The most successful people in all arenas of life are basically just sticking to the basics and doing the simple stuff over and over again until they get to where they want to go. It doesn't matter if you are studying to be a monk or a business mogul like Warren Buffet. The monk gets up every morning, does some work around the monastery and then gets on with his studies and meditation. Warren Buffet gets up every day, does whatever it is he has to do and then sits down and studies the market for up to 8 hours. There is no advanced formula to peace, success or happiness. They are all just the result of sticking to the same basics and becoming better and better through practice. The cool thing about sticking to the basics is that often times you will start seeing results very quickly and the results will keep improving the more you stick with it. Likewise, the solution to liberating yourself from the mind made prison is quite simple. Pick one or two concepts that you really like and start focusing on them in your everyday life.
The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai Build on what you have learned from taking that step. Every time you act, reality changes. If you pay attention, you learn something from taking a smart step. More often than not, it gets you close to what you want. (“I should be able to afford something just outside of downtown.”) Sometimes what you want changes.
In other words, when facing the unknown, act your way into the future that you desire; don’t think your way into it. Thinking does not change reality, nor does it necessarily lead to any learning. You can think all day about starting your businesst, but thinking alone is not going to get you any closer to having one. Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future by Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer This opportunistic bent of the human mind is the source and foundation of our creative powers6/26/2013
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 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 As you work to free up your mind and give it the power to alter its perspective, remember the following: the emotions we experience at any time have an inordinate influence on how we perceive the world.
If we feel afraid, we tend to see more of the potential dangers in some action. If we feel particularly bold, we tend to ignore the potential risks. What you must do then is not only alter your mental perspective, but reverse your emotional one as well. For instance, if you are experiencing a lot of resistance and setbacks in your work, try to see this as in fact something that is quite positive and productive. These difficulties will make you tougher and more aware of the flaws you need to correct. In physical exercise, resistance is a way to make the body stronger, and it is the same with the mind. Play a similar reversal on good fortune—seeing the potential dangers of becoming soft, addicted to attention, and so forth. These reversals will free up the imagination to see more possibilities, which will affect what you do. If you see setbacks as opportunities, you are more likely to make that a reality. Mastery by Robert Greene When Leonardo da Vinci wanted to create a whole new style of painting, one that was more lifelike and emotional, he engaged in an obsessive study of details. He spent endless hours experimenting with forms of light hitting various geometrical solids, to test how light could alter the appearance of objects. He devoted hundreds of pages in his notebooks to exploring the various gradations of shadows in every possible combination. He gave this same attention to the folds of a gown, the patterns in hair, the various minute changes in the expression of a human face. When we look at his work we are not consciously aware of these efforts on his part, but we feel how much more alive and realistic his paintings are, as if he had captured reality.
The average person does not generally pay attention to what we shall call negative cues, what should have happened but did not. It is our natural tendency to fixate on positive information, to notice only what we can see and hear. In business, the natural tendency is to look at what is already out there in the marketplace and to think of how we can make it better or cheaper. The real trick—the equivalent of seeing the negative cue—is to focus our attention on some need that is not currently being met, on what is absent. This requires more thinking and is harder to conceptualize, but the rewards can be immense if we hit upon this unfulfilled need. One interesting way to begin such a thought process is to look at new and available technology in the world and to imagine how it could be applied in a much different way, meeting a need that we sense exists but that is not overly apparent. If the need is too obvious, others will already be working on it. Mastery by Robert Greene Author Jonathan Franzen takes the temptation of multitasking so seriously that, to write his bestselling novel Freedom, he locked himself away in a sparsely furnished office. As he told Time magazine, he went so far as to strip his vintage laptop of its wireless card and surgically destroy its Ethernet port with superglue and a saw. He then established a cocoon-like environment with earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones.
A little extreme, perhaps, but Franzen demonstrated shrewd insight into human fallibility. Creative minds are highly susceptible to distraction, and our newfound connectivity poses a powerful temptation for all of us to drift off focus. Studies show that the human mind can only truly multitask when it comes to highly automatic behaviors like walking. For activities that really no such thing as multitasking, only task switching—the process of flicking the mind back and forth between different demands. It can feel as though we’re super-efficiently doing two or more things at once. But in fact we’re just doing one thing, then another, then back again, with significantly less skill and accuracy than if we had simply focused on one job at a time. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series)by Jocelyn K. Glei A producer is someone who creates value and shares knowledge with others. In the process, a producer helps improve lives and earns continuous active and passive income.
Step one is committing to becoming a producer. To attract customers, and partner with affiliates who’ll help promote your products, follow these principles:
Higher prices lead to greater affiliate participation. Whether your product costs $10 or $10,000, it’ll require roughly the same amount of effort for an affiliate to promote it. As a result, most affiliates will choose to invest their time into selling high-priced products that provide substantial returns. Printed books and ebooks, while often providing wonderful content, are ill suited for commission-driven relationships as are most other products that sell for under $500. Today’s successful partnerships involve the promotion of products priced between $500 and $4,995. Products above and below these price points continue to be sold, but they represent the two ends of the bell curve. Successful Internet marketers offer products at the center of the curve—and right now that sweet spot is roughly $2,500. Higher commissions mean happy affiliates. Selling a highpriced product isn’t the whole story. You must also be generous on commissions paid. Today, 40%-50% commission rates are commonplace, as is the payment of an additional 10% for second-tier affiliates. Second-tier affiliates, also known as brokers, help recruit affiliates for a product launch. When a product is sold, a second-tier affiliate typically receives 10% of the purchase price. Naturally, this cuts into your net profits. However, industry leaders understand that 40%-50% is a price worth paying for instant massive exposure, immediate income, and adding thousands of hopefully satisfied customers to their sales funnel. Continuity programs create long-term relationships. While instant cash is always nice, long-term passive income is even better. Whether they consist of bi-weekly one-on-one coaching, monthly product shipments, quarterly VIP programs, or annual membership dues, continuity programs provide ongoing benefits for both you and your affiliates. Developing products from scratch is hard. But even more difficult is creating products that fulfill audience needs, provide immense value, are of superior quality, and convert prospects to paying customers. Success requires satisfying all four criteria. Today, he who has the list controls the game. Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher In 1971, renowned social scientist Herbert Simon observed, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
I’ve seen many different proposals for how to preserve focused work in a hectic schedule. Of these many proposed tactics, one stands out, in my experience, as being unusually effective. I call this the focus block method, and it works, ironically, by turning the machinery of the distraction culture against itself. The focus block method leverages the well-understood concept of a pre-scheduled appointment. It has you block off a substantial chunk of time, most days of the week, for applying sustained focus to your most important creative tasks. This scheduling usually happens at the beginning of a new week or at the end of the previous week. The key twist is that you mark this time on your calendar like any other meeting. This is especially important if your organization uses a shared calendar system. Blocking off time for uninterrupted focus, however, is only half the battle. The other half is resisting distraction. This means: no e-mail, no Internet, and no phone. Start with small blocks of focused time and then gradually work yourself up to longer durations. A good rule of thumb is to begin with an hour at a time, then add fifteen minutes to each session every two weeks. The key, however, is to never allow distraction. If you give in and quickly check Facebook, cancel the whole block and try again later. Your mind can never come to believe that even a little bit of distraction is okay during these blocks. Tackle a clearly identified and isolated task. If you have to write an article, for example, do the research ahead of time, so that when you get to your focus block you can put your word processor in fullscreen mode and turn your entire attention to your prose. Consider using a different location for these blocks. Move to a different room, or a library, or even a quiet place outside to perform your focused work. When possible, do your work with pen and paper to avoid even the possibility of online distraction. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (The 99U Book Series) by Jocelyn K. Glei |
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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.” |