spiff” or extra selling incentives to your salespeople. Giving salespeople greater financial incentive to bring in new, first-time clients can produce tremendous results in the right situation. You could also use that same $100 to buy more of your product or service. So you still charge the full $200, but you give prospects twice the quantity on the first purchase.

Or you could take the $100 and use it to buy other complementary products or services (at wholesale) to package and add to your product or service without raising the $200 price—so the value of your offer becomes far greater and thus more attractive. Or you could use that $100 to invest in advertising, sales letters, additional salespeople, free seminars, or any other marketing and selling programs. Or you could rent promotional space in someone’s store or trade-show booth and pay them the $100 for every new client you gain through their facility. The only limitation you have on how to use your allowable marketing or selling cost to help you strategically break even on the initial sale is that it must be ethical and legal. And after testing it out it must be economically viable in the long term.

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

Eliminate barriers to practice. 

There are many things that can get in the way of practice, which makes it much more difficult to acquire any skill.

Relying on willpower to consistently overcome these barriers is a losing strategy. We only have so much willpower at our disposal each day, and it’s best to use that willpower wisely. The best way to invest willpower in support of skill acquisition is to use it to remove these soft barriers to practice. By rearranging your environment to make it as easy as possible to start practicing, you’ll acquire the skill in far less time.

Make dedicated time for practice. The time you spend acquiring a new skill must come from somewhere.

If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.

You have 24 hours to invest each day: 1,440 minutes, no more or less. You will never have more time. If you sleep approximately 8 hours a day, you have 16 hours at your disposal. Some of those hours will be used to take care of yourself and your loved ones. Others will be used for work. Whatever you have left over is the time you have for skill acquisition. If you want to improve your skills as quickly as possible, the larger the dedicated blocks of time you can set aside, the better. The best approach to making time for skill acquisition is to identify low-value uses of time, then choose to eliminate them. As an experiment, I recommend keeping a simple log of how you spend your time for a few days. All you need is a notebook. The results of this time log will surprise you: if you make a few tough choices to cut low-value uses of time, you’ll have much more time for skill acquisition. The more time you have to devote each day, the less total time it will take to acquire new skills. I recommend making time for at least ninety minutes of practice each day by cutting low-value activities as much as possible.

I also recommend precommitting to completing at least twenty hours of practice. Once you start, you must keep practicing until you hit the twenty-hour mark. If you get stuck, keep pushing: you can’t stop until you reach your target performance level or invest twenty hours. If you’re not willing to invest at least twenty hours up front, choose another skill to acquire.

Mastery by Robert Greene

The animal world can be divided into two types—specialists and opportunists. Specialists, like hawks or eagles, have one dominant skill upon which they depend for their survival. When they are not hunting, they can go into a mode of complete relaxation.

Opportunists, on the other hand, have no particular specialty. They depend instead on their skill to sniff out any kind of opportunity in the environment and seize upon it. They are in states of constant tension and require continual stimulation. We humans are the ultimate opportunists in the animal world, the least specialized of all living creatures. Our entire brain and nervous system is geared toward looking for any kind of opening.

This opportunistic bent of the human mind is the source and foundation of our creative powers, and it is in going with this bent of the brain that we maximize these powers.

Mastery by Robert Greene

In Art & Fear (2001), authors David Bayles and Ted Orland share a very interesting anecdote on the value of volume:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and  weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on “quality,” however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an A. Well, come grading time a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes, the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and  in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Skill is the result of deliberate, consistent practice, and in early-stage practice, quantity and speed trump absolute quality. The faster and more often you practice, the more rapidly you’ll acquire the skill.

Contrary to popular usage, “steep learning curves” are good, not bad. The graph makes it clear why: Steep learning curves indicate a very fast rate of skill acquisition. The steeper the curve, the better you get per unit of time.

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!  by Josh Kaufman

Karl Popper said many wise things, but I think the following remark is among the wisest: “The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.”

Focus your energy on one skill at a time. One of the easiest mistakes to make when acquiring new skills is attempting to acquire too many skills at the same time.

It’s a matter of simple math: acquiring new skills requires a critical mass of concentrated time and focused attention. If you only have an hour or two each day to devote to practice and learning, and you spread that time and energy across twenty different skills, no individual skill is going to receive enough time and energy to generate noticeable improvement.

Pick one, and only one, new skill you wish to acquire. Put all of your spare focus and energy into acquiring that skill, and place other skills on temporary hold. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (2002), recommends establishing what he calls a “someday/maybe” list: a list of things you may want to explore sometime in the future, but that aren’t important enough to focus on right now.

I can’t emphasize this enough. Focusing on one prime skill at a time is absolutely necessary for rapid skill acquisition. You’re not giving up on the other skills permanently, you’re just saving them for later.

Define your target performance level. A target performance level is a simple sentence that defines what “good enough” looks like. How well would you like to be able to perform the skill you’re acquiring?

Deconstruct the skill into subskills. Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. Once you’ve identified a skill to focus on, the next step is to deconstruct it—to break it down into the smallest possible parts.

Deconstructing a skill also makes it easier to avoid feeling overwhelmed. You don’t have to practice all parts of a skill at the same time. Instead, it’s more effective to focus on the subskills that promise the most dramatic overall returns.


The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!  by Josh Kaufman

The grammar of language locks us into certain forms of logic and ways of thinking. As the writer Sidney Hook put it, “When Aristotle drew up his table of categories which to him represented the grammar of existence, he was really projecting the grammar of the Greek language on the cosmos.” Linguists have enumerated the high number of concepts that have no particular word to describe them in the English language. If there are no words for certain concepts, we tend to not think of them. And so language is a tool that is often too tight and constricting, compared to the multilayered powers of intelligence we naturally possess.

According to the great mathematician Jacques Hadamard, most mathematicians think in terms of images, creating a visual equivalent of the theorem they are trying to work out. Michael Faraday was a powerful visual thinker. When he came up with the idea of electromagnetic lines of force, anticipating the field theories of the twentieth century, he saw them literally in his mind’s eye before he wrote about them. The structure of the periodic table came to the chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev in a dream, where he literally saw the elements laid out before his eyes in a visual scheme. The list of great thinkers who relied upon images is enormous, and perhaps the greatest of them all was Albert Einstein, who once wrote, “The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined.” 

Studies have indicated that synesthesia is far more prevalent among artists and high-level thinkers. Some have speculated that synesthesia represents a high degree of interconnectivity in the brain, which also plays a role in intelligence. Creative people do not simply think in words, but use all of their senses, their entire bodies in the process. They find sense cues that stimulate their thoughts on many levels—whether it be the smell of something strong, or the tactile feel of a rubber ball. What this means is that they are more open to alternative ways of thinking, creating, and sensing the world. They allow themselves a broader range of sense experience. You must expand as well your notion of thinking and creativity beyond the confines of words and intellectualizations. Stimulating your brain and senses from all directions will help unlock your natural creativity and help revive your original mind.

Mastery by Robert Greene

Researchers at Stanford University discovered in the 1970s that one of the best ways to combat negative distractions is simply to embrace positive distractions. In short, we can fight bad distractions with good distractions. 

In the Stanford study,7 children were given an option to eat one marshmallow right away, or wait a few minutes and receive two marshmallows. The children who were able to delay their gratification employed positive distraction techniques to be successful. Some children sang; others kicked the table; they simply did whatever they needed to do to get their minds focused on something other than the marshmallows. There are many ways to use positive distraction techniques for more than just resisting marshmallows. Set a timer and race the clock to complete a task. Tie unrelated rewards to accomplishments—get a drink from the break room or log on to social media for three minutes after reaching a milestone. Write down every invading and negatively distracting thought and schedule a ten-minute review session later in the day to focus on these anxieties and lay them to rest.

Still, it takes a significant amount of self-control to work in a chaotic environment. Ignoring negative distractions to focus on preferred activities requires energy and mental agility. For his book Willpower, psychologist Roy Baumeister analyzed findings from hundreds of experiments to determine why some people can retain focus for hours, while others can’t. He discovered that self-control is not genetic or fixed, but rather a skill one can develop and improve with practice.

Baumeister suggests many strategies for increasing self-control. One of these strategies is to develop a seemingly unrelated habit, such as improving your posture or saying “yes” instead of “yeah” or flossing your teeth every night before bed. This can strengthen your willpower in other areas of your life. Additionally, once the new habit is ingrained and can be completed without much effort or thought, that energy can then be turned to other activities requiring more self-control. Tasks done on autopilot don’t use up our stockpile of energy like tasks that have to be consciously completed.

Entertaining activities, such as playing strategic games that require concentration and have rules that change as the game advances, or listening to audio books that require attention to follow along with the plot, can also be used to increase attention. 

Even simple behaviors like regularly getting a good night’s sleep are shown to improve focus and self-control.

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series) by Jocelyn K. Glei