Derek Sivers, coach and author: “Abraham Maslow had a great quote that he said something like, ‘Life presents us constantly with a choice between safety and risk’ and he said, ‘Make the growth choice a thousand times a day.’ Reading something like that when I was 17 and just knowing him and his pyramid of self-actualization I kind of went all right. “Again, that’s like a rule of thumb or recipe for what to do and how to make your decisions in life. Make the growth choice a thousand times a day, okay, got it. I guess I kind of just run all of my daily decisions through that kind of filter.
Frank McKinney, who does ultramarathons, talks about exercising risk like a muscle. It’s something that can be strengthened. Your comfort zone can grow. You start to build up a tolerance and then it starts to become comfortable. I see this over and over again. That’s why it’s easier for serial entrepreneurs, even if there is big risk involved in the new companies. They have done it before. They have more confidence and more skill managing risks. That doesn’t mean there isn’t fear, but they mitigate that as well. The key difference between them and others though is just like I said earlier: They don’t let that stop them! They continue to grow and get better. You need to make sure you can rely on yourself and your own powers. The way to do that is to keep relying on yourself over and over again so you start to trust yourself. Once that trust builds, your confidence builds. It takes practice. The more practice you get in, the more times you step up to the plate, the more times you’ll have to look back on to show yourself that you did it. That also means that practicing that sales call or practicing that presentation makes a difference, too. Another piece that tends to play a part in confidence is how much you value the opinions of others. If you take others’ opinions of you to heart, then either you will be too worried about what they think to even try, or you will be so focused on what others think that you can’t be confident in what you think. If this seems to resonate with you, then this is a piece that needs to be worked on! An opinion is not fact. Everyone has his or her own perception of reality. Just like asking eye witnesses to recount an accident, there will be differences based on their feelings toward the event. You will never be able to please everyone! Don’t let the opinion of others get in the way of you creating the business you want. As you grow as a business owner you’ll rely more and more on yourself and care less about the opinions of others. Whatever scares you, go do it, because then it won’t scare you anymore. With almost anything, once you do it, it’s not as scary as you thought it was. —Derek Sivers The Eventual Millionaire: How Anyone Can Be an Entrepreneur and Successfully Grow Their Startup One has to focus on what is real. On the truth. When in darkness, don't fight it. Turn on the light.4/20/2014
One has to focus on what is real. On the truth. When in darkness, don't fight it. You can't win. Just find the nearest switch, turn on the light.
James Altucher, in one of his best blog posts, talks about how he stops negative thoughts in their tracks with a simple mind trick. "Not useful," he tells himself. It's a switch, a breaker of sorts, shifts the pattern of the fear. So, these tools, like light switches, exist. When fear arises, remember that it is a hallucinated snake or that it's not useful or that it's not real. All three work. There's many more, ones we can come up with ourselves, if we wish. As long as it works, it's valid. So I ask myself the question, "if I loved myself, truly and deeply, what would I do?" I love this question. There is no threat, no right or wrong answer, only an invitation to my truth in this present moment. The answer is simple: I'd commit to the practice. And I would also share the next thing I've learned, which is, don't let yourself coast when things are going great. It's easy to wish for health when you're sick. When you're doing well, you need just as much vigilance. This I know: the mind, left to itself, repeats the same stories, the same loops. Mostly ones that don't serve us. So what's practical, what's transformative, is to consciously choose a thought. Then practice it again and again. With emotion, with feeling, with acceptance. Lay down the synaptic pathways until the mind starts playing it automatically. Do this with enough intensity over time and the mind will have no choice. That's how it operates. Where do you think your original loops came from? The goal, if there is one, is to practice until the thought you chose becomes the primary loop. Until it becomes the filter through which you view life. Then practice some more. The key, at least for me, has been to let go. Let go of the ego, let go of attachments, let go of who I think I should be, who others think I should be. And as I do that, the real me emerges, far far better than the Kamal I projected to the world. There is a strength in this vulnerability that cannot be described, only experienced. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It Fear isn't bad or something to avoid; conversely, it's something you want to seek and embrace. Fear is actually a sign that you are doing what's needed to move in the right direction.
It's been said that FEAR stands for False Events Appearing Real, which aptly implies that most of what you're afraid of doesn't ever come to pass. Fear, for the most part, is provoked by emotions, not rational thinking. You must reframe your understanding of fear and use it as a reason to move forward rather than as an excuse to stop or retreat. If you're afraid to call on a client, then it's a sign that you should call that client. Fear of speaking with the boss is an indication that you should march into his office and ask for a moment of his time. Fear of requesting the client's business means that you must ask for the business—and then keep asking. The 10X Rule compels you to separate yourself from everyone else in the market. And you do that by—as I emphasized earlier—doing what others refuse to do. Only in this way will you distinguish yourself and dominate your sector. Everyone experiences fear on some level, and because the marketplace is composed of people interacting with both products and one another, the market will face fear in the same way that you and your peers do. But rather than seeing fear as a sign to run—as most other people in the market will do—it must become your indicator to go. I handle this dilemma myself by omitting time from the equation—since time is what drives fear. The more time you devote to the object of your apprehension, the stronger it becomes. So starve the fear of its favorite food by removing time from its menu. Fear doesn't just tell you what to do; it also tells you when to do it. Ask yourself what time it is at any point in the day, and the answer is always the same: now. The time is always now—and when you experience fear, it's a sign that the best time to take action is at that very moment. Most people will not follow through with their goals when enough time has passed from the inception of their idea to actually doing something about it; however, if you remove time from your process, you'll be ready to go. There's simply no other choice than to act. There's no need to prepare. It's too late for that once you've gotten this far. All the excuses in the world won't change one simple fact: that fear is a sign to do whatever it is you fear—and do it quickly. Eat your fears; don't feed them by backing off or giving them time to grow. Learn to look for and use fear so that you know exactly what you need to do to overcome it and advance your life. Every successful person I know of has used fear as an indicator to determine which actions will provide the greatest return. The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure It’s hard to interrupt these autopilot cycles because, well, that’s the whole point of autopilot. We don’t think about what we’re doing. We drift along in life, floating on the wake of past choices, and it’s easy to forget that we have the ability to change direction.
One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with “tripwires,” signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one. Chances are you know someone who has been stuck on autopilot too long. Sometimes autopilot causes people to neglect opportunities; maybe you have a friend who has talked about writing a novel for years but never seems to make any progress. Other times, autopilot leads people to persist at efforts that seem doomed, like a couple whose relationship makes them both miserable, or a relative with a naive dream of making a living as a landscape painter, or an executive who refuses to recognize that her pet project has failed. At some point, the virtue of being persistent turns into the vice of denying reality. When that transformation happens, how can you snap someone out of it? One option is to set a deadline, the most familiar form of a tripwire. Some deadlines are natural, such as the deadline for filing stories at a daily newspaper—the printing press has to roll at a certain time, whether the story is ready or not. But it’s easy to forget that most of the deadlines we encounter in life are simply made up. They are artificially created tripwires to force an action or a decision. Deadlines focus our mental spotlight on a choice. They grab us by the collar and say, If you’re gonna do this, you have to do it now. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work To get where you want to go in life, you must adopt the view that whatever is going on in your world—good, bad, or nothing—is something caused by you. I assume control over everything that happens to me, even for those things that I appear to have no control over. Whether I am in control or not, I still elect to claim responsibility and control so that I can do something to improve my situation going forward.
When I assume and increase my responsibility for this situation, I will probably come up with a solution going forward. Assume control and increase responsibility by adopting the position that you make all things happen, even those things you have previously considered to not be under your control. Never take the position that things just happen to you; rather, they happen because of something you did or did not do. If you are willing to take credit when you win, you have to take credit when you don't! Increasing your responsibility level will inherently enhance your ability to find solutions and create more success for yourself. Assuming control will cause you to start to look at what you can do to make sure negative events don't take place so that you can improve the quality of your life and reduce the occurrence of seemingly random unfortunate events. Once you start to approach every situation as someone who is acting—not being acted upon—you will start to have more control over your life. Having (or failing to have) success, I believe, is a direct result of everything you are doing and thinking yourself. You are the source, the generator, the origin, and the reason for everything—both positive and negative. This is not meant to simplify the concept of success, of course, but until you decide you are responsible for everything, you likely will not take the action necessary to get you above the game. However, if you want to have it all, then of course you have to assume responsibility for everything. It was only until I truly started to believe that nothing happens to me; it happens because of me that I was able to start operating at 10X levels. Someone once said, “No matter where I go, there I am.” This little saying suggested to me that I am both the problem and the solution. Disciplined, consistent, and persistent actions are more of a determining factor in the creation of success than any other combination of things. Understanding how to calculate and then take the right amount of action is more important than your concept, idea, invention, or business plan. Most people fail only because they are operating at the wrong degree of action. To simplify action, we are going to break down your choices into four simple categories or degrees of action. Your four choices are: 1. Do nothing. 2. Retreat. 3. Take normal levels of action. 4. Take massive action. You have to approach each day as though your life and your future depend on your ability to take massive action. The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure “If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.”3/16/2014
“If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.” —Kenneth Goldsmith
“Stock and flow” is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: “Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” Sloan says the magic formula is to maintain your flow while working on your stock in the background. In my experience, your stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon your flow. Social media sites function a lot like public notebooks—they’re places where we think out loud, let other people think back at us, then hopefully think some more. But the thing about keeping notebooks is that you have to revisit them in order to make the most out of them. You have to flip back through old ideas to see what you’ve been thinking. Once you make sharing part of your daily routine, you’ll notice themes and trends emerging in what you share. You’ll find patterns in your flow. When you detect these patterns, you can start gathering these bits and pieces and turn them into something bigger and more substantial. You can turn your flow into stock. For example, a lot of the ideas in this book started out as tweets, which then became blog posts, which then became book chapters. Small things, over time, can get big. Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered You can’t make changes in your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now.3/5/2014
You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes will flow naturally. You don’t have to force anything, struggle, or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. It is automatic; you just change. But arriving at that initial insight is quite a task. You have to see who you are and how you are without illusion, judgment, or resistance of any kind. You have to see your place in society and your function as a social being. You have to see your duties and obligations to your fellow human beings, and above all, your responsibility to yourself as an individual living with other individuals. And finally, you have to see all of that clearly as a single unit, an irreducible whole of interrelationship. It sounds complex, but it can occur in a single instant. Mental cultivation through meditation is without rival in helping you achieve this sort of understanding and serene happiness.
“What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what you are now. The consequences of an evil mind will follow you like the cart follows the ox that pulls it. The consequences of a purified mind will follow you like your own shadow. No one can do more for you than your own purified mind—no parent, no relative, no friend, no one. A well-disciplined mind brings happiness.” Throw a stone into a stream. The running water would smooth the stone’s surface, but the inside remains unchanged. Take that same stone and place it in the intense fires of a forge, and it all melts; the whole stone changes inside and out. Civilization changes a person on the outside. Meditation softens a person from within, through and through. Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your thought increases, and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion. Meditation deals with levels of consciousness that lie deeper than conceptual thought. Therefore, some of the experiences of meditation just won’t fit into words. That does not mean, however, that meditation cannot be understood. There are deeper ways to understand things than by the use of words. You understand how to walk. You probably can’t describe the exact order in which your nerve fibers and your muscles contract during that process. But you know how to do it. Meditation needs to be understood that same way—by doing it. It is not something that you can learn in abstract terms, or something to be talked about. It is something to be experienced. Meditation is not a mindless formula that gives automatic and predictable results; you can never really predict exactly what will come up during any particular session. It is an investigation and an experiment, an adventure every time. In fact, this is so true that when you do reach a feeling of predictability and sameness in your practice, you can read that as an indication that you have gotten off track and are headed for stagnation. Learning to look at each second as if it were the first and only second in the universe is essential in vipassana meditation. The purpose of meditation is to develop awareness. Mindfulness in Plain English: 20th Anniversary Edition by Bhante Gunaratana Willpower is the missing link in reaching human potential. Because it’s so crucial, you’ll discover many other situations where you need it. Try out Jeopardy in those everyday moments when you tend to lose your will: getting out of bed in the morning, concentrating in the face of distractions, or restraining the impulse to give in to a bad habit. It works just as well at those heightened moments when you’d like to take your life in a new direction. You might want to start a book, a new business, or move to a new city. You fantasize about it endlessly but you don’t even take step one. We’ll elaborate on these other uses of Jeopardy at the end of this chapter.
Jeopardy is a model for being fully alive. Paradoxically, this sense of life emerges from a relationship with the deathbed version of yourself. Because he knows what it’s like for time to run out, he has the wisdom you need every moment. Invite him into your consciousness, feel him looking at you every moment, and welcome the pressure he puts on you. You’ll move through life with a wind at your back. The consumer expects a reward for the slightest effort—or better, for no effort at all. He cares only about what he gets from the world, not about what he might add to it. Living on the surface, jumping from thing to thing, his energy is diffused, like milk spreading across a tabletop. He makes no impact on the world; when his time on earth is over, it’s as if he never lived. The creator won’t accept that fate. Everything he does is with the intention of making an impact on the world. His code ensures this:
Anyone can live by this code, but very few of us do. It means putting your life in the service of higher forces. These forces can’t be found on the surface of life; they’re found in its depths. The creator’s energy must have the singular focus of a drill boring through stone. As difficult as that is, a creator is rewarded many times over for his efforts. You don’t have to be an artist to be a creator. You can add something to the world in any human activity—even the most routine. Your job, your role as a parent, your relationships, your contribution to your community—all become more meaningful when you put your personal stamp on them using higher forces. The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion In essence, worry had become a powerful superstition—with no more real benefit than a rabbit’s foot. But superstitions have a powerful appeal because they give us a magical sense that we can affect the future. Of course, this is an illusion—most of life is beyond our ability to predict, much less control. From a picnic getting rained out to a sudden heart attack—anything can happen at any time. Still, we insist we can control the uncontrollable.
We assume (because science tells us so) that the universe is indifferent to us. Based only on what we see around us, this is a reasonable conclusion. But it makes us feel alone in a universe that doesn’t care about us. Feeling we won’t be provided for, we become obsessed with controlling our future. In that context, worrying seems to make sense. But what if, on a level we can’t see, the universe is interested in our welfare, supporting us in ways large and small? It’s not that much of a stretch to be able to perceive this. Start with your physical body. It extracts oxygen from the air, it digests complex foods, it allows you the miracle of sight and hearing. All these things work amazingly well without your even understanding how. There’s more—the earth supplies us with food, the air we breathe; and it gives us the raw materials with which to build things. And these are just a few examples of the infinite number of ways our existence is sustained by the universe. The Grateful Flow Pick out things in your life you can be grateful for—particularly things you’d normally take for granted. Say them to yourself silently, slowly enough to feel the value of each one. “I’m grateful for my eyesight; I’m grateful I have hot water,” etc. You should do this until you’ve mentioned at least five items—it takes less than thirty seconds. Feel the slight strain of your effort to find these items. You should feel the gratefulness you express flowing upward, directly from your heart. Then, when you’ve finished mentioning the specific items, your heart should continue to generate gratefulness, this time without words. The energy you are now giving out is the Grateful Flow. As this energy emanates from your heart, your chest will soften and open. In this state you’ll feel yourself approaching an overwhelming presence, filled with the power of infinite giving. You’ve made a connection to the Source. Stick to things you’re truly grateful for, not things you feel you should be grateful for. These are often minor things that you might not notice unless they were taken away—like the fact that you had a nice lunch with a friend, for example, or that your electricity works. Patients often ask why we emphasize these minor items. The answer is simple: although we tend to take them for granted, they’re always there You should also make it a daily practice. What Elizabeth had gained was that priceless quality we call perspective. Without perspective, any disappointment can take over your whole life; like a drop of ink in a beaker of water, everything looks dark. Even the smallest setback tends to overwhelm you. Perspective is the ability to see whatever is happening at the moment without losing sight of the enduring, positive nature of life. When your mind is filled with worry, self-hatred, or any other form of negative thinking, you’ve been taken over by the Black Cloud. It limits what you can do with your life, deprives your loved ones of what is best about you. Life becomes a struggle to survive instead of the fulfillment of great promise. What You’re Fighting Against is the unconscious delusion that negative thoughts can control the universe. Because we think the universe is indifferent to us, we cling to the sense of control negative thinking gives us. 1. Start by silently stating to yourself specific things in your life you’re grateful for, particularly items you’d normally take for granted. You can also include bad things that aren’t happening. Go slowly so you really feel the gratefulness for each item. Don’t use the same items each time you use the tool. You should feel a slight strain from having to come up with new ideas. 2. After about thirty seconds, stop thinking and focus on the physical sensation of gratefulness. You’ll feel it coming directly from your heart. This energy you are giving out is the Grateful Flow. 3. As this energy emanates from your heart, your chest will soften and open. In this state you will feel an overwhelming presence approach you, filled with the power of infinite giving. You’ve made a connection to the Source. The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion Whenever you get really stressed out, grab a pen and a few pieces of paper. Write down every single thing you’re currently worrying about. Don’t filter your words or resist your feelings. Be brutally honest about what you are going through. Expose your fears and insecurities so you can see them outside of yourself.
Once you’re finished, go back and read through everything you just wrote. Then take out another few sheets of paper, and write down one reason why you’re grateful for every single thing you’re worried about. It doesn’t matter how awful or irredeemable that source of stress has been; come up with one reason why you’re thankful to have experienced it. This is the best method for transforming mental poison into spiritual nourishment. Writing unlocks the gates of your mental prison, which allows your brain to decompress and breathe. And practicing gratitude for each of your stressors helps you see your life in a more positive light. I can’t overstate how critical writing was for retaining my sanity. It was one of the few activities that calmed me down and made me feel better. Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety |
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