January 2023
New year, new me? Nah, I’m just going to keep on being fabulous and making mistakes like I always do 😜
Happy New Year everyone!
There are a lot of things in life that only work when you commit.
I don’t mean dabble. I don’t mean half-in. I mean commit.
Commitment means all in, all the time.
“The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they’re right.” — John Cleese
Choosing something once is easy. Choosing it repeatedly makes a difference.
Ordinary choices compound into extraordinary results.
Too much book learning may crab and confine the imagination, and endless poring over the research of others is sometimes psychologically a research substitute, much as reading romantic fiction may be a substitute for real-life romance….The beginner must read, but intently and choosily and not too much.
Almost any problem is interesting if it is studied in sufficient depth.
Writing is useful precisely because it’s difficult.
Having too much free time is just as bad as being busy and stressed out. All that time tends to get filled with low-quality activities like internet browsing, binge-watching, and overthinking.
Everyone has an emotional blind spot when they fight. Work out what yours is, and remember it.
If possible, take the stairs.
If you’re going less than a mile, walk or cycle.
The happiest people are givers, not the takers!
“I think we have a lot of self-limiting beliefs. And the self-limiting beliefs, a lot of these come from inside us. Basically, I can’t do this. I can’t do that. This is just the way I am. One of the most common problems is, this is just the way I am as if we have some “real” fixed identity that lives throughout time. And I have to really work on people to change that. Even smart people say things like this, “I can’t listen. I can’t listen. I’ve never been able to listen.” I’ll look in their ears. “Why not? You got something stuck in there? Why can’t you listen? Do you have an incurable genetic defect that is prohibiting you from listening?” As long as we tell ourselves, “That’s the way I am.” Two things happen, both bad. One, we inhibit the odds of ever getting better. Two, even if we do change our behavior we don’t seem authentic to ourselves. We feel like a phony because if the real me can’t listen and you say, “I’m a good listener. You know what I’m thinking?” Well, that’s not the real me. I’m just pretending to be a good listener because the real me is no good at that.” –Marshall Goldsmith
“Action is the antidote to despair.” - Joan Baez
Most people read the same new books that everyone else has read, not necessarily for the ideas but for the social reward of being able to talk about them with others. Reading the same thing as everyone else is only going to put the same ideas in your head that everyone else has. If you want new ideas, read old books.
Not just applicable for books.
“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.” –Charlie Munger
Good positions are expensive, but poor ones cost a fortune. Spend less time worrying about maximizing your immediate results and more time maximizing your ultimate results. Giving yourself options in the future always appears suboptimal in the moment. Putting yourself in a good position for tomorrow means paying today. This might mean a lower return, living below your means, or sitting on the sidelines when everyone else is having fun.
Poor positioning kills more dreams than poor decisions. Decisions matter, but it’s easier to make good decisions when all your options are great.
Short-term easy is long-term hard. Short-term hard is long-term easy.
The easy path today makes a hard path tomorrow. The hard path today makes an easier path tomorrow.
The choice is yours, but the mountain isn’t going away. The longer you put off the hard thing you know you need to do, the harder it becomes to get started.
“All that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.”
- Lewis Carroll
The way to control is to let go of the control.
“You are perfectly cast in your life. I can’t imagine anyone but you in the role. Go play.”
- Lin-Manuel Miranda
There are 3 layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story.
The moment before letting go is often when we grip the hardest.
There is no set of conditions that leads to lasting happiness. Lasting happiness doesn’t come from conditions; it comes from learning to flow with conditions.
The more comfortable you become in your own skin, the less you need to manufacture the world around you for comfort.
Your mind doesn’t wander. It moves toward what it finds most interesting. If you want to focus better, become more curious about what’s in front of you.
You cannot practice non-attachment. You can only show your mind the suffering that attachment creates. When it sees this clearly, it will let go.
The growth mindset individual, will feel successful, worthy, and purposeful when they’re learning. What this essentially means is that failure, as a concrete idea or our general understanding of it, doesn’t really exist, because the harder a task or an undertaking is, the more we stand to grow as a result of doing it — even if we don’t do it perfectly. With a growth mindset, we welcome challenge because instant success and recognition are not the ultimate goals.
Needless to say, in the long run growth-minded people have the potential to go further, and grow bigger, in all aspects of their lives.
Guilt is in the past, and the one thing you cannot change is the past.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Frankl
If you’ve never thought about where you’d like to be in three years, sit down and think about it.
Don’t fall into the trap of “I’ll do it when [insert perfect life conditions we mostly use as an excuse].”
Do it now. Do it today. And keep it consistent.
If you’re only ever exposing yourself to interesting information, if you’re only ever exposing yourself to the stimuli, but not taking the time to actually think about it — to process it, to look at it from different angles, to try to run it against other paradigms or structures you have in your current mental schema — if you don’t do that work of just being alone with your own thoughts, you’re probably extracting just a small fraction of the potential value.