Principles
I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game. (View Highlight)
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals. (View Highlight)
Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 (View Highlight)
The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others. (View Highlight)
People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t will suffer through constant misunderstandings and conflicts. (View Highlight)
Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that. (View Highlight)
Systemize your decision making (View Highlight)
1. Have clear goals.
View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you. Though it won’t feel that way at first, each and every problem you encounter is an opportunity; for that reason, it is essential that you bring them to the surface (View Highlight)
Thinking about problems that are difficult to solve may make you anxious, but not thinking about them (and hence not dealing with them) should make you more anxious still (View Highlight)
Be specific in identifying your problems. You need to be precise, because different problems have different solutions. If a problem is due to inadequate skill, additional training may be called for; if it arises from an innate weakness, you may need to seek assistance from someone else or change the role you play. In other words, if you’re bad at accounting, hire an accountant. (View Highlight)
Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.” It is a common mistake to move in a nanosecond from identifying a tough problem to proposing a solution for it. Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design (View Highlight)
Go back before you go forward. Replay the story of where you have been (or what you have done) that led up to where you are now, and then visualize what you and others must do in the future so you will reach your goals. (View Highlight)
Think about your problem as a set of outcomes produced by a machine. Practice higher-level thinking by looking down on your machine and thinking about how it can be changed to produce better outcomes. (View Highlight)
Remember that there are typically many paths to achieving your goals. You only need to find one that works. (View Highlight)
Think of your plan as being like a movie script in that you visualize who will do what through time. Sketch out the plan broadly at first (e.g., “hire great people”) and then refine it. You should go from the big picture and drill down to specific tasks and estimated time lines (e.g., “In the next two weeks, choose the headhunters who will find those great people”). The real-world issues of costs, time, and personnel will undoubtedly surface as you do this, and that will lead you to further refine your design until all the gears in the machine are meshing smoothly. (View Highlight)
Write down your plan for everyone to see and to measure your progress against. This includes all the granular details about who needs to do what tasks and when. The tasks, the narrative, and the goals are different, so don’t mix them up. Remember, the tasks are what connect the narrative to your goals. (View Highlight)
Recognize that it doesn’t take a lot of time to design a good plan. A plan can be sketched out and refined in just hours or spread out over days or weeks. But the process is essential because it determines what you will have to do to be effective. Too many people make the mistake of spending virtually no time on designing because they are preoccupied with execution. Remember: Designing precedes doing! (View Highlight)
Good work habits are vastly underrated. People who push through successfully have to-do lists that are reasonably prioritized, and they make certain each item is ticked off in order. (View Highlight)
There are many successful, creative people who aren’t good at execution. They succeed because they forge symbiotic relationships with highly reliable task-doers. (View Highlight)
You will need to synthesize and shape well. The first three steps—setting goals, identifying problems, and then diagnosing them—are synthesizing (by which I mean knowing where you want to go and what’s really going on). Designing solutions and making sure that the designs are implemented are shaping. (View Highlight)
Tags: #personal development
Knowing what your weaknesses are and staring hard at them is the first step on the path to success. (View Highlight)
There are two paths to success: 1) to have what you need yourself or 2) to get it from others. (View Highlight)
The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots. (View Highlight)
Your deepest-seated needs and fears—such as the need to be loved and the fear of losing love, the need to survive and the fear of not surviving, the need to be important and the fear of not mattering—reside in primitive parts of your brain such as the amygdala, which are structures in your temporal lobe that process emotions. Because these areas of your brain are not accessible to your conscious awareness, it is virtually impossible for you to understand what they want and how they control you. They oversimplify things and react instinctively. They crave praise and respond to criticism as an attack, even when the higher-level parts of the brain understand that constructive criticism is good for you. They make you defensive, especially when it comes to the subject of how good you are. (View Highlight)
To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. (View Highlight)
Those who adapt do so by a) teaching their brains to work in a way that doesn’t come naturally (the creative person learns to become organized through discipline and practice, for instance), b) using compensating mechanisms (such as programmed reminders), and/or c) relying on the help of others who are strong where they are weak. (View Highlight)
Aristotle defined tragedy as a terrible outcome arising from a person’s fatal flaw—a flaw that, had it been fixed, instead would have led to a wonderful outcome. In my opinion, these two barriers—ego and blind spots—are the fatal flaws that keep intelligent, hardworking people from living up to their potential. (View Highlight)
decision making is a two-step process: First take in all the relevant information, then decide (View Highlight)
creative genius often exists at the edge of insanity (View Highlight)
The brainstem controls the subconscious processes that keep us and other species alive—heartbeat, breathing, nervous system, and our degree of arousal and alertness. (View Highlight)
In his book The Meaning of Human Existence, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward O. Wilson surmises that between one million and two million years ago, when our ancestors were somewhere between chimpanzees and modern homo sapiens, the brain evolved in ways supporting cooperation so man could hunt and do other activities. (View Highlight)
the rewards of working together to make the pie bigger are greater than the rewards of self-interest, not only in terms of how much “pie” one gets but also in the psychic rewards wired into our brains that make us happier and healthier. (View Highlight)
the brain evolution that I described has given us (some people more than others) the ability to see ourselves and our circumstances from a higher holistic level and, in some cases, to value the whole that we are part of even more than ourselves. (View Highlight)
His view was that prayer and meditation seemed to have similar effects on the brain in producing feelings of spirituality (the rising above oneself to feel a greater connection to the whole) but that each religion adds its own different superstitions on top of that common feeling of spirituality. (View Highlight)
Our greatest moments of inspiration often “pop” up from our subconscious. We experience these creative breakthroughs when we are relaxed and not trying to access the part of the brain in which they reside, which is generally the neocortex. When you say, “I just thought of something,” you noticed your subconscious mind telling your conscious mind something. With training, it’s possible to open this stream of communication. (View Highlight)
When thoughts and instructions come to me from my subconscious, rather than acting on them immediately, I have gotten into the habit of examining them with my conscious, logical mind. I have found that in addition to helping me figure out which thoughts are valid and why I am reacting to them as I do, doing this opens further communication between my conscious and subconscious minds. It’s helpful to write down the results of this process. In fact that’s how my Principles came about. (View Highlight)
Know that the most constant struggle is between feeling and thinking. There are no greater battles than those between our feelings (most importantly controlled by our amygdala, which operates subconsciously) and our rational thinking (most importantly controlled by our prefrontal cortex, which operates consciously). If you understand how those battles occur you will understand why it is so important to reconcile what you get from your subconscious with what you get from your conscious mind. (View Highlight)
If you do just about anything frequently enough over time, you will form a habit that will control you. (View Highlight)
Good habits are those that get you to do what your “upper-level you” wants, and bad habits are those that are controlled by your “lower-level you” and stand in the way of your getting what your “upper-level you” wants. (View Highlight)
Habit is essentially inertia, the strong tendency to keep doing what you have been doing (or not doing what you have not been doing). (View Highlight)
Research suggests that if you stick with a behavior for approximately eighteen months, you will build a strong tendency to stick to it nearly forever. (View Highlight)
The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections (View Highlight)
Train your “lower-level you” with kindness and persistence to build the right habits. I used to think that the upper-level you needed to fight with the lower-level you to gain control, but over time I’ve learned that it is more effective to train that subconscious, emotional you the same way you would teach a child to behave the way you would like him or her to behave—with loving kindness and persistence so that the right habits are acquired. (View Highlight)
The left hemisphere reasons sequentially, analyzes details, and excels at linear analysis. “Left-brained” or “linear” thinkers who are analytically strong are often called “bright.” (View Highlight)
Brain plasticity is what allows your brain to change its “softwiring.” For a long time, scientists believed that after a certain critical period in childhood, most of our brain’s neurological connections were fixed and highly unlikely to change. But recent research has suggested that a wide variety of practices—from physical exercise to studying to meditation—can lead to physical and physiological changes in our brains that affect our abilities to think and form memories. In a study of Buddhist monks who had practiced more than ten thousand hours of meditation, researchers at the University of Wisconsin measured significantly higher levels of gamma waves in their brains; these waves are associated with perception and problem solving (View Highlight)