In a way, psychology is entirely a discipline of self-improvement; it helps us analyze our thoughts, actions, and motivations to learn how we can avoid misjudgments. In self-improvement, psychology helps us step outside of ourselves and view our thoughts and actions from a third-person perspective.

I learned once that there are people who act, and people who are acted upon, meaning that some people control the trajectory of their lives (carpe diem!) and others let life happen to them .

If you want to achieve extraordinary things, begin with the ordinary.

Psychological research confirms the principle that small, proximal goals are more effective than long-term (distal) goals.

The study illustrated a simple principle—to accomplish big things, set small proximal goals that will help us work toward our larger goal.

The grandiose goals are often too daunting for us to even attempt them, unless we shift our perspective and ask, “What’s the first step to achieving this?” Create a manageable first step, and we’ll be on the right track.  

How often do we have an important, somewhat unexpected idea pop into our heads, but we dismiss it without taking action. For me, these ideas arrive with a bang. I think, “I should do that!” But then I hesitate, allowing myself to debate the issue for a few minutes until all the momentum has worn off.

The Nike principle  no room for debate and indecision. Don’t wait; just do it. When the opportunity arrives, take it, and that’s a lesson we should all try to apply to our own goals.

If you commit to doing something specific at a future time, you’ll be more likely to do it. You make a decision about something long before the moment of decision arrives.


If you do something well (even just ONE thing) people will ask you to do it again.


Boost: Create Good Habits Using Psychology and Technology

A longer time horizon allows you to take in your stride the lead times that inevitably pass before you can make a mark, and to put obstacles into context. You are not thrown off track as much as someone with a short-term view, and instead of a wish, your success takes on an air of relaxed inevitability. Yet the long view takes courage.

People with a long-time horizon tend to be more confident because they feel in control of their destiny.

As Fritjof Capra noted in The Tao of Physics: ‘The Chinese believe that whenever a situation develops to its extreme, it is bound to turn around and become its opposite. This basic belief has given them courage and perseverance in times of distress and has made them cautious and modest in times of success.

The great art critic and aesthete John Ruskin counselled: ‘Never depend upon your genius. If you have talent, industry will improve it; if you have none, industry will supply the deficiency.’ Voltaire, who liked to prick the balloon of privilege and rank, remarked that there was a very fine line that separates the person of ‘genius’ from the ordinary man. ‘Work’, he said, ‘banishes those three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.’ Buffon, the 19th-century naturalist, simply said: ‘Genius is patience.’

As Ellison said to Wilson: ‘I don’t know of any place or time where there aren’t great possibilities.’ Exactly. You miss one revolution, another one happens.

It is never enough to be excellent or even extraordinary in terms of talents, technical skills or ability to motivate and command people. For a person to reach his or her potential, there must be a certain amount of self-reflection and willingness to correct character flaws or rackets. Self-reflection may not be compatible with the go-getting nature of fast success, but it is compatible with real, slow-cooked success.


Think Long: Why It's Never Too Late To Be Great

Don’t be afraid to let go of your old priorities

Most people have been guided by the same core priorities for years. They are so attached to their current priorities that to change even one of them would be like cutting off a body part. Some people identify so strongly with their current priorities, they knowingly sacrifice their biggest goals to avoid dealing with the temporary pain of change.

A few years ago, I went through the process of determining the top six core priorities that were guiding my life. After a lot of self-reflection, which included digging into the strengths I valued in myself and in others,

Putting my priorities down on paper was not easy. In fact, it was painful. I didn’t like some of the items on my list and I was embarrassed by others. But I was determined to be completely honest with myself. I cannot begin to describe the level of clarity and insight I achieved by making this list. Suddenly, I was able to see why I did the things that I did. I finally understood the drivers behind the decisions and actions that shaped my life.

You are in control of your priorities—you can erase old priorities and define new priorities at will.


My long-held priorities were what got me to my current position, but they were not going to get me to my future position. The first and most important priority that I added to my new list was presence. Without presence of mind, self-awareness, and being able to be present in the moment, I would not be able to enjoy any of my pursuits. I would also not be able to see all of the opportunities around me. Second, I added both openness and relationships to my list. If I wanted to be an effective author, I would have to learn to be uncomfortably vulnerable, transparent, and authentic. This openness would help me connect with other people, including my audience, fans, and readers. By valuing relationships, I would stay focused on building lasting connections that would add meaning to my life and the lives of others.

Then I added contribution to the list, which would help me redefine success and achievement. With contribution as one of my core priorities, I would stop asking, “How can I get ahead?” and start asking, “How can I add value?” Focusing on contribution would help me stay focused on building, creating, giving, and leaving a legacy.

Lastly, I added strategy to my list. Strategy meant staying focused on my long-term goal. I would be a strategist consumed with purpose rather than a tactician consumed with instant gratification. Valuing foresight in this way would prevent me from wasting my time. It would also encourage me to be more intelligent, patient, and wise. Most importantly, I would stop engaging in battles that did not matter.

While many of my priorities changed, vitality stayed exactly the same. I firmly believe that vitality should be near the top of everyone’s list. Your new purpose may be important, but it’s useless if you are unhealthy, sick, or dead. Of course, you can leave a legacy from the grave, but while you’re here on Earth, the healthier you are, the more effective you are.

You never lose your strengths. 


Finding and fulfilling your purpose requires you to define your core priorities and develop new ones. There is no loss; you are merely adding to your repertoire. You are in control of your priorities—you can erase old priorities and define new priorities at will. The key is to define your new priorities with words that inspire you. Choose words that fill you with hope and energy, and drastically impact your decisions and actions. In this way, you will align your current life with your new purpose and guard yourself against distracting activities and emotions.


Black Hole Focus: How Intelligent People Can Create a Powerful Purpose for Their Lives

I recommend that you find the means to put a smile on your face during challenging training and events. Although this may be difficult at first, it will get easier with time and practice. By doing this you are not just pretending to be positive but are actually forcing yourself into a happy place.

Studies have shown that a smile brings the same level of stimulation as eating a bunch of chocolate bars (so if you are using that tactic to brighten your day, then smiling instead will have the added benefit of weight loss!). Smiling releases endorphins, serotonin, and natural painkillers. In fact, people with serious depression have been completely cured with daily twenty-minute sessions during which the patient just sits and smiles.

Intriguingly, recent research on happiness by David Lykken and Auke Tellegen, from the University of Washington, suggests that over half of what makes a person happy is within our sphere of influence to change. They cite faith, family, community and work as places to find that happiness. I don’t know for sure if being happy makes one smile more or if smiling more makes one happy, but it would be hard to dispute that the two are linked. Making a habit of smiling is a good idea because it can:

Induce the physiology of happiness Lower blood pressure Boost immunity Reduce stress Cure depression Create a positive feedback loop as you are more appealing to others when you smile

It is amazing how something as simple as smiling can have such a profound effect.

Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level

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I recommend you get serious about team training. When I was in the SEALs, the units that took training more seriously than others far outperformed. Team training should not be seen as a random occurrence or a nuisance by the leadership.

Here are ten guidelines for team training to set the stage for success: 

• Participation should be mandatory—sharing risk and experience is a key factor in a team's development. 
  
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• Check egos at the door—participation, teamwork, and best effort far outweigh impressive performance in a training event. If it is a physical challenge, ensure you have methods for scaling things for those less physically capable. The point is to provide a vehicle for growth, not to hurt or embarrass anyone. 
  
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• Someone must lead. The leader should plan the session, brief it, debrief it…and participate. 
  
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• Change leadership roles often during training to give others a chance to experience the role and share the wealth and responsibility.
  
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• Insist on accuracy before intensity—make sure proper form is followed before intensity or weight loads are ramped up (for physical training). When consistent accuracy is evidenced in action, then it is OK to dial it up. A note on accuracy: this applies to counting repetitions and full range of motion. Nothing will destroy trust quicker than a teammate cheating on rep count or shortcutting range of motion on a movement. No one wants to watch a teammate do half the work in half the time and then take credit for coming in first!
  
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• Engage experts to take the team to a higher level: hire a coach or subject matter expert to come spend some time with the team. 
  
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• Have everyone participate in the planning, organization, setup,
  
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• Safety trumps hard—develop an awareness of risk factors, plan to mitigate the risk, and ensure that safety of the team is more important than pounding your way onto the bench. 
  
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• Have fun! Training should be super-fun and rewarding. If it is not, then take a hard look at why. Are there other tools and tactics to train a tough team to drive toward team mastery, where the teammates serve each other, don't quit, and achieve victory time after time? Let's find out.
  

Unbeatable Mind: Forge Resiliency and Mental Toughness to Succeed at an Elite Level

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. 

Researchers have found that memory follows a decay curve: new concepts need to be reinforced regularly, but the longer you’ve known a concept, the less regularly you need to review it to maintain accurate recall. 

Spaced repetition and reinforcement is a memorization technique that helps you systematically review important concepts and information on a regular basis. Ideas that are difficult to remember are reviewed often, while easier and older concepts are reviewed less often. Flash card software programs like Anki,1 SuperMemo,2 and Smartr3 make spaced repetition and reinforcement very simple. Spaced repetition systems rely on a “flash card” model of review, and you have to create the flash cards yourself. By creating flash cards as you’re deconstructing the skill, you’re killing two birds with one stone. 

Once you’ve created your flash cards, it only takes a few minutes each day to review them. By systematizing the review process and tracking recall, these systems can help you learn new ideas, techniques, and processes in record time. If you review the decks consistently, you’ll memorize necessary concepts and ideas extremely quickly.

Create scaffolds and checklists. 

Many skills involve some sort of routine: setting up, preparing, maintaining, putting away, et cetera. Creating a simple system is the best way to ensure these important elements happen with as little additional effort as possible. Checklists are handy for remembering things that must be done every time you practice. They’re a way to systematize the process, which frees your attention to focus on more important matters. Scaffolds are structures that ensure you approach the skill the same way every time. Think of the basketball player who establishes a pre–free throw routine. Wipe hands on pants, loosen the shoulders, catch the ball from the ref, bounce three times, pause for three seconds, and shoot. That’s a scaffold.

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

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Your Four Dominant Emotions 

Today’s first assignment: Grab your journal, sit quietly, and reflect upon which four dominant emotions drive your behavior. Do you operate out of fear? Anger? Jealousy? Love? Joy? Courage? Be brutally honest with yourself. No one’s watching. Write your four down. It’s very important. The Kokoro quitter operated out of anger and fear of failure. They defeated him.

Got your four down? Good. Now, answer the following questions:   

1. What do these emotions keep me from creating in my life? 
2. What beliefs create these four emotions? 3. What would I be like, and what would my life be like, if I could control these emotions?

Now we’re getting somewhere. Next I want you to close your eyes, and envision four new ideal emotions that you strongly desire. Replace fear with courage, anger with joy, jealousy with acceptance, pessimism with trust. Whatever four emotions you originally chose to describe yourself, choose more positive emotions now. When you’ve written down your four, answer these questions:

1. What benefit would it bring me and others if I acted with these ideal emotions? 
2. What beliefs do I need to change, and what new beliefs do I need to develop, to own these ideal emotions? 
3. What would I be like and what would my life be like, if I replaced my original four dominant emotions with these four ideal emotions?

Reflect on your answers daily for the next 3 weeks. After 21 days your new beliefs and emotions will begin to form habits, which will define your new character.

8 Weeks to SEALFIT: A Navy SEAL's Guide to Unconventional Training for Physical and Mental Toughness

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We do not like what is unfamiliar or unknown. To compensate for this, we assert ourselves with opinions and ideas that make us seem strong and certain. Many of these opinions do not come from our own deep reflection, but are instead based on what other people think. Furthermore, once we hold these ideas, to admit they are wrong is to wound our ego and vanity. Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible.

This ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties is what Keats called negative capability.

All Masters possess this Negative Capability, and it is the source of their creative power. This quality allows them to entertain a broader range of ideas and experiment with them, which in turn makes their work richer and more inventive.

Negative Capability will be the single most important factor in your success as a creative thinker. In the sciences, you will tend to entertain ideas that fit your own preconceptions and that you want to believe in. This unconsciously colors your choices of how to verify these ideas, and is known as confirmation bias. With this type of bias, you will find the experiments and data that confirm what you have already come to believe in. The uncertainty of not knowing the answers beforehand is too much for most scientists. In the arts and letters, your thoughts will congeal around political dogma or predigested ways of looking at the world, and what you will often end up expressing is an opinion rather than a truthful observation about reality.

To put Negative Capability into practice, you must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path. You consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoints opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. You observe a person or event for a length of time, deliberately holding yourself back from forming an opinion. You seek out what is unfamiliar—for instance, reading books from unfamiliar writers in unrelated fields or from different schools of thought. You do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth.

 In order to produce work of any sort we must create limits on what we’ll consider; we must organize our thoughts into relatively cohesive patterns, and eventually, come up with conclusions.

In the end, we must make certain judgments. Negative Capability is a tool we use in the process to open the mind up temporarily to more possibilities. Once this way of thinking leads to a creative avenue of thought, we can give our ideas a clearer shape and gently let it go, returning to this attitude whenever we feel stale or blocked.

The brain is constantly searching for similarities, differences, and relationships between what it processes. Your task is to feed this natural inclination, to create the optimal conditions for it to make new and original associations between ideas and experiences. And one of the best ways to accomplish this is by letting go of conscious control and allowing chance to enter into the process.

Mastery

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Depending on where and how we are raised, we learn different ideas about what we need to be happy. These ideas often show up as either our fantasies or our beliefs about what we should be doing with our life. The most common beliefs are that marriage, love, having children, success, wealth, major achievements, fulfilling potential, making history, fame, power, respect, or travelling the world will make us happy. As soon as we believe that something is the key to our happiness, and we don’t have it, we have no choice but to think, “My circumstances aren’t good enough right now to be happy”, or “I need my circumstances to change for me to be happy”. These thoughts make us feel as if something is missing from our lives, and as though we are somehow lacking or incomplete.

We then innocently blame our unhappiness on our seemingly insufficient circumstances instead of recognizing that it’s only our thoughts about our circumstances that have created these feelings.

We first need to understand what our identity is. Our identity, or self-image, is our answer to the questions, “Who am I?”, or “How would I describe myself?” Part of our answers to these questions includes the facts of our age, gender, physical measurements, job title, education, living situation, marital status, and so on. However, the facts themselves aren’t what create our identity, emotions, or self-confidence. The basis for our self-image, and our ensuing happiness or unhappiness, is our opinion of ourselves (our thoughts about ourselves). For example, even if two people are the same age and have the same weight, education, and jobs, one person could be proud of himself, while the other person could be ashamed to have these very same characteristics. Basically, our self-image is predominantly made up of our opinions of all the facts, as well as our opinions of completely subjective topics such as our personality and whether we are attractive.


Put simply, our identity is made up of thoughts (opinions).

Psychological thoughts are the ones that decide whether something is “good” or “bad”, and these are the thoughts that create our suffering.

For simplicity, our psychological thoughts are nearly all of our thoughts that have opposites. This is because if a thought has an opposite, then we will almost certainly consider one side to be “good” and its opposite to be “bad”. For example, if we think it is “good” to be rich, funny, skinny, and intelligent, then we would consider it “bad” to be poor, boring, overweight, and unintelligent. Our minds tend to be filled with the same psychological thoughts repeating themselves over and over again.

Functional thoughts are mostly answers to the question “How do I do that?” Functional thoughts determine how to build something, how to get somewhere, or how to solve a particular problem at work. Purely functional thoughts don’t create suffering, only psychological thoughts do. However, most of the time, our functional thoughts are tainted by psychological thoughts.

In any moment when we have no psychological thoughts, or we don’t believe our psychological thoughts, what remains is the experience of the present moment.

When we don’t have or believe the thoughts that create our unwanted emotions, none of these emotions are experienced, and we get to experience the present moment.

The ability to experience the awe of something simple arises in the moments when we have silence or space between our thoughts. It is like seeing something for the first time. This feeling is similar to the sense of wonder and innocent curiosity that young children have.

A Guide to The Present Moment

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Deep and regular breathing, also referred to as diaphragmatic breathing, helps to quiet the sympathetic nervous system and allows the parasympathetic nervous system—which governs our sense of hunger and satiety, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function—to become more dominant. Conversely, shallow breathing, breath-holding, and hyperventilating trigger the sympathetic nervous system toward a fight-or-flight state. 

In this state, our heart rate increases, our sense of satiety is compromised, and our bodies gear up for the physical activity that, historically, accompanied a fight-or-flight response. But when the only physical activity is sitting and responding to e-mail, we’re sort of “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” Our bodies are tuned to be impulsive and compulsive when we’re in fight-or-flight. We also become tuned to over-consume. In this state, we’re less aware of when we’re hungry and when we’re sated. We reach for every available resource, from food to information, as if it’s our last opportunity—pulling out our smartphones again and again to check for e-mail, texts,  and messages.

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

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