The one thing that is utterly and completely under your control is your own physical condition—you can get in shape.
And there is another reason to stay fit: The physical is inextricably linked to the mental. The greater the fitness level, the higher the cognitive resilience to stress. In-shape athletes handle stress hormones better than out-of-shape people. The adrenaline dumps don’t affect their minds as badly. If you’re in shape, you get to hang on to those fine motor skills a little longer. The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse by Sam Sheridan Want to know more? Check out Indestructible Muscle here All that should concern you in the early stages of your career is acquiring practical knowledge in the most efficient manner possible.
The reason you require a mentor is simple: Life is short; you have only so much time and so much energy to expend. Your most creative years are generally in your late twenties and on into your forties. You can learn what you need through books, your own practice, and occasional advice from others, but the process is hit-and-miss. The information in books is not tailored to your circumstances and individuality; it tends to be somewhat abstract. When you are young and have less experience of the world, this abstract knowledge is hard to put into practice. You can learn from your experiences, but it can often take years to fully understand the meaning of what has happened. It is always possible to practice on your own, but you will not receive enough focused feedback. You can often gain a self-directed apprenticeship in many fields, but this could take ten years, maybe more. Mastery by Robert Greene The model goes like this:
You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you to, but only if they are related to your deepest interests. Like a hacker, you value the process of self-discovery and making things that are of the highest quality. You avoid the trap of following one set career path. You are not sure where this will all lead, but you are taking full advantage of the openness of information, all of the knowledge about skills now at our disposal. You see what kind of work suits you and what you want to avoid at all cost. You move by trial and error. This is how you pass your twenties. You are the programmer of this wide-ranging apprenticeship, within the loose constraints of your personal interests. You are not wandering about because you are afraid of commitment, but because you are expanding your skill base and your possibilities. At a certain point, when you are ready to settle on something, ideas and opportunities will inevitably present themselves to you. When that happens, all of the skills you have accumulated will prove invaluable. You will be the Master at combining them in ways that are unique and suited to your individuality. You may settle on this one place or idea for several years, accumulating in the process even more skills, then move in a slightly different direction when the time is appropriate. In this new age, those who follow a rigid, singular path in their youth often find themselves in a career dead end in their forties, or overwhelmed with boredom. The wide-ranging apprenticeship of your twenties will yield the opposite—expanding possibilities as you get older. Mastery by Robert Greene When a machine malfunctions you do not take it personally or grow despondent. It is in fact a blessing in disguise. Such malfunctions generally show you inherent flaws and means of improvement. You simply keep tinkering until you get it right. The same should apply to an entrepreneurial venture. Mistakes and failures are precisely your means of education. They tell you about your own inadequacies. It is hard to find out such things from people, as they are often political with their praise and criticisms. Your failures also permit you to see the flaws of your ideas, which are only revealed in the execution of them. You learn what your audience really wants, the discrepancy between your ideas and how they affect the public. Pay close attention to the structure of your group—how your team is organized, the degree of independence you have from the source of capital. These are design elements as well, and such management issues are often hidden sources of problems.
Mastery by Robert Greene Advancing at a measured pace—step by step, from where you are to a little bit better—may seem the logical and safe way to proceed. But you can and should think in terms of skipping levels and making quantum leaps. You can move rapidly, easily, and surprisingly safely from your present level of accomplishment to a place that is several stages higher. You can do it instantly—and directly. And you can do it in virtually every aspect of your business or career activities. You can do it by not limiting yourself to following only those practices people in your industry follow.
Think about it logically. You can’t be a follower and expect to ever really become a leader in your field. It just doesn’t work that way in today’s fast-changing world. Instead, you need to see the overlooked opportunities that are all around you and act on the vast sums of untapped income and unclaimed success just waiting to be harnessed. You probably spend too little time studying the most successful, innovative, and profitable ideas people in other industries use to grow and prosper. Yet, if you start focusing on other industries’ success practices, you’ll be amazed at how easily you can adapt these ideas to your own business situation. Suddenly, you’ll see significantly better ways to produce significantly better results from the same time, manpower, effort, activity, and capital. 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 (To become a master) We generally follow what others have done, performing the accepted exercises for these skills. This is the path of amateurs. To attain mastery, you must adopt what we shall call Resistance Practice.
The principle is simple—you go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice. First, you resist the temptation to be nice to yourself. You become your own worst critic; you see your work as if through the eyes of others. You recognize your weaknesses, precisely the elements you are not good at. Those are the aspects you give precedence to in your practice. You find a kind of perverse pleasure in moving past the pain this might bring. Second, you resist the lure of easing up on your focus. You train yourself to concentrate in practice with double the intensity, as if it were the real thing times two. In devising your own routines, you become as creative as possible. You invent exercises that work upon your weaknesses. You give yourself arbitrary deadlines to meet certain standards, constantly pushing yourself past perceived limits. In this way you develop your own standards for excellence, generally higher than those of others. In the end, your five hours of intense, focused work are the equivalent of ten for most people. Soon enough you will see the results of such practice, and others will marvel at the apparent ease in which you accomplish your deeds. Mastery by Robert Greene When it comes to mastering a skill, time is the magic ingredient.
Assuming your practice proceeds at a steady level, over days and weeks certain elements of the skill become hardwired. Slowly, the entire skill becomes internalized, part of your nervous system. The mind is no longer mired in the details, but can see the larger picture. It is a miraculous sensation and practice will lead you to that point, no matter the talent level you are born with. The only real impediment to this is yourself and your emotions—boredom, panic, frustration, insecurity. You cannot suppress such emotions—they are normal to the process and are experienced by everyone, including Masters. What you can do is have faith in the process. The boredom will go away once you enter the cycle. The panic disappears after repeated exposure. The frustration is a sign of progress—a signal that your mind is processing complexity and requires more practice. The insecurities will transform into their opposites when you gain mastery. Mastery by Robert Greene Before Henry Ford would hire anyone for an important position, he would have lunch with them. If the potential employee would salt the food before tasting it, Mr. Ford would not hire the person. The reason? Salting the food before tasting it indicated the person would implement a plan before testing it—ergo, no job. Test everything. It’s simple and the payoff can be enormous. It’s not at all unusual when you test and compare the effectiveness of one approach against another for the superior approach to outperform the inferior one by as much as ten or twenty times.
Until you start testing different responses and performance levels, you’re leaving massive potential on the table. 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 I have a client whose income curve was stagnant. It doesn’t matter what they sold. Pretend it’s your product or service. This company had a compensation program that paid the salespeople 10 percent of the profit. So, if the company made a $1,000 profit on a sale, the salesperson would get $100 and the company would get $900. I had them calculate:
• What the average new client is worth to them in dollars each time they buy • How many times that client will buy from them each year • How many years the average client will be with them It turned out the first sale, on average, resulted in about a $200 profit for the company. Of that, $20 went to the salesman or saleswoman, $180 to the company. On average, the client bought five times a year for three years. So basically, each time that company got a new client, they were receiving $3,000 in cumulative profits. My solution: Instead of giving the salespeople 10 percent of the profit on a sale to a new, first-time client, give them 100 percent of the profit on the first sale. The company management’s response: “You’re insane!” I smiled pleasantly and went on to explain that as long as their salespeople maintain sales from existing clients at past levels or above, give them 100 percent of the profit on the first sale for every new client they bring in. They’ll be ten times more motivated to sell new clients. And every time they bring in a new client, the salesperson makes an additional $200, but the company makes an additional $2,800. The company implemented the plan and sales tripled in nine months. 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 Value learning over money
What is important when you are young, she (Martha Graham) decided, is to train yourself to get by with little money and make the most of your youthful energy. For the next few years she would work as a dance teacher, keeping her hours to the minimum for survival. The rest of the time she would train herself in the new style of dancing she wanted to create. Knowing the alternative was slavery to some commercial job, she made the most of every free minute, creating in these few years the groundwork for the most radical revolution in modern dance. Mastery by Robert Greene |
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